Taking Your Foot off the Hose
With 30 years of label printing experience behind him, Dave Nosker understands a few key subtleties of running a printing company. The first is to have equally good relationships with customers and vendors alike. “It’s always a two-way street and you have to have solid, mutually respectful relationships to be successful. We treat our vendors as well as we do our customers,” says Mr. Nosker, CEO of Creative Labels of Ohio. The Troy, Ohio-based firm offers top-of-the-line label printing, equipment, processes, and customer service from simple one-color jobs to complex designs and configurations.
“Using the best technology and taking your foot off the hose, or so to speak, empowers employees so they can do the best work possible,” continues Mr. Nosker. “There are a lot of printers out there who don’t do that and it limits how effectively their people can work.”
The Power of Support
That choice is one that directly impacts product quality, the ability of a company to address customer needs, employee satisfaction, and morale. It’s an approach Mr. Nosker has long nurtured, but as label printing and production became increasingly reliant on digital technology he realized the level of support his company needed would be better coming from the equipment and software companies that provided the technology. That is when Mr. Nosker called on Anderson & Vreeland for help in developing a state-of-the-art pre-press system that would produce the best results and help maximize throughput.
Mr. Nosker began by talking with Mark Ferland, the local Anderson & Vreeland Account Manager, who identified the issues and brought in the A&V Digital Business Analyst. The analyst identified the imager and software challenges while A&V Technology Team took on the plate-related concerns. The Business Analyst and the Technology Team quickly resolved the issues, profiled the presses (something Creative Labels of Ohio does not do internally), set up proofing on an Epson 7900 proofer, and trained Mr. Nosker’s staff so they could handle these and other concerns in the future as the company grows.
“The people on the Anderson & Vreeland Tech Team had the detailed knowledge we needed to put all our technology to work for us,” notes Mr. Nosker. “Working with A&V technical people has made all the difference for us. We can now use some of the best technology available and deliver labels that we and our customers can be proud of.”
Mr. Nosker says A&V’s expertise extends past products the company sells. A new computer acquired by his pre-press department, for instance, would not properly connect to the RIP for their CDI Imager. The maker of the imager sought a significant sum to make the devices “talk” to each other, but A&V was able to address the issue quickly and economically.
Upping the Game
One of three recent additions at Creative Labels of Ohio was the Flint nyloflex Xpress Thermal Plate Processor provided by Anderson & Vreeland.
Unlike competing processors, the Flint Xpress processor uses consumables specifically designed for it, a strategy that streamlines plate production while improving accuracy and quality. “It was all new to us,” recounts Mr. Nosker, “but with Anderson & Vreeland support our team quickly learned how to make the best use of the system in our operations. It’s a straightforward process, and expertise A&V provided let us put the processor to work very quickly.”
Tackling different challenges were PACKZ from Hybrid Software, and Measure Color, also brought in by Anderson & Vreeland.
“There were some files that needed to be optimized for output and our customers turned to us for help. We asked Mark Ferland for his advice and he recommended we use PACKZ from Hybrid Software. As with other products we’d brought in from Anderson & Vreeland, we took it right away and used A&V’s technology experts to help us keep moving forward. We’ve found that using A&V for support is the fastest way to get up to full speed right away and ensure we always provide customers with the best possible labels.”
Creative Labels of Ohio has also added Measure Color software to provide accurate color management and ensure repeatability; key demands of brand conscious customers. “Companies come to us because they want all their colors to be accurate every time. With A&V behind us, supporting all the technologies they sell, we know we can create the best plates and deliver the best quality labels available,” says Mr. Nosker. “We are never idle on our quality and always want to make something better. Our relationship with A&V ensures we are able to achieve that.“
