Installations News
Impulse Graphic Running New Esko Workflow

Impulse Graphic and Display Solutions Inc. of Mississauga, Ontario, has invested in new prepress software, most prominently Esko Automation Engine workflow and ArtiosCAD for structural design. The company is using Automation Engine to reduce operator time and automate step-and-repeat layouts moving to their printing systems and Kongsberg cutting tables.

Founded 40 years ago, Impulse Graphic and its 35 employees now focus on retail in-store marketing, display and POS, providing a range of services like project management, creative solutions, printing, kitting and warehousing, shipping and installation. In 2007, Impulse Graphic invested in a high-volume flatbed printer, recently added a new hybrid printer to boost its printing capacity to over 7,000 square feet per hour and has invested in its third Kongsberg cutting table. “We felt the need to have the same family of cutting tables, moving away from another cutter brand to create consistency and greater throughput in our bindery department,” said Alexander Cachia, President of Impulse.

Cachia explains the decision to go with Esko’s Automation Engine was in part based on its ability to customize Impulse Graphic’s workflow based on its scope of work. “We also wanted our creative department to take advantage of other software tools Esko offers that tied into prepress,” said Cachia. “With the implementation of Esko ArtiosCAD we now have the ability not only to create structural designs in 2D or 3D, but also link these files to Automation Engine to output to our printers and to the Kongsberg tables. This make the prepress operation very seamless.”

Until recently, Impulse was receiving job files from FTP sites and manually sending them through a pre-flight program. One-ups were manually stepped and repeated in Adobe Illustrator, and a separate layer was created for a cut line. Once approved, the files were sent to the printers and cutting tables. “With a growing customer base, some of which operate more than 3,000 locations across North America, we needed a powerful tool to automate our workflow,” explained Cachia. “Our most pressing need was that we wanted to reduce prepress operator time, especially for repetitive tasks.”

Impulse has been using Automation Engine for about four months and, based on its majority of clients, the company will handle on average 100 files a day. “We recently completed a project where we processed over 800 files through Automation Engine on a variety of substrates,” said Cachia. He continues to explain, that in the past, Impulse Graphic used to create a variety of templates to step-and-repeat and output jobs. The company’s operators have customized them all within Automation Engine. “The operators are more efficient. We can accept larger jobs and turn them around faster. Prepress used to be the bottleneck. Now it’s pushing production.”