The Finishing Company have chosen XMPie technology

XMPie technology supplied by Positive Focus will drive the recently installed Kodak NexPress 2500

This is only the second NexPress 2500 in the UK and the XMPie products will provide Variable Data as PDF output to the Prinergy DFE and also PostScript output to drive the company's three Toshiba mono printers.

The new digital press will further extend The Finishing Company's capability to personalise mailed products.

Of particular interest is the personalisation of carriers using the high quality 5 colour printing of the Kodak NexPress.

"Customers are becoming more demanding" says Andy Fox, Sales and Marketing Director "A black and white 'photocopy' style carrier is no longer sufficient and the personalised element must be more relevant to the end user.

"Starting out in colour we wanted a personalisation tool that was easy to learn and use, completely scalable yet one that offered us a full range of capabilities.

said Stuart King who heads The Digital Bureau, set up by The Finishing Company to market the NexPress service.

"We have a fast engine with a large sheet size that adapts to a wide variety of jobs, so we didn't want to be held back by software limitations.

With XMPie we have personalisation of the highest quality, in text and images, to match the print quality of the NexPress.

We can expand the facility, adding extra processing power, cross-media and web-to-print functionality as the demand grows.

Judging by initial reactions from our corporate customers and their agencies, that expansion may be sooner rather than later.

Alan Dixon, Technical Director of Positive Focus, oversaw the installation and training.

"We worked closely with Stuart and his colleagues to get the solution in place as soon as possible after the NexPress installation, and we used on-the-job training to produce some self promotion pieces informing The Finishing Company's customers about the new service.

This was the first installation of XMPie's new Version 3 software and the extra features we now have, like automatic handling of semi transparent objects, have created a huge amount of interest.

It simply hasn't been possible to use these effects in personalised mailers before.

We also used uImage to personalise some of the imagery, showing how quick and easy it is to prototype a job using this integrated suite of software.

"Using the technology to promote the service is an obvious thing, but from a standing start, in a couple of days we had a selection of highly personalised mailers targeted at different corporate and agency audiences" he continued, "I don't know of any other software that would allow relative novices to achieve that in the timescale.

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