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ASI's Case Studies
COMPANY: Blue Cross Blue Shield
West
, Portland, ME
TYPE OF COMPANY: Health Care Provider
COMPANY PROFILE: BCBS is one of the nations largest health care organizations. The company is
growing at a tremendous rate and has seen a rapid increase in the amount of
printed and electronic information it generates for external and internal documents.
INITIAL PREPRESS SITUATION:
BCBS over the past three years has seen a need for improved quality
for all of it's printed materials. The equipment installed was performing
up to its capability, but was not able to take BCBS to the next
quality level. The pre-press group was creating single pages on
Macintosh 800 AVs using Quark Express, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Scanning was being sent out to a local printer and high-resolution
tiff images returned. Pages were composed and output to an Accuset
1000. In order to achieve the quality level necessary, BCBS would
have to upgrade the existing configuration and change it's workflow,
all within the established, budgeted lease payment.
CLIENT ISSUES:
- Bring all four-color work in house to lower outside costs.
- Impose pages in a four-up printer spread to film.
- Reduce pre-press stripping time by imposing pages.
- Decrease plate make ready time.
- Archive and retrieve data quickly and efficiently.
- Technical support for the system to be maintained in house.
- Increase performance with RAID.
- Deployment of Microsoft NT server w/RAID and RIP technology.
CHANGE IN PREPRESS SITUATION:
All Systems Integration consulted on a solution for several months.
This process involved researching the workstations, server, imagesetter
and RIP tower that would work well together and fit into the overall
Corp. MIS requirement. The first part of the process involved backing
up the data, coordinating the removal of the current system and
installing the new system without keeping BCBS down for more than
24 hours. A Linotype-Hell Opal flatbed scanner, 3 Mac OS Umax 900S/225
workstations, Agfa Avantra 25 drum recorder, Tiapan NT RIP, Digital
Equipment Corp. (Microsoft NT 4.0) server with 10 GIG RAID 5, switched
Cisco 1400 series networking were all installed. The monthly budget
was $6,000/month; ASI was able to provide a full solution for $5,000/month
over a 3-year period.
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