It takes a lot of work to climb to the top of your industry – and even more to stay there. Faced with fierce competition, material and labor shortages, and escalating demand, leading manufacturers recognize that they must continue to take steps toward improving efficiency. For the print industry, today’s digital production processes present new challenges and opportunity. And market leaders are maintaining their edge by actively scrutinizing operations, advancing best practices, embracing proven technologies, and fully leveraging resources and equipment investments.

Primary Color Premedia Manager, Denny Katz explains, “I go online almost every morning just to stay current with technology. That was how I discovered tilia Phoenix. We weren’t actively looking for an automation solution, in fact we had begun the process to develop the capabilities on our own. But I knew that this was something we had to consider.”

Process and Automation Engineering Manager, Jay Sato was extremely impressed with the software. “There’s been a lapse of software innovation throughout the print industry in recent years; and it’s refreshing to see someone putting energy into improving the production part of the business. It’s clear that tilia Phoenix was designed and engineered at the highest level. Not just the advanced algorithms and fancy math but you can tell that it was developed by those deeply involved in print production. When someone on the team asks, Will we be able to do this? I’m confident in telling them that Phoenix can handle it.”

Results 

With tilia Phoenix, Primary Color was able to:

• Minimize human error when dealing with hundreds of SKUs.
• Reduce time to optimized layout from hours to minutes.
• Eliminate additional time spent in engineering. 

Like many manufacturing organizations, Primary Color knows that automation is key. Account Manager, Rob Cozby’s experience includes time with several print companies. There he saw firsthand that, with its many touch points, manual planning was time-consuming, inconsistent, and riddled with human error. 

Cozby explained that tilia Phoenix is highly intuitive, flexible, and easy to use; and automating the process often allows him to bypass engineering completely. Streamlining the planning phase allows new layouts to be generated in a matter of minutes. 

“A lot of care was put into the software’s user’s experience. I’ve gone from planning manually to using tilia Phoenix and without a doubt, those done with the software are done more smoothly. The program minimizes human error especially when working on a project with hundreds of pieces of artwork. As a planner I’ve learned to trust the program which gives me greater confidence.”

With tilia Phoenix, Primary Color is saving time and dollars at a range that is consistently better than subjective human planning. 

“We’ll get a new client in, and they may have six hundred pieces of artwork. I can go to the CFO and ask Do you want me to spend 50 hours laying out this job or do you want me to skip it? If you want me to skip it, all I need is this much money. Tilia Phoenix allows us to automate manually intensive tasks and concentrate on what we do best.”

Developed for packaging, labels, commercial, and wide format print service providers, tilia Phoenix is a dynamic layout solution that takes the guesswork out of job planning and imposition. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, the software minimizes touchpoints to accelerate production, maximize material usage, and increase profits.

After investigating the software, and the company behind it, Tilia Labs, Katz quickly recognized that such a solution would save the company the time, expense, and trouble of trying to develop similar capabilities in-house. 

Currently, Primary Color uses tilia Phoenix for digitally printed work. And early success is opening the doors to expand its use into new areas of the business.

“The immediate goal is to automate our digital presses,” said Sato. “Our plan is to have the production department fill out a CSV file, upload it, and automate the layout side of things. Moving forward, we want to leverage tilia Phoenix in as many areas as possible with a goal of automating 75% of our production work.”

Sato says that packaging represents a significant future growth opportunity and tilia Phoenix is a part of the plan into this new market.

From accelerating production to workflow automation and sales support, highly flexible tilia Phoenix is easily adapted to areas throughout the business. And with the ability to quickly determine material usage, ink cost, run time, secondary operations, and associated costs, print companies are turning to the software to support sales efforts by creating winning and profitable quotes.