The vision for Prinergy was created in 1995, as a fully-digital prepress workflow was just becoming viable, and the need to transitions prepress operators from film-based workflow to digital was paramount to achieving the transition to digital.
Ten years later, Kodak had purchased Creo, and Prinergy had established itself as the market leader in sheetfed and web printing plants worldwide, and tools like Workshop re-established the transparency of prepress workflow that was temporarily lost in the transition to digital, and Creo’s VPS Virtual Proofing Software set the paradigm for on-screen checking of page alignment, and was just beginning to make use of ICC profiling to create color-accurate virtual proofing.
It was also becoming apparent that the number of minutes or hours per page to prepare customer files for printing was a key factor in the difference between profitable and unprofitable jobs. Printers were motivated to provide tools to their customers to help them prepare and pre-flight files to ensure they would get to press smoothly and efficiently.
Within the prepress area, the volume of print was increasing, and staff needed to be able to direct their energy to the high-need, high-profit work, and find a way to have the bread-and-butter work of commercial print, things like brochures, ads and stationery, go through prepress with the lightest of touch. This was especially true as digital presses were being introduced to commercial printers, who could then direct work to the most suitable press.
Prinergy Dashboard strove to provide an entire view into the prepress jobs in progress, as a partner to the increased use of RBA rules-based-automation. Dashboard could monitor job progress of automated jobs, detecting when a problem stop the workflow. It could also signal to an operator when proofs were ready or awaited approval, ideas that were extended out to the customer’s web browser with Prinergy Insite.
