TruArt Color Graphics Implements Virtual Ticket and Job Manager
TruArt Color Graphics of Iowa City, IA, is a commercial printer providing both sheet fed and web printing along with full electronic prepress services to its commercial printing customers. TruArt also works closely with other divisions of their company who specialize in specialty advertising and worldwide calendar distribution. TruArt employs 70 full-time employees working two shifts per day, five days a week, and processing over ten thousand jobs per year.
In recent years, TruArt has been using MetaCommunications' Virtual Ticket and Job Manager software packages for digital asset management, electronic job ticketing, data collecting, job tracking, and costing. Prior to implementing these systems, TruArt prepress employees had been entering job information into a Logic/Covalent print management system, which was used to log time spent, materials used, and costs incurred. TruArt made their purchase of Job Manager because, according Lori Livingston, Prepress Supervisor "The Logic/Covalent system was cumbersome for the operators on the Macintosh side, and it wasn't very intuitive. For our business we knew we needed a Macintosh-based client application with drop down menus. The MetaCommunications system is exactly what we were looking for. It is fast and easy to use, new operator training is simple, and it has made our entire operation considerably more efficient."
From a management perspective, tracking job costs and generating invoices couldn't be easier than with the Job Manager software. All of the costing and material usage information the system tracks is instantly available for viewing and printing at any time throughout the workflow process, and after the job has been closed. "The end of the month was always a hectic time for accounting," recalls Livingston. "Gathering all of the invoice information often took days. Running Job Manager, costs are recorded along the way, at every step, and the invoice is there waiting at the end. You just close the job and you're done."
"We're also able to keep track of every minute our employees spend on a job," adds Livingston. "Even before a job is done, we can see how much manpower has gone into it." Using Job Manager, TruArt management is able to track costs and workflow very precisely. Reports are available showing the exact status of current jobs: where they've been, where they are, who has worked on them, and where they need to go next.
Virtual Ticket has made archiving an automated process, and locating those archived resources is very easy.
Lori Livingston, Prepress Supervisor
Prior to implementing Virtual Ticket, TruArt's asset management system was entirely paper-based. Like many commercial printers before the advent of electronic tracking and ticketing, finding old images and job information often amounted to hours of searching through stacks of paper documents.
"This is the main area where Virtual Ticket has helped us," says Livingston. "We no longer need to refer to a paper archive list. Virtual Ticket has made archiving an automated process, and locating those archived resources is very easy." To manage new files and assets, TruArt employees simply drag the files from where they are located on the network directly into Virtual Ticket. This instantly associates the files with the job and the customer they are being produced for. Files can also be dragged from one job to another, allowing Virtual Ticket to instantly repurpose the file to the new job.
For TruArt employees, one of the most exciting features of Virtual Ticket is the ability to keep people updated about job changes using automatic notifications. In a 70 employee company, even normally efficient communication lines can sometimes break down: job specifications get lost, and employees aren't notified of important customer alterations. Virtual Ticket can notify the proper TruArt employees whenever important information about a job changes. "Setting up our customized notifications is very easy," says Livingston. "Within minutes, we had the system set up to notify the proper people of important events as soon as they happen. You can't get that flexibility and functionality without electronic tickets, and not without Virtual Ticket."
In addition to the economy Virtual Ticket and Job Manager have provided for TruArt, Lori Livingston is impressed by the speed and efficiency of the software packages themselves. Cost and time reports in Job Manager show comprehensive job information, and are ready within seconds of initiating the commands. Tracking a digital resource with Virtual Ticket is a very quick and a simple drill down process; users don't need any database knowledge, and don't have to wait for search results. According to Livingston, "The software is very efficient; the actual work on a job still occurs at the same speed, but all of the down time between steps has virtually disappeared. We have Virtual Ticket and Job Manager to thank for that."
