EFI Metrix Produces a Competitive Edge for Lawton Printing Services

Frank A. Lawton and his father, Frank H. Lawton, founded Lawton Printing Services 75 years ago in a converted backyard chicken coop. The pair worked hard together as a two-man company in this humble locale, earning a reputation for honesty, diligent work and creative solutions.

While the father-and-son team cherished and lived by their old fashioned values, they nonetheless believed in the power of innovation. Frank A. Lawton even designed and developed special machinery to better serve clients. Today, a fourth generation family member, Laura Lawton, heads the company. Laura strongly affirms that embracing change is the key to success, having guided her team through the transition from traditional offset printer to a full-service marketing solutions provider.

Challenge

“We were looking for ways to speed throughput, improve accuracy and reduce costs, without sacrificing our high standards for quality,” says Laura Lawton, president of Lawton Printing Services in Spokane, WA.

Lawton Printing Services has a broad and varied client base. On any given day the company may be tasked with producing marketing collateral, promotional products, directories and catalogs, maps, business cards, postcards and everything in between. The equipment list at Lawton Printing Services includes sheetfed offset and digital presses, a full bindery, a fulfillment center and a mailing operation.

The company includes a division called Lawton Publishing, which partners with Chambers of Commerce throughout the United States. Lawton Publishing has produced printed directories since 1975, and today leads the way in coordinated print and digital directories and campaigns for Chambers across the country.

Across all of Lawton Printing Services’ operations, increasingly tight deadlines are the norm. “Our clients’ turnaround times have continued to be compressed,” says Laura Lawton, the company’s president. “We are under constant pressure to produce work faster, which means we must be more efficient and we must eliminate errors and rework.”

Solution

According to Lawton, change in the industry is the only constant, and the only way to handle it is head-on. “I grew up in this business and have watched the change since 1983 when I first started,” she says. “I am passionate about adapting new technology to provide better solutions to our clients, for their success and ours.”

In 2009, while in the throes of implementing lean manufacturing principles, Laura Lawton took a closer look at her company’s workflow. The company sought ways to remove steps from the production process and eliminate potential errors.

When Lawton saw a demonstration of Metrix Software (now EFI Metrix software) (Booth 1902) at the Print 09 tradeshow that year, she immediately knew it would fit right in with the company’s efficiency strategy. Says Lawton, “At first glance, Metrix seemed like an imposition product. But after watching the demonstration, I realized it could simplify and streamline the entire job planning process, while doing the imposition at the same time.”

Soon after the tradeshow, Lawton Printing Services installed Metrix. After spending a few days setting up equipment parameters in the software’s database, “Metrix started doing some of our thinking for us — finding the most efficient and economical ways to produce jobs while automatically ensuring that press and bindery equipment requirements were respected.

“Spoilage started to decline almost immediately,” she adds. EFI Metrix enables the operators at Lawton Printing Services to handle work destined for either offset or digital presses using the same intuitive interface. “Our prepress operator and production manager rave about its simplicity and ease of use,” Laura Lawton says.

Results

Lawton puts the benefits of EFI Metrix in three categories: faster throughput, higher productivity and fewer errors and reruns.

“When we first implemented EFI Metrix,” says Lawton, “we immediately noticed that we could process jobs much faster. Because EFI Metrix automatically generates the correct layout and production method based on the job specs, we saved all that time spent either searching through thousands of Preps templates or creating new templates from scratch. We also eliminated hand-drawn diagrams, saving even more time.”

The total savings are significant: After switching to EFI Metrix, Lawton Printing Services can get jobs through planning and prepress in approximately one-third of the time it took previously.

The time savings has made a difference in terms of remaining competitive and controlling costs. According to Lawton, meeting tighter deadlines has been crucial to Lawton Printing Services’ continued success. “We can process jobs faster with EFI Metrix,” she notes, “which means we can actually complete more work with the same equipment.”

When appropriate, EFI Metrix has helped the company efficiently gang jobs together for even higher productivity.

Says Lawton, “We never even considered the possibility of ganging before we had EFI Metrix, and it took awhile to get into the mindset that ganging jobs was possible and feasible. But if you take a step back from the process and look at your production, you realize that you can print two or more jobs on the same sheet and make everything much more efficient. And these efficiencies are passed along to our customers, making us more competitive in a very challenging business environment.”

Eliminating reruns was another huge gain for Lawton Printing Services, thanks to EFI Metrix.

“Before we implemented EFI Metrix,” says Lawton, “we struggled with reruns due to incorrect imposition. When you are working with a template- and file-based system, you are depending on the operator to pick up the right template. Over the years, thousands of templates are created, so your only safety net is the diligence of the operator.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum is EFI Metrix and its Metrix Standards feature, a centralized database system containing plant-specific production requirements driven by print-specific algorithms.

Metrix Standards automatically selects the correct layout for a job based on the job’s specifications.

“We have very little spoilage due to incorrect trim margins or the wrong layout anymore,” Lawton says. “EFI Metrix has dramatically reduced reruns, contributing substantially to our bottom line and to the satisfaction of our clients.”