Druckerei Laub GmbH & Co. KG in Elztal-Dallau (Germany) has decided to replace its Alphagraph Prinance workflow with the EFI Pace print MIS.  The full-service, owner-operated offset and digital print shop with over 60 employees has been supplying its customers with a wide variety of printed goods for 115 years. After using the Alphagraph Prinance workflow since 1997, the company decided to switch to the EFI Pace system following an intensive evaluation process.

The family-owned company is run by Gerhard Cherdron and his daughter Anke Cherdron, who was heavily involved in the evaluation process.  "We decided in favour of EFI Pace because just like Prinance it was developed by experts who are fully conversant with technical production operations in print shops," said Anke Cherdron.  "We developed a comprehensive materials planning system that we had not been able to update since 2009 due to increases and special requirements, but now we can use again with EFI Pace.What was helpful to us was the option to transfer part of the data from Prinance.Changing software after 15 years of use provides the opportunity to clean out-of-date data.."

A key decision-making criterion for Druckerei Laub was that Pace is a browser-based server that runs local or in the cloud.  "We used to have to complete the updates of around 15 computers individually and simultaneously, which was forever causing us problems and taking up a lot of time.With Pace, only the server is updated and all the computers accessing the server use the latest data," added Cherdron.

EFI played another part in the decision-making process.Laub was already familiar with EFI as a company from the Fiery colour servers working on various imagesetters and printing machines.  "With EFI we are investing in a market leader with an international presence and sufficient resources for ongoing development and support for their software, so we hope to be able to work with EFI Pace in the long term," said Cherdron.  "We estimate that it will take about six months until we have added all the information to Pace for all our requirements during ongoing production, and then around a year until all employees are fully conversant with their workspaces. In these circumstances, we simply cannot trust a system supplier unless we can be certain they will still be around in five years."

Solutions from Alphagraph such as Prinance, etc. will still be developed, supported and sold to existing customers, but will no longer be offered to new customers. Alphagraph customers on maintenance are eligible for special price discounts on new EFI systems.  EFI will continue to provide reliable support for customers using Alphagraph solutions - currently more than 6000 installations in 15 countries - for several more years to come, was the assurance from Georg Hollenbach, Managing Director of EFI GmbH and Alphagraph on the occasion of the acquisition of Alphagraph by EFI.