Lupa was established in 2006 by the brothers Yoram and Ofer Rosenbaum with one objective in mind: turning digital photos into printed stories. Almost 15 years later, they are now one of the largest digital online photo book retailers in Israel. From personalized photo books to calendars and tiles, Lupa keeps offering new innovative and creative print products to always be ahead of the other players in the Israeli photo print market. They now employ 45 people and do more with less, using Ultimate Impostrip® to automatically send the impositions to their 3 HP Indigo 7,500 Digital Presses.
A few year ago, Lupa’s growing business revealed some irritants in their prepress department which slowed their production down and prevented further growth. Their imposition solution at the time required a lot of programming to integrate with their web-to-print solution. “The biggest aspect of the problem was the lack of proper imposition templates to produce a wider range of products in an automated way using our store-front to connect to.’’ says Ofer Rosenbaum, General Manager at Lupa. They needed a solution that would easily integrate into their workflow to concentrate on business and marketing aspects instead.
Lupa heard about Ultimate Impostrip® powerful automation and ease of use, and decided to try it out. According to the GM, the results were outstanding: “Ultimate Impostrip® easily consumed the job ticket from our web-to-print solution. It imposed the jobs exactly the way we wanted, every time, repeatedly. As soon as we finished our trial, we understood how powerful this software is.’’
The imposition software layouts the book jobs in an optimal way to save time in cutting and preparation. Prior to Ultimate Impostrip®, Lupa needed to print each book separately in a 2up imposition on their HP Indigo presses. The first half of the book was on the left of the sheet, and the second half was on the right. Then, they needed to cut the sheet, and put the left stack on top of the other to complete the book. “With Ultimate Impostrip®, we were able to switch right away to printing batches of orders instead of single books. We were able to load thousands of files instead of only a few dozen at a time.’’ Lupa now prints on one sheet two different books in separate batches. Then, they only need to cut the sheet once to produce the final orders on their Horizon Perfect Binder. ‘’The automatic sorting is done at the end of the day in separated batches of hardcover and soft cover books organized and ready to go to print. This saves us time and prevent mistakes’’, adds Rosenbaum.
The automatic generation of the right job ticket to batch according to criteria like format, binding type, paper type, urgent, super urgent, etc., remove all manual intervention to create a completely automated workflow from order entry to print on their HP Indigo presses: ‘’Every morning, we simply look at a 2-3 page report to see all the batches from the overnight production. Everything else is automated. The system works all night without having an operator attending the press tracking and releasing jobs.”
Over the years, Ultimate Impostrip® increased the productivity, resolved the tedious postpress tasks and opened up new opportunities at Lupa’s: “Our jobs are organized automatically. We have a better margin on the work done. We are able to save around 30% of workers time in the production flow. To summarize, we do more with less.’’ Ofer Rosenbaum concludes: ‘’We are eager to increase our business because we are confident in our smart imposition and our ability to deliver higher volume of personalized books, JPEG photos and more.”
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We are a company of photography and design lovers who help people do something good with their photos. In our opinion, exciting experiences that were filmed and not printed are lost and a pity. With us you will find easy and fun editing software and design tools for computer and phone and printing a personal photo book at the highest level, to which your photos are entitled. Each book is manufactured by the most advanced printing and binding equipment in the world, from the highest quality materials and carefully inspected before packing and shipping. The process from the design of the book to its receipt by the customer, is accompanied by our customer service team.