Success often comes down to speed. The faster a repro shop completes a project, the more quickly it can move onto the next. Ottawa-based Gilmore Reproductions took on a large-scale project building a digital archive of transit system documents for OC Transpo, Ottawa’s public transportation system. A few months into the project, Director of Operations Brad Stafford knew that it was time to invest in a faster wide format scanning solution to meet the project’s demands. Gilmore installed a 42-inch Contex HD Ultra i4290s wide format scanner with Nextimage REPRO software in November 2013, and realized immediate productivity gains. The new hardware was faster, and it eliminated processing steps from the workflow. Gilmore staffers now capture exceptional images without post-processing, thus doubling the company’s productivity. Gilmore anticipates completing the project ahead of schedule, thanks to the faster workflow.
The solution
Gilmore invested in a new Contex HD Ultra i4290s wide format scanner with Nextimage REPRO software to meet the project’s high-volume productivity requirements, including the ability to scan documents directly to PDF for archiving.
Benefits & Results
With the HD Ultra i4290s scanner and Nextimage REPRO software, Gilmore Reproductions more than doubled its productivity, thanks to faster scanning and eliminating time-consuming image processing from the scanning workflow.
The OC Transpo project involves scanning 12 skids (4x4x5 feet in size) of blueprints and other large-format documents detailing the public transportation pathways. After each document is scanned, it is saved as a PDF and becomes part of OC Transpo’s new digital database. Each skid is filled with dozens of boxes of documents. Initially, progress on the multi-year project was hampered by the company’s 7-year-old Océ scanner, which was just too slow to handle this demand. Staffers were able to scan just one box of documents each day. Now, on most days, they scan two, or even three, boxes of documents.
Simplifying the workflow
Previously, all documents digitized on Gilmore’s existing scanner required substantial processing in order to get a clean image. Scans had an unacceptable blue hue in the background that required processing in Adobe Photoshop to remove. This time-consuming step had to be performed on every scan. With the Nextimage REPRO software, however, this step is now unnecessary.
“The scans generated on the Contex HD Ultra i4290s come in clean,” states Stafford. “Thanks to Nextimage, we have eliminated an extra processing step from our scanning workflow. Now, we just scan directly to a PDF file or to print.”
Building digital architectural archives for more customers
The investment in the Contex scanning solution is also reaping benefits elsewhere for the company, as its 31-year history of blueprint printing for the AEC market is coming back full circle. Customers are now bringing in those same blueprints to be scanned to create searchable databases. Gilmore has begun hosting these digital archives for its customers.
Scanning three decades worth of documents is a big task, explains Stafford. “The fast hardware can handle the volume of scanning our customers are now requiring,” he says. “And we needed high-quality color capture to catch the handwritten annotations.” These black-and-white architectural drawings are often marked up with red lines, so color scanning is required to capture both information from the original drawings and any notations made to the working documents.
