Improved Production Planning On Show At Ipex 06

Upfront 4.0, which is to be released this week, is claimed to introduce more 'intelligence' in to the production planning tool from Kodak.

UpFront 4.0, which is to be released this week, is claimed to introduce more 'intelligence' in to the production planning tool from Kodak.

Existing users will notice the improved ease of use with a redesigned interface and single click access to critical information.

The company will be demonstrating Upfront 4.0 on its stand at Ipex 2006 - stand 20-D45, hall 20.

Upfront (formerly Creo Synapse Upfront) is available in the UK from Positive Focus, which already has installations of earlier versions running at sites across the country with consistent savings in time and materials, regardless of company turnover, adding a percentage point to the bottom line, claimed the company.

Upfront is said to allow experienced production planners to embed technical details of their layouts, including press and bindery preferences, in a database that can be accessed by relatively unspecialised operators, so that new jobs entering the factory can quickly and safely be progressed in to production, with Upfront creating a suitable imposition.

T he product is said to import job intent from popular MIS applications, further automating the process in a JDF workflow.

Upfront checks the input against the database to ensure the result can be printed and finished on the available equipment.

As a result, it is claimed that a recent return on investment study showed a 25 per cent reduction in planning labour costs, a 10 per cent reduction in pre-press labour costs and a four per cent cut in pre-press non-chargeable material waste.

In addition, the company claimed a 33 per cent reduction in spoiled plates and a five per cent drop in press materials make-ready waste.

New to the latest version of the product is the ability to attach Preps software signatures to Upfront press layouts.

Upfront has always integrated closely with Preps, exporting templates and jobs to pre-press, and one frequently requested feature has been the ability to re-use good, existing templates rather than proliferate new ones, said Positive Focus.

Marks can now be pre-defined and arranged in groups that are relative to sheets, pages and gutters to save time-consuming manual calculations.

Marks can be verified and it warns when a mark overlaps a page area.

Upfront 4.0 also supports the smart collation mark in Preps.

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