After just 4 months, Gist and Herlin Press has been reaping many rewards.

Giving clients access to images and files over the Web has been a win-win situation. For Gist and Herlin Press, making sample files for clients used to be a manual, multi-step process. Now their server automatically generates FPO files, which clients can download themselves from their Web browsers. This self-serve mechanism is a huge time-saver for a company that deals with hundreds of thousands of files a year, and for its clients

Having seen how easily they can access their files, some customers are now looking to Gist and Herlin Press to manage all their critical assets. "Digital asset management helps us build deeper relationships with clients," Robinson states. "Our clients quickly realized that they were much better served by Web-based management. Now some of them are coming to us, asking if we could host all their assets, which is very exciting."

Currently, the company is doing large-scale digital asset management for a university, an ad agency and a catalog company, with others soon to follow.

The Web has also made it possible for Gist and Herlin Press to offer clients template-driven print solutions, such as online business card ordering. In the past, business cards had to be manually typeset. Not anymore. "Our clients at the university wanted a standardized card so any professor could order one," says Workflow Manager Bill Hahn. "Now professors can make any changes and see proofs on screen. Their job is automatically sent to a digital printer and their credit card transaction is processed online."

Uploader has been yet another success story. "We've converted the majority of our clients to it," Hahn says. "It's drag and drop. You no longer have to manually compress files or open an FTP session with the server to initiate uploading. We have clients saying, 'This is so easy, we're going to give you all of our print work!'"

Internally, the Xinet solution has delivered in numerous ways, too, significantly streamlining the prepress workflow. Robinson explains, "Xinet has greatly simplified how we handle things. Before, there might have been 8 ways a job could be sent for output, depending on the file type. Now, 90% of the time, there's only one way to do it, which greatly reduces the number of workflows and errors."

In addition, Gist and Herlin Press has benefited from Xinet's PostScript error-catching and optimization, its ability to convert the dpi of multiple images at once through batch automation, and its archiving and backup capabilities.

With FlashNet, archiving is completely automated, making it much easier. Instead of a system administrator having to manually move files to an archiving folder, a robot sweeps the server for jobs ready to go to archive. "We've also dramatically reduced backups," says Robinson. "It used to be a very labor-intensive process. A machine had to be attended by a person. Now, we do in half-an-hour what used to take us 10 hours a week."

In Xinet, Gist and Herlin Press has found a product suite that gives them everything they want - and more. In NAPC, they've found a partner who does the same. "We're big fans of NAPC," says Bill Hahn. "They're really easy to get a hold of and to work with. Any issue that's come up, they've taken care of it right away."

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