NPP Makes Major Prepress Upgrade
New Esko-Graphics Imaging Equipment Part of Company’s “Renaissance” Restructuring Program

VANDALIA, OH—NPP Packaging Graphic Specialists, formerly known as National Printing Plate, Inc., has purchased a $220,000 prepress system upgrade as part of a company-wide restructuring program. According to NPP President Bill Ruch, the investment is a strategic move to expand the company’s graphic capabilities and position NPP for growth in its Flexo Printing and Consumer Product Company market segments.

“The new equipment enables us to speed-up turnarounds to our packaging converter customers, and offer a whole new range of graphics management services to our CPC national accounts,” says Ruch. “Both are key requirements for achieving our business plan goals.”

Ruch laid out those goals in an ambitious re-vamping program he has code-named Renaissance. “We’re re-energizing the company with more effective tools, new processes, and greater employee empowerment in order to keep us strong and competitive. The name Renaissance reflects the attitude we’ve adopted to manage the changes.” Ruch says those changes include expanding the sales force, creating an Internet-based customer service component, making sweeping technology upgrades, and renaming the company itself to re-focus its position and identity in the marketplace.

The 47-year-old Indianapolis-based company is privately held and specializes in graphic services for corrugated containers, cartons, labels, displays, and flexible packaging. “An important niche market for us is supplying separations and plates for flexographic-printed party goods,” says Dave Norton, Vice President. “That type of work has unique challenges that require serious image processing horse-power. We frequently make modified four-color and six-color separations using Pantone® or demand spot colors. Then we have to geometrically distort the images to the exact dimensions of a cup or plate. There are only a few prepress systems available that are capable of responding to these challenges.”

NPP’s continuous improvement team researched and wrote the specifications for the upgrade, which included a move from their old Unix-based platform to new NT servers. NPP purchased optics retrofits and new RIPs for their large format Megasetter and D3800 imagesetters to improve film output resolution and speed; new workstation processors; a complete suite of PackEdge software programs for image manipulation, trapping, and color management; and BackStage automation software for step and repeat, output device management, and overall system administration.

“Even though we already own Barco equipment, the size of the investment warranted all-out due diligence. We benchmarked our work with every qualified vendor, but the Esko solution was still the best. We’re shaving off hours of operator time on our high-end work, and overall productivity is right on pace with our expectations,” stated Norton.

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