Success Story – International Brand Company
Recently we’ve been working with a brand that sells their products all over the world. They work with other brands to license products for them, as well. They’re working with Print Service Providers (PSP’s – aka packaging printers) in Canada, Mexico and China and were seeking a better way to communicate color with them. They chose Alder Color Solutions because we offer the world’s best cloud-based, conformance platform and have helped other brands implement it, saving them tons of time, money, and headaches.
The platform provides “inspectors” for checking the accuracy and conformance (generally to ISO standards), for myriad of things related to the printing process – lighting, process color, spot colors, instruments, ink, paper, environment, the list goes on. But one of the most powerful is the Project Inspector, which enables the brand to define alll of the specs for the print job. This includes color space reference/profile, DeltaE and E-factor tolerances for these, spectral definitions, with separate “snowflake” tolerancing for these, measurement mode, lighting /viewing details, as well as Control Strip or color bar. The PSP receives the invitation to the Project and uploads color measurement data, as specified, which generates basically a scorecard back to the brand. And this all happens in real-time, while the job is on press – eliminating the need for in-person press checks.
The Project Inspector functionality alone is worth the investment by itself. But there are many other features that can have huge impact. One of those is the “Color Match” functionality. Using an inexpensive inkjet printer, we can generate incredibly accurate spot color references. Just like the fan guides most people use, except more accurate and repeatable. Listen to what our customer has to say about this…
“I’ve been completely consumed with color matching a complete rebrand for our toughest brand partner. I’ve had excellent results. This one feature is worth the purchase for us. To give you an idea of what this will do for us, we have been working with a vendor to get ink drawdown color matches done off of brand supplied ink drawdowns. You’d think that would be a simple process for an ink lab, but we did not have a single set of color approved for any one of this brand’s, and we have been working on it for about 2 months. I was beyond frustrated. I was able to get 13 color matches approved using the color match feature in one week (I actually had to create a number of the colors manually because they didn’t supply targets large enough to get a measurement off of). And now I will be sending the color reports out to vendors, along with CxF files for them to run to as standards. This is good stuff. We will cut a TON of time out of this process moving forward. This feature is gold for us.
If you work for a brand company in the package printing space, I highly recommend you contact us for more information. We’re happy to provide demonstration and trials for qualified prospects. It’s time to utilize the incredible power of color science, conformance standards and cloud-computing to completely streamline your procurement processes. Email us at [email protected] to connect.
