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ASI's Case Studies
COMPANY: American Power Conversion
West
Kingston, RI
TYPE OF COMPANY: Power Back-up Manufacturing, Surge Protection
COMPANY PROFILE: APC is the leading supplier of personal computing backup and surge protection products to the business and personal computer market. The company has experienced explosive growth in the last five years and has built a reputation as the most inventive and forward thinking quality oriented manufacturing company.
INITIAL PREPRESS SITUATION:
APC, over the last five years, had gone from outsourcing all advertising
work to ad firms to hiring and retaining in-house designers to create
marketing materials for the company internally. This MARCOM (marketing
& communications) group has grown to a staff of fifteen. These
employees were creating ad text in Pagemaker, on the PC, and generating
disk output files to be sent out for film Ripping and Imaging. Contone
images were scanned one of four (4) color separators, corrected
for color and "cut" into the final composite film for
plate making at the separator before being forwarded to the printer.
APC made final corrections for color and text before OK'ing the
final film to go to press. This process would involve 2 to 5 day
turn arounds. Rush jobs could be handled overnight, but the rush
charges were a severe penalty. In APC's 17 international markets
timing of advertising is crucial. Oversees Paris and Tokyo offices
were only part of the creative process through an expensive relationship
with FEDEX(tm). APC was spending $135,000 per month in pre-press
outsourcing.
CLIENT ISSUES:
- Bring the entire pre-press process in house to lower production
expenses and gain control over turnaround times to its 20 advertising
markets.
- Hire and retain key pre-press personnel to administer and support
process
- Gain control of high-res files from current (4) color separators
- Negotiate transition of production from out of house to in-house
- Technical support for the system to be maintained in-house
- Production training to move from Pagemaker to Quark Xpress workflow
- Deployment of Microsoft NT server to "match" in-house MIS requirement
- Deployment and support of Lotus Notes on the Macintosh
- Full in house digital and contract proofing to match ripped film
file
CHANGE IN PREPRESS SITUATION:
All Systems Integration consulted on a solution strategy for APC
for 1 year. This process involved Gantt charting a 26-week implementation
for APC to accomplish all of its goals. First, ads were written
for local and regional newspapers to solicit the talent required
to run the systems. The final candidates were interviewed and final
prepress tests were developed to hire final employees and determine
training requirements. A Howtek 4500 drum scanner, 15 Mac OS Power
Computing workstations, Rampage Ripping, Digital Equipment Corp.
(Microsoft NT 3.51) server with 28 GIG Raid 5, Agfa 7000, digital
proofing, contract proofing and switched networking were all installed
to provide 100% in-house prep services.
Total cost
with overhead $32,000/mo.
Savings: $135,000/mo-$32,000/mo=$100,000/mo. (ROI).
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