The Luftfartsverket, the Swedish National Civil Aviation Authority, based in Norrköping, manages its own commercial, in-house Print Shop, which is responsible for all of the printed material connected to this governmental agency. Installing four different digital printers adjacent to the traditional offset machines, Luftfartsverket processes all of the material that is submitted to the department. However, after implementing iWay Prime into their system, the way in which the different Print Jobs are being handled has dramatically changed and efficiency in the Print Shop has dramatically improved. At the same time, with iWay Prime acting as the workflow and management-backbone to the Luftfartsverket in-house Print system, Luftfartsverket can now has a fully digital, end-to-end system that provides its print customers with the means for both submitting and for following up orders. iWay Prime has provided the Luftfartsverket Print Shop with a fully digital workflow and all four Xerox printers (the 6180 and the 65 are black and white printers while the 2060 and DC 12 are full color printers) are linked to a central iWay Prime server. Three Luftfartsverket Print Shop employees are employed on the receiving side and handle all of the Print Jobs that are submitted to the Print Shop via iWay Prime. Stefan Karlson, responsible for the Luftfartsverket Print Shop praises the software as “an excellent way in which to send files that must be printed”. “It is very easy to learn how to work with iWay Prime and our customers are very pleased with it. Down here at the Print Shop, we are extremely satisfied with iWay Prime. In fact, some of the problems that we had been experiencing with our old way of handling the orders, like text overflow from Microsoft Word files, have totally disappeared.” The Luftfartsverket Print Shop handles a wide variety of Print Jobs. “For example, we print out and distribute the rules for Swedish civil aviation. This has to be carried out twice a week. Anyone accredited with a flying certificate, including the airlines, receives one of the 2500 copies each time. And this order must be completed on time. With iWay Prime, we’ve got the perfect tool to get these Jobs done”, stresses Karlson. In addition to the civil aviation rules, an abundance of other Print Jobs are processed by the Print House, including business cards, letterheads, manuals and booklets. “Our customers and I especially like the business card feature”, continues Karlson. “We are using the templates feature and iForm for this.” All business cards can therefore appear with the Corporate Identity of the company. The only manual work required by the user is the input of the variable data such as name, telephone extension and e-Mail-address. Apart from the easy administration, which is another feature Stefan Karlson values, Stefan is convinced that the implementation of iWay Prime at Luftfartsverket has had a big impact in terms of cost-efficiency: “With iWay Prime, we have time savings of about 25 per cent per order. And all customers know beforehand how much their Print Order will cost.” Every Luftfartsverket Print Shop customer – and there are at least 90 customers working with iWay Prime – are provided with individual user privileges, which are regulated in advance. When taking on a new customer, Stefan Karlson talks to the candidate about the requirements and after agreement of the two parties, he then carries out the installation of the iWay Print Driver, at the customer site. “It doesn’t take long to do this and afterwards, each customer receives a training of about one hour, which is enough to cover all of the angles from the customer’s side”, continues Karlson. Additionally, he hands his customers a manual and a price list as well as a printing test. “Although we use the pricing feature that iWay Prime provides, our customers value a printed price list”, he explains. “And all of our by now 90 iWay Prime users are convinced that by submitting their orders via the system, they are saving themselves a lot of hassle.”

About Luftfartsverket

Founded in 1947, Luftfartsverket is the Swedish National Civil Aviation Authority, responsible for overseeing 19 airports in Sweden as well as Swedish air navigation services, safety issues and environmental issues. The main tasks of the Luftfartsverket are the promotion and development of civil aviation, the operation and improvement of Swedish state-owned civil aviation airports, the supervision of civil aviation safety, the responsibility for the protection of the environment against pollution from civil aviation, the responsibility for peacetime air navigation services for both civil and military aviation and, last but not least, the administration of civil defense and emergency planning as it pertains to the civil aviation sector. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the Luftfartsverket to ensure a macro-economically efficient and sustainable air transport supply for individuals and the business community throughout the country as well as to provide and ensure the economically efficient operation and development of Swedish state-owned air navigation services, airports and related activities. Luftfartsverket has over 3500 full-time employees and had generated 4719 million Swedish Kronor in 1999 alone.

All rules, business cards, manuals and booklets – along with all of the other printed material that the Agency needed – were generated through different programs, including such text editors as Microsoft Word. The customers then had to write PostScript files and send the files through the network to the Print Shop. Both the generation of the PostScript files and the transfer of the data through the network took up a great deal of time. In addition, the network was burdened with the extra load of the large postscript-files. Regular orders, such as the twice-weekly production of 2,500 copies of the aviation rules, took up a large amount of Print Shop capacity. In addition, this process was extremely fallible as many of the documents generated with Microsoft Word had overflows of text and therefore needed to be sent back to the customer for correction.

After iWay was implemented at the Print Shop, all documents to be printed were received as PDF files. The customers, themselves, using the iWay software available on the customer-side, converted their files to PDF files through the use of the iWay Print Driver, thereby eliminating all of the problems encountered in the past. In addition, such Jobs as business cards are generated through the use of the iWay iForm-feature, which supplies the customers with easy-to-use templates.