Making short run work for the long term. (Southwestern Bell's use of Electronics for Imaging and Canon equipment for producing low-cost color documents) (Special Color Publishing Supplement)

Juan Ramirez will tell you there's a very simple reason why Dallas-based Southwestern Bell made the decision to lease EFI Fiery print servers and Canon CLC 500 color copiers in 1991: cost.

"The main reason we went to the system is that it's less expensive [than other solutions we looked at]," said Ramirez, a graphics specialist in the integrated-systems marketing group responsible for producing sales proposals for Southwestern Bell's account representatives. "We write and design sales proposals, and we customize the proposals for our clients, including putting their logos on the covers. In the old days, we were sending all of our covers to offset printers and spending about $800 for 25 copies of a four-color cover."

That worked out to be about $32 per 15-page proposal, not including the cost of printing and copying the rest of the pages, which, because of costs, were limited to black-and-white.

Ramirez and his colleagues set out to look for ways to cut the cost per proposal while at the same time adding more color to their layouts, which are created with QuarkXPress, Aldus FreeHand, and Adobe Photoshop. After shopping around at local service bureaus and getting bids for printing services, Ramirez said, the company decided to lease Fiery/CLC systems for its documentation centers in Dallas, St. Louis, and Houston. These sites are responsible for producing sales proposals for the company's account representatives selling southwestern Bell's telephone service to clients in five ...