Real World Case Study: The need to create files that could be printed without plates or film and the need to send these files to various locations worldwide for production has increased in recent years. A major graphics and printing organization decided to convert their production process to DTP technology (Direct to Plate/Direct to Press). Despite their efforts to dramatically increase the efficiency and quality of their systems, the rate of errors due to bad barcodes was increasing. How could this be? It became apparent that when moving to DTP technology, the verification of a barcode could not take place until the final printed piece was complete. At that point, it was too late to catch the mistake and the whole process had to start over. The company reverted to outputting a “proof” of the document in order to check the quality of the barcode in an attempt to keep the process rolling. Though this seemed to be a good idea at the time, the efficiencies gained through adopting DTP technology were severely diminished because the barcode could not be verified during the process.
Real World Case Study: A Fortune 500 manufacturing firm decided to revolutionize their document proofing system to drastically decrease turnaround times and to improve the QC results and documentation required throughout the approval process. Using Adobe Acrobat, PDF documents were speeding through the various departments and locations, receiving approvals from the many different parties involved in the process such as Marketing, Design, Legal, Packaging, and Accounting. When it came time to verify that the correct barcode had been placed on the correct artwork, and that the quality specifications for that particular package matched the actual printing process to be used – the workflow came to a big halt. Despite the investment made to keep the process flowing digitally to ensure a more efficient time to delivery, the barcode always seemed to throw a wrench into the system. Different from virtually every other type of visual art or graphics, barcodes could only be read and verified by outputting to a high resolution device and later measuring with a cumbersome and expensive barcode hardware verification device. The FineLine Solution That’s when FineLine Technologies, Inc. entered the picture. The challenge was to develop a method to verify the barcode without the need to output a high resolution, expensive proof simply to verify the barcode. Since the late 1980’s, SymArt Pro has been the industry leading software package generating pre press high quality barcodes for high, medium, and low end users. As the developers of SymArt Software, Fineline Technologies aimed to meet this challenge in order to solve a major problem for a growing number of companies who are moving to Direct to Press, Computer to Plate, and digital and paperless workflows.
The Solution? Digital Verification Technology. The Digital Verification Tool allows users to actually verify a barcode on-screen within programs such as Adobe Illustrator or Acrobat. All you need to do is drag the mouse across the barcode and instantly, the barcode is identified, specifications such as bar/space measurements, ratios and bar-width reduction are checked, and the results are returned. With SymArt DVT installed at the proper points within the workflow, the problematic verification of a barcode is solved and the workflow can proceed. The revolution is complete. Welcome to the future of barcode verification!