Significans Automation, one of the leading providers of integration and automation solutions for the graphic arts industries, has made its first foray into software development with the launch of Virtual InkBooks, a powerful colour management tool for creating cloud-based custom ink libraries that can be tailored to any job.

Designed to work in conjunction with Esko’s WebCenter and Automation Engine, Virtual InkBooks enables users throughout a printing or packaging operation to view Pantone and custom ink libraries in real-time and allows production teams to easily customise and record job-specific ink data in the cloud.

These libraries can be used for repeat work downstream or across multiple jobs or output devices, reducing make-ready costs and improving and augmenting colour consistency across multiple platforms.

According to Marc Raad, CEO of Signficans Automation, the entry into the world of software development was a natural progression for the company, which has enjoyed a tremendous track record of improving production efficiencies and automating workflows for its clients throughout the Americas.

“In fact, Virtual InkBooks was first conceived after a conversation with one of our packaging clients, Bay Cities, which expressed a desire to reduce the variables, manpower, and costs associated with managing colour consistency, particularly with re-orders,” Raad explained. “Over the next couple of months, we worked closely with Bay Cities to develop a solution to address these specific needs, and the result was a robust piece of industry software.”

Headquartered in Pico Rivera California, Bay Cities is a leading expert in printed corrugated displays and packaging operations. With the addition of Virtual InkBooks, the company is now able to track and accurately reproduce colours.

According to Bay Cities’ director of IT and automation, James Hawton, the company needed to make it easy for designers and pre-press staff to enter the colour data in WebCenter to ensure it could track its colours and accurately reproduce them again on future orders.

 Hawton explained, “A lot of times when you go to press, you still need to make tweaks to hit a specific colour as closely as you can, and the biggest problem you run into is how to store what you’ve done on that specific machine after the initial run is complete.”

“With Virtual InkBooks, we now have a specific location where we can store the colour information and the LAB values that we worked on for a particular machine to get the result that we wanted,” Hawton added. “So now whenever any graphic artist is going to work with that colour, they will be working with the same variable. Significans Automation really delivered a great solution for our needs.”

Regarding the software’s availability in India, Jennifer Raad, VP operations, Significans Automation told PrintWeek, “Yes, we are happy to provide remote services to India. We are happy to receive inquiries from Indian printing and packaging companies, which currently use Esko Automation Engine (AE) and WebCenter (WC).”

Raad said, “Significans Automation provides SaaS services, featuring Virtual InkBooks for colour library management. A prerequisite for this custom-configured module is to have an existing Esko AE and EC.”

“Virtual InkBooks is essentially a custom configured background workflow that requires a Significans Automation Workflow Deployment Architect to implement directly to the customer,” she concluded.