Pre-Media to Print

Pre-media is the last stage in the overall marketing print process. It is the final file to be signed off, and the one that places a client’s message to ink on paper. Therefore it’s a critical step in the production cycle. Many businesses rely on off the shelf software to complete this task, while others may leave it to a printer – both offer high risk. Wellcom offers quality assurance through its proprietary software workflow to co-manage this process.

It includes pre-flight checks, colour management, retouching, scanning, digital sends to media, digital proofing and specialist press profiling for specific printing presses with all stock type variants where the printer is nominated on the order. Wellcom can also digitally send the Pre-media file to publications and printers, or transition it to CTP (Computer To Plate), or to any of Wellcom’s many digital print businesses whether it is large format or personalized and variable print.

This is a classic case of seeing a business solution opportunity and selling it in from nothing but a base level cold-call discussion.

• Beaumont Tiles in Adelaide conducts ten sales events each year.
• These require the production of 1,000,000 A5 POS tickets.
• For each sale, their store managers receive 1,000 pre-printed ‘shells or templates’ without the product or price descriptions.
• Store managers were then expected to hand-write two tickets for each product on sale with a description plus a ‘was’ price and a ‘now’ price.
• This process takes each store manager at least two days to complete.
• The clever Wellcom business solution:
Beaumont Tiles have 100 stores. There are 10 sales per year and each manager spends two days writing tickets. The equation is 100 stores x 10 sales x 2 days = 2000 wasted days a year by store managers filling in sales tickets.
• Wellcom provided a simple cost matrix based on pre-print costs including storage plus cost of labour of having the highest paid managers spend 2,000 hours writing tickets when they should out selling or performing management administrative tasks.
• This was overlaid against a Wellcom costs and benefits analysis and the result was simply overwhelming.
• The Wellcom alternative solution provided a process that prints the two tickets for each product one store at a time.
• Each printed ticket displays the ‘creative’, plus the product and price details.
• The tickets are printed chronologically store-by-store, packed and dispatched to the appropriate store.
• This process eliminated the requirement for manual hand-collation and reduced the overall production time cycle significantly.
• The product and price data was supplied by the client to Wellcom as an Excel file. Wellcom merged this data with the creative template tickets.
• This process no longer required standardized pre-printing of shells that generally leads to waste or even worse, shortfalls. Wastage was eliminated.
• Creative can be presented in any number of customised variations or versions and produced when they are needed, not months before.
• The client’s creative flexibility was much enhanced enabling a sales promotion that remained vital and fresh.