It is no surprise that Imp has the largest user base in Europe. Imp’s automation and ability to handle complexity is highly valued here. And our sales partners led by Four Pees, Belgium covering Europe were actively involved in our booth. Resellers from Australia also joined us in showing the value of Imp to the owners of Digital Printing Houses from Australia.

Algorithms for Large Format Printing were released just before DRUPA making Imp the only layout planning & creation software for any kind of job – books, labels, brochures, folding cartons, signage by the entire range of digital and offset printing machines. It is also the only solution for cost based layout creation even for the emerging continuous feed digital webs.

Some of our customers from Brazil, UK, Russia, Germany, USA were pleased to see us at our booth. Many large format printers were pleasantly surprised with the speed and accuracy of layouts creation. They came back with their own files next day to truly believe what they saw.

The power of Imp software was demonstrated by many MIS partners booth at DRUPA. Rogler Software, Austria, Tharstern UK, Optimus, the Netherlands, BEL, Greece and Four Pees stands were showing Imp to their customers. Optimus demonstrated the integrated version of their solution for packaging module at the KBA booth. The only ERP for print (Dynamix AX) integrated with Imp by MPS Graphics, Denmark demonstrated at the booth.

New at DRUPA was the launch of the intelligent PDF to Epub conversion software “InForm”. Arguably, the best software in the world in this specialized niche, it was demonstrated to customers who have expressed interest in taking it further since.

At DRUPA, the entire team of partners and resellers together with our team, worked diligently and with purpose each day to show value to customers. All in all, we came back with big smiles on our faces.

The hands-free automation for the entire range of digital printing machines from A3, B2 size to continuous feed web presses was unveiled as a novel solution for bound, rectangular and die-cut jobs. Also of interest was Imp’s Highly evolved ganging engine for faster than ever before computing of layouts.

Live demonstrations of Cost Based Layout Planning showed how Imp automatically takes into account multiple touch points like costs of printing, paper, finishing operations, to not only Automate but also Optimize existing setups.

With the successful integration of their MIS with Metamation’s planning software Imp, they are adding value for both their existing and new customers with accurate estimates and final print ready layouts generated directly from MIS, thus eliminating imposition or nesting in the prepress stage.

BEL has already deployed Metamation’s Imp-Pack at Paperpack, who are very happy with this value addition.

The BEL and Metamation partnership began in Athens, Greece in June 2014 with the goal of providing innovative increases in productivity and savings through integrated solutions. The results of this partnership will provide unique solutions for the print industry with both standalone Imp software and the MIS-integrated solution.

Six years later, Metamation has not only achieved this goal, but is constantly raising the benchmark set by itself. With the release of version 5.1 of Imp®, Metamation announced the hitherto unheard of die-database search feature. This new features allows packaging printers to dynamically search tens of thousands of existing dies to find geometrically matching dies for a new job. Apart from a metadata-based search, Imp. is capable of comparing geometry of the current job with thousands of jobs in the database to find close matches. A user can superimpose the geometries and graphically see how close the match is. Further, Imp is also capable of making the necessary cost calculations to see if the printer is better off using the existing die or making a new one. It is also important to mention here that one can seed this die-database with existing dies by importing the industry standard CF2 CAD files.

This feature, along with many others was showcased by Metamation this September at Print 13, McCormick Place, Chicago USA. Printers from across the Americas were impressed by Metamations’ offerings for the printing and packaging segments. One of the features that especially had a lot of resonance with customer needs at this exhibition was the ganging feature.

Ganging seems to be one of the answers to the challenges faced by offset printers today. The revenue and profit that this approach can give is vast. Combining different jobs and printing them together can drastically reduce make ready and boost productivity. The catch however, is the problem of figuring out how to combine multiple jobs efficiently and economically. It is a complex problem to solve and even with experienced personnel it is impossible to achieve consistent results. Metamations’ Imp is helping printers address this problem comprehensively. Imp is powered by a sophisticated ganging algorithm that can calculate how to combine hundreds of jobs in a profitable way, keeping in mind the print-specific requirements of each job and the printing & finishing capabilities of the printers’ print-shop. This intelligent software has answers for most of the challenges that a gang-printer could face.

At Print13 – Chicago, there were also many commercial printers who are stepping into the packaging segment to get a piece of the pie in the booming packaging industry. But, they are finding out that equipping their pre-press setup for processing packaging jobs is not trivial and often requires huge investments in new software product suites and training. Imp’s built-in intelligence and unique ability to handle both commercial and packaging jobs allows even a novice operator to be successful.

Metamation has more than 15 years of experience in developing high-end nesting solutions for the sheet metal industry. Today, customers around the world trust Metamation nesting technology for optimal outputs from costly sheets of metal, wood & stone. Below, we highlight one very special feature of our nesting algorithm.