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Sttark uses HydraFix® to boost color accuracy and productivity!




Michael Oostdyk, Sttark’s Chief Technology Officer, uses Alwan’s Hydra Technology in the company’s daily labels & cartons production. 


“On behalf of Sttark, I would like to share our highly successful experience with Alwan HydraFix®.

As the fastest, highest quality manufacturer of labels and cartons in the Southeastern US, Sttark is not hesitant to tell our technology suppliers that we want it all, because we are insisting on our customers’ behalf. (As you can see from our materials and our website, we are Customer Obsessed.) As a result, our requirements for a color management solution are pretty intense.
At Sttark, we turn high-end color work around in just a few hours, and we need the color to be beautiful, and accurate, every single time. Of course, running 100 different, same-day jobs; one right after another; is a bit of a challenge to quality management. Then again, there are a dozen or more color management solutions out there. We figured we’d be able to find the ones that would allow us to achieve, and maintain, superior color at all times.

What we found, however, was disappointment. We were disappointed by the need to repeat steps, or to repeat the whole process, to achieve the color accuracy we knew our devices were capable of. In the end, we were spending between 45 and 90 minutes every time we sought color validation for a new job.
Using HydraFix®, it’s very rare that we have to run the check more than once. And now we’ve got the whole thing down to a 4-5 minute process because of Alwan and the related API integration the company built for us.

As a result, we are using an integrated system wherein every job contains the critical data the system needs to associate it with the correct color, target, and track we’re trying to match. Being able to access this much functionality via a programmatic interface that eliminates the operator’s overhead makes the entire operation more efficient than ever before.

I think you may be even more impressed when I tell you that unlike most other shops, we validate color before every single job. So, for example; if we get 100 same day jobs in by 10 am, we are promising them by end of day… and every one of those jobs will have been optimized for color and accuracy with calibration and a full press check prior to the run.
Asking for the fastest technology – in any process – has usually translated to quality sacrifice. With Alwan HydraFix®, the opposite has actually occurred. The process is not only faster; the quality is orders of magnitude better.

In closing, I’d like to reiterate how satisfied we are with HydraFix®It has become critical to Sttark’s success in the marketplace. Overall, we are quite happy and proud to be an Alwan customer, and look forward to seeing the company continue to build what we believe is the most important core technology for color management.
Discover & test HydraFix®:
alwancolor.com/software/hydrafix

Build Hydra profiles directly online:
colorcloud.alwancolor.com

Learn more about Sttark:
www.sttark.com