EFI today announced that Repro India, Ltd. of Mumbai is implementing a full suite of EFI solutions, including EFI Monarch, EFI Digital StoreFront and EFI PrintFlow, to provide an integrated management system that will keep pace with their current growth and meet future needs. Repro India offers design and prepress services, sheetfed and web offset printing, digital printing, postpress and last-mile logistics, with an annual turnover of US$60 million with more than 600 employees. Repro India produces annual reports, IT manuals, catalogues, and magazines and is one of India's largest producers of educational books for the global market.
"In order to be competitive in today's market, print service providers need to have a real-time, end-to-end, 360-degree view of their business. Our home-grown management solution had reached its limitations. We needed a modern solution and a proactive MIS partner to ensure future success, so we selected EFI," said Baiju Gujarathi, senior vice president of Repro India.
Repro India selected the EFI Monarch print MIS solution to manage its multi-plant, multi-technology business. In addition to EFI Monarch's solid reputation in the marketplace, Repro India was especially attracted by the wide range of additional integrated modules available for Monarch (such as scheduling, direct machine interface and Web storefronts) as well as the ability of the software to address international business requirements such as currency, language and taxes. The company also needed to be able to manage both digital and offset print production from a single interface, so Monarch's support of industry standards such as JDF was a critical decision factor as well.
Comments Gujarathi, "EFI Monarch is a proven, integrated solution that offers an industry best-practices framework and a wide array of add-on modules that can expand the scope of our automation over time and scale with the business. EFI also has a large scale engineering team in India, so we know any requests will be handled very responsively."
Repro India has installed EFI Monarch in both of its plants, including the shop floor data collection capability. This has given the company better control over its production operation, more flexibility in planning, and the scalability that will ensure that its systems are positioned for future growth. "We can already see improvements in productivity, and we also have job costing control in place to monitor job profitability, an extremely important capability for us," said Gujarathi.
In addition to Monarch, Repro India is piloting the Digital Storefront web-to-print platform, with two customer profiles created and beta use started. The company is also piloting the adoption of planning and scheduling practices using EFI's PrintFlow dynamic scheduling module. Next up is Auto-Count®, which will accurately track actual production with a direct machine interface to the shop floor. Repro India is also using PrinterSite® Internal to make it easier for its sales representatives around the globe to process requests for customer estimates from the field. And with PrinterSite Fulfilment, the firm will be able to integrate its fulfilment operation into the overall customer offering.
"Our promise to our customers is to manage their content using a zero inventory approach whether they require one or one million copies of books or other printed materials, whenever or wherever they are needed," concludes Baiju. "The capabilities of EFI Monarch are vital to our ability to deliver on this promise. It is improving our efficiency across the organisation, but more importantly, has been a critical factor in shifting our corporate culture to a focus on solving customer business problems which almost incidentally includes the production of print. EFI is a trusted partner we expect to work with over the long haul to ensure a comprehensive and service-oriented offering in a dynamically changing global business scenario."
