TC Transcontinental Printing Orders ppi Media's Web-2-Print Solution OM Portal

One of the most modern printing houses in the US, TC Transcontinental Printing, is to expand its prepress workflow. With OM portal, TC Transcontinental Printing, which prints the San Francisco Chronicle and other dailies as well as retail printing work, offers its customers a smart, highly automated web-2-print solution.

The increase in retail printing work required a new workflow at TC Transcontinental Printing. “We needed to expand our workflow, but didn’t want to give up the seamless integration already established between our OM prepress system and our manroland presses. OM portal extends our automation to include preflighting, live customer approvals, ink reduction, and a number of other features. The system will provide new flexibility as our plant takes on increasing amounts of retail printing work alongside our regular newspaper customers,” says David Bruckmann, planning navigator at TC Transcontinental Printing in Fremont, CA.

OM portal organizes, visualizes and simplifies the planning and production of jobs for print customers in a single web application. Using OM portal, customers can view their orders at the printing house and then issue a planning release. After this, the PDF files are uploaded and the data automatically checked and normalized. An online soft proof is then created. Here, customers can download both check protocols and the normalized print data. When the print data has been checked, customers can then approve the print data and release the retail print job for printing.

Since July 6, 2009, three manroland Colorman XXL presses and ppi Media’s OM prepress solution have been responsible for producing and printing, for example, the San Francisco Chronicle at TC Transcontinental Printing in Fremont, California. Apart from automating the processes of imaging, CIP3 data generation, production monitoring and proofing, OM also offsets the page geometry of the Chronicle. Northern California’s largest daily is printed in a modern, narrow 11-inch format.

“After nearly four years of live use of OM and given the outstanding technical support we received from ppi Media throughout our very complex project, we are confident that our experience with OM portal will be just as solid,” says David Bruckmann, looking ahead to the future.