In With the New

Hazelden Publishing and Educational Services is the world's largest publisher of products focusing on addiction, recovery and prevention. Hazelden books, video and audio programs, direct mail, catalogs and other products are sold in 32 countries - at a high rate of warehouse orders a day.

With an output of this magnitude, the non-profit knew it had to upgrade its workflow management system. Hazelden had been working with two prepress vendors and a piecemeal workflow that had evolved over the years.

First, each prepress vendor stored Hazelden's hi-resolution images separately in different systems, which caused duplication, versioning problems and retrieval issues. Files were not logically named and multiple variations of the same images created confusion, and finding the desired version became time consuming.

Under the old workflow system, the staff worked without access to the latest generation workstations and networking systems. There were no file naming conventions and no procedures or standards in place for back up or disaster recovery, putting valuable data at risk.

Hazelden's graphic design team also manually searched for required images and sent them along with Quark files to prepress vendors by overnight courier. The prepress vendors then made film and Matchprint proofs and sent them back to the organization by courier. Hazelden reviewed the proofs, marked up corrections and returned them back to the prepress vendors. The vendors made the corrections, reproofed and returned the materials back to Hazelden, who sent the proofs to the printer, while the prepress vendors sent film to the printer.

Server-based workflow

An initial investigation was performed by Banta Corporation, who recommended and implemented a server-based workflow where Banta became the single source vendor for prepress at Hazelden. The heart of the system is the file server installed on site at Hazelden and connected through a dedicated line to Banta's data center, to manage the connected workflow.