The Big Display Company Gains Full-Service Advantage from tilia Griffin

The Big Display Company was formed in 1998 with the aim of being an all-around service provider for any type of large-format print, specializing in quick turnarounds. With a wide variety of machinery in its production department in Slough, Berkshire, UK, the company presides over facilities for premium-quality UV, solvent, sublimation, aqueous and latex printing as well as in-house finishing.

Banners, flags and board printing for sign shops, marketing agencies and litho printers are the bread and butter of The Big Display Company, but the service offering is whatever a customer wants it to be within the realms of large-format. The company delivers according to needs, from straightforward print output to delivery, including “plain label” and bespoke branded deliveries. Its website even offers a facility for customers to build a customized large-format product catalogue of their own to offer clients. Whatever the requirement, The Big Display Company asks for nothing more than the artwork to be able to process the entire job to completion.

This level of service brings huge accountability, of course. To manage the responsibility successfully, the Big Display Company has to maintain tight control on all the processes
involved and their integration with one another. It was with this concern uppermost that Arturo Benjumeda, Artwork Department Manager at The Big Display Company, decided to research solutions that could automate time-consuming nesting processes in both printing and finishing to improve efficiency and maximize substrate usage.

“We had so many different printer brands and models, each with its own RIP and software quirks, there were a lot of issues especially in the interface with the cutter,” Benjumeda explains. “I wanted one single software solution for laying out and cutting that could work with all devices, so that there would be no more than one set of issues, regardless of which machine the products were printed on.”

With 28 team members at the Big Display Company, Benjumeda was clear from the outset that they needed a system that was easy to use: the solution would be no solution if only one or two technically seasoned individuals could work it. Keeping this objective in mind, the field of options narrowed rapidly with only Tilia Labs (Booth 550) making it to the final cut.

What Benjumeda found when he tested the tilia Griffin was a powerful cross-platform, automatic layout solution for large-format printers, designed to be feature-rich but intuitive, and ultra-responsive in operation. tilia Griffin is vendor neutral, and designed to provide the same efficiencies with virtually all printing and cutting machines. At the core of Griffin is Tilia Labs’ crown jewel, its Imposition AI engine, which provides the ability to search across millions of combinations in minutes to find the most cost-effective, tightly-nested layout, whether for a single job or a combination of multiple jobs.

30% time savings

Installed less than a month later, in November 2017, according to Benjumeda he was using the system effectively after just ten minutes. Within two days, the whole team was fully confident and getting the results they had hoped for.

“Griffin pretty much does exactly what we expected of it,” Benjumeda says. “It gives us quick and smart layouts, and simplifies the cutting machine files from any print device.”

When asked about the savings through tilia Griffin, Benjumeda estimates to have reduced production time by about 30 percent. “That’s mainly due to savings on jobs where the cut-out is not a simple rectangular shape,” he explains. “Griffin has saved us a massive amount of time in these situations because we used to manually impose them to save as much material as we could. And, of course, saving production time means saving money. That value is difficult to calculate exactly, but it has been significant.”

The Big Display Company is not resting on its laurels. With customers demanding ever shorter turnarounds on even the most complicated jobs, the time advantage has already been soaked up by new production demand and deadlines. Benjumeda is currently looking forward to the new, improved banner hems and eyelets feature projected for the next Griffin update. There is also reassurance for him and his team in knowing that, whatever their next equipment investment, tilia Griffin will continue to integrate seamlessly, doing what it was purpose-designed to do: automating to maximize their time, costs and resources.