BURLINGTON, ON—In order to quickly manage and produce its short-run jobs, Category 5 has installed Esko’s Automation Engine, which has eliminated the repetitive task of placing one-up artwork onto print sheets.


The Canadian company was previously using Adobe Creative Suite to prepare its projects, but found they needed an automated software that would help them produce the graphics faster for the same-sized materials, reducing time prep—and Esko fit the bill.

"We bought our own, new system for the server,” Dave LePoidevin, prepress technician, Category 5 Imaging, said. “Everything—Automation Engine, i-cut Layout, and our previously purchased i-cut Preflight was installed so our workstations could be connected remotely. We had WebEx training for i-cut Layout, a component of the solution, which was pretty simple to learn.

Automation Engine, as you can imagine, was a bit more sophisticated,” he continued. “We had three days of in-house training. We created everything from scratch. We built a few easy workflows and, as we got farther in, added more automated tasks for our specific needs. Our trainer helped us build workflows that had us just about up and running when training was complete. I made a few tweaks to the ones he built, and we were basically running a few days after that."

Automation Engine was installed in March. Setups are now automated, rather than manually done in Illustrator.

Category 5, based in Burlington, ON was established in 2006 and is a fully digital, full service large format printer. The company’s 30 employees operate a number of state-of-the-art Vutek digital presses and provide full service creative, prepress, fulfillment and shipping, all in house.