"Something's wrong - this is way too
easy." Rajiv Rai
General Manager
Krishna Press
San Francisco, California
"Something's
wrong - this is way too easy." This was how Rajiv Rai
summed up his experience with Metrix as we wrapped up our
interview. Spoken like a true soldier of the prepress wars,
Rajiv marveled at the way Metrix actually delivered on its
promise of automating imposition - even complex gang runs
- transforming a labor-intensive and difficult task into a
simple and straightforward process.
Rai runs Krishna Press, a commercial print shop
located in the SOMA district of San Francisco. Founded in
1975 by Krishnan Rai, Rajiv's father, Krishna produces a very
broad range of work, from corporate identity collateral to
brochures, leaflets, and catalogs, to presentation folders,
ticket sleeves, business cards, and post cards. "All
of our work comes in over the Internet," he explained,
"via email or FTP upload. I needed a way to take those
files and impose them quickly and easily. Metrix proved to
be the solution I was looking for."
Rai made the decision to purchase Metrix when
he was laying plans to move to a larger press. "We had
been ganging everything manually for our Heidelberg DI,"
he said. "It would take us about two hours to gang 8
jobs or so, twice a week. But I knew this would become an
impossible bottleneck for our new Mitsubishi 6-color."
Rai installed Metrix in May of 2006 and hasn't looked back
since. He uses Metrix for all his planning and imposition
now, including booklets and other types of bound work.
"What we used to do in a couple of hours
now takes about 2 minutes with Metrix," said Rai. "And,"
he continued, "what used to require three people can
now be done with two, with time left to spare." Rai noted
that his overtime hours at the shop diminished markedly after
he began using Metrix, enabling him to spend more of his time
building his business and enjoying his family.
Rai asserted that the most significant impact
made by Metrix was on turnaround time. "We used to need
a lot more lead time before we could get jobs to the press,"
he said. "Now we plan and impose in the morning and print
the jobs in the afternoon. Our customers submit a lot of time-critical
work, so the speed of delivery is crucial. With Metrix we
are able to deliver. But more than that, we are often able
to find better, more efficient layouts with Metrix than we
ever could have figured out ourselves."
When asked about the learning curve for Metrix,
Rai chuckled. "I was pushing jobs through Metrix after
about 30 minutes of playing around," he said. "And
my other operator learned how to use it in one day, even though
he had no previous experience with imposition software or
job planning. I would say the learning curve is practically
non-existent."
At the end of the interview, Rai said simply,
"Metrix has enabled us to do the work we want to do.
If something has to be out the door today, then it must be.
All the bottlenecks are gone. I can't imagine doing without
Metrix - it would not be possible."
"Something's
wrong - this is way too easy." This was how Rajiv Rai
summed up his experience with Metrix as we wrapped up our
interview. Spoken like a true soldier of the prepress wars,
Rajiv marveled at the way Metrix actually delivered on its
promise of automating imposition - even complex gang runs
- transforming a labor-intensive and difficult task into a
simple and straightforward process.