Market
SPOTLIGHT
GEM LITHO
USA
“By being able to profitably serve our smallest clients, we’ve made GEM better able to serve
all our clients. In this, ECRM’s WorkMates NEWS software is our indispensable partner. It’s a
technology whose time has definitely come.”
-- Artie Marin, GEM Design Department
GEM Litho-Print (GEM) is a 50-year-old,
cold-web general commercial printer in
Houston, Texas, specializing in printing
tabloid and broadsheet newspapers
flyers, shoppers and other colorful
newsprint products. The firm services
clients of all sizes, from small, one-person
community newspapers, to giant food
store chains. With print runs ranging from
a few thousand, to a million-plus, GEM
uses Harris eight-unit and four-unit web
presses operating 24/7.
GEM’s present owners, Steven Gregory
and Artie Marin, were formerly the press
and prepress supervisors of the firm. They
bought GEM in 2001 and have made
technology choices that have maximized
its efficiency, productivity and profitability.
The partners’ objective was to be able
to service all clients and never turn away
business because a run might be thought
“too small.”
Never Say Never
“Today, when others say ‘no,’ we say
‘yes,’ says Artie Marin. “We can, because
we’ve re-designed and re-engineered our
process to make it fit short, as well as
long runs. In fact, we have recently been
able to eliminate the concept of ‘prepress’
from our process, by redesigning our
workflow around ECRM’s WorkMates
NEWS software application.”
Marin continues, “WorkMates NEWS
is a smart software solution that does
everything and more a skilled operator
can do to ready a file for printing. The
differences are, it’s automatic, it’s fast, it
doesn’t make mistakes, never tires, and
runs 24 hours a day.”
Eliminating Prepress
He explains, “Today, ‘digital desktop
publishing’ is the workflow just about
everyone uses. The old idea of ‘prepress’
has gone the way of film and celluloid
collars. Job creation is now
typically done by designers
working at Macs. Once we
decided that ‘prepress’ wasn’t a
true function any more, we simply
eliminated it as a department.
Instead, we increased our design
group, and widened its franchise
to include supervising automatic
page-makeup and preflighting
by our ECRM WorkMates NEWS
workflow software, as well as CTP plate
production by our ECRM NEWSmatic
platesetter.”
Mike Marin, Artie’s son, works in the
design department at GEM and echoes
his father’s enthusiasm for WorkMates
NEWS, saying, “WorkMates NEWS
actually assembles, preflights and pagepairs a job automatically. It even fixes
mistakes, proofs it as required, and sends
it on to the platesetter. No ‘operator’
needs to get involved. Instead, a designer
simply checks the progress and can do
other creative tasks while WorkMates
NEWS does the actual work. This saves
lots of time and cost.”
Creative Destruction is Good
Business
Artie Marin provides this comparison,
“In the old days, 2-3 days of costly labor
might have been needed to assemble and
plate a color grocery ad. Now, we can do
it all in just 4 hours!”
Economists call it “creative destruction”
when you replace old, inefficient ways by
more-productive methods. Artie Marin
calls it good business. “By being able to
profitably serve our smallest clients, we’ve
made GEM better able to serve all our
clients. In this, ECRM’s WorkMates NEWS
software is our indispensable partner. It’s
a technology whose time has definitely
come.”
ECRM Headquarters:
554 Clark Road
Tewksbury, MA 01876
USA
Tel: (+1) 978.851.0207
Fax: (+1) 978.851.7016
sales@ecrm.com