The Ellison family; (L-R) Chris, owner, Arnie, new business development executive, Susan, commercial director and Charlotte, commercial manager
By implementing GMG’s OpenColor, OPM Group has seen a reduction in waste, time and overall production costs due to accurate colour results and repeatable quality.
The company offers artwork, repro and print services for multi-nationals using a traditional range of Adobe and Esko software design tools and has an enviable reputation for specialist packaging, where clients demand high quality and costs must be kept to a minimum.
Susan Ellison, commercial director, said, ‘Our clients include brands with thousands of products on the market, varying from their competitors’ offers by only one or two pence at a time. The commercial success of their brands may depend entirely on what visual impact the packaging has on their customer when they see it in store, so our clients expect nothing less than perfection from our work. Colour management is key to the services we provide.’
OPM wanted a better, more efficient way to predict what a finished product would look like as early as possible in the manufacturing process, before incurring the costs associated with plates or actual printing. ‘By predicting colour more accurately at proofing stage, we knew we could avoid costly errors on press,’ said Mrs Ellison.
OPM needed proofs that would be identical to the finished product on a multitude of substrates, without worrying about the characteristic limitations found in some specialist materials – or the need to run presses and waste materials to get the required results.
‘One of our toughest challenges was reliably communicating colour between everyone in the supply chain, from designers right through to the client’s brand manager,’ said Mrs Ellison. ‘But with OpenColor proofs, we get highly accurate representations of trapping and overprints – inks printed one on top of another – which just wasn’t possible before. As a result, we don’t have to waste materials – or time or money – committing press time before colour approval from the client.’
An unknown colour mix is created when overprinting spots, which makes it hard to predict what will happen once a job reaches the press. The software solves that problem by calculating profiles on-the-fly, reducing the time taken and the margins for error en route – and to ensure all systems use the same critical colour data, the software links everything in to a centralised database, this links back to the OPM fully automated ink mixing system which shares its data with GMG.
OPM can now see what a finished product will look like with 100% certainty. Having invested further with GMG, the company can also simulate press results on white, silver or clear substrate. Mrs Ellison concluded, ‘Quite simply, predicting the behaviour of overprints and interaction of these inks is critical to delivering the results our clients expect – they want nothing less than perfection and to visualise the print in advance. With OpenColor we can achieve that – time after time – efficiently and effectively.’
