Howard Fenton

FEW INDUSTRY discussions are as contentious as the debate about how a large company or organization should handle its printing needs. It is often impacted by prevailing management trends that swing from owning equipment and managing the staff to using a facilities management (FM) service to hiring a company to outsource the printing. After working with many companies, we have seen each of these options work or fail in different circumstances.

IPG interviewed Howard Fenton, senior digital technologies consultant for NAPL, on a host of technological and workflow issues of concern to in-plant managers. IPG: In your experience of consulting with in-plant managers, what's their biggest prepress challenge today? Fenton: By far, the biggest problem they're facing is working with and training customers to prepare files correctly. Although this issue is one commercial printers face as well, it seems for be more challenging for in-plants. Somewhat surprisingly, the need for proper training in file preparation often is not recognized by large organizations. Ongoing collaboration between the customer and the print provider about proper file