When the Cape Cod Times went live with Agfa’s Arkitex workflow app at the beginning of the year, it marked the first time the Hyannis, Mass.-based daily employed software to manage production.

The deployment was made in conjunction with the Times’ transition to computer-to-plate production. Prior to that, the paper (daily, 43,821; Sunday, 49,574) imaged film and relied on manual processes to monitor workflow and release pages for printing.

“Back when we used the camera we would have to sign off in blue pencil on the corner of the flats, then it went to film and we would tell staff when to release film to the plateroom,” said Mike Fabia, print operations manager. “Arkitex allows the newsroom to control the release of the pages.”

Giving the newsroom oversight of finished pages was a specific request from the Times’ editorial staff, which now has the authority of deciding when pages can be released by giving the go-ahead in an approval box within the app.

Beyond that, Fabia said Arkitex has allowed the newspaper to create a stopgap to hold pages until they are ready or track pages that may need to be changed.

“We wanted to have the ability to be the bottleneck, so to speak,” he said. “We also wanted the ability to hold pages until we’re ready to send then because a lot of times there are pages that change during the night and you know what your time element is and you can watch jump pages for instance and pages that tend to change - so it gave is the ability to hold that up.”

Pages are sent from the Times’ Main Street editorial office over a T1 line to the production plant, which houses the paper’s two new Agfa Advantage violet CTP units and Goss Metro press.

Page approval

Once pages are approved, they no longer appear on the Arkitex screen, Fabia said, and when a page is changed it re-enters the workflow and again pops up on the screen.

“Once a page is off the screen you know it’s done, and if for some reason there is a redo or a change the page comes back,” Fabia said. “You’re not going to press and all of a sudden somebody’s wondering where such and such page is and you have to go picking through everything. This stopped that.”

Agfa’s Newsdrive software drives the Times’ violet units  - an Advantage DL 150 and a new Advantage Xs manual-load CTP unit the paper subsequently added in a bid to eliminate film redundancy.

“After a year of running both film and CTP, we found that with the expense of maintaining the film side, it was actually cheaper to go out and purchase a second CTP line,” Fabia said.

“When we did the ROI on the savings we found that we could justify that Xs unit,” Fabia said.

Savings add up

Additional savings have resulted from sending pages over the high-speed data line rather than physically transporting film between the editorial and production locations. Labor savings with the new CTP workflow have also been significant, Fabia said.

“I used to have three guys working the plateroom and then two guys working downtown doing film and now everything’s done by one guy,” he said. “The other savings that you don’t even consider is in training.”

When the film imagers resided downtown, Fabia said, the Times was required to put all staff in the building through hazardous materials training because they were working around chemistry.

“There’s no longer a need for a separate photo processing permit or any of that,” he said.

The conversion to producing CTP plates and launching the workflow software went more smoothly than expected, Fabia said.

“When we went from camera to film we started with just section fronts and did them for a few weeks and then finally integrated the rest of the paper,” he recalled. “We decided to do the same thing with this system and in about three days realized that was stupid and just moved the whole paper right into it. It actually went that well.”

In addition to its daily, the Times prints The Barnstable Patriot and the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, local weeklies also owned by parent Ottaway Newspapers.

“We take those pages, transfer them into our RIP and into Arkitex and we can output them from another remote location,” Fabia said.

Changed deadlines, improved quality

Coupled with the CTP imaging, Fabia said the Times’ new workflow app has added time into the production schedule and improved quality.

“When we were on film we’d always want stuff the day before in order to fix any problems or to have somebody put it through the imager and create the film,” he said. “Now I can call them up downtown and within five minutes I have it up here and output it. It’s changed deadlines completely.”

Next up for the Times’ evaluation is Agfa’s IntelliTune color correcting app and stochastic screening, Fabia said.