Cj Urban · Sales Specialist · Inland Group
Automation becomes interesting when you can measure what it actually gives back.
At PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas, Pat McGrew meets C.J. Urban, Vice President of Operations at Inland Group, at the CAI booth to discuss the company’s transition to ECO3 APOGEE — and how connecting prepress more closely with Pace MIS has changed everyday production.
Inland previously used Kodak Prinergy, but when the company added HP Indigo production and needed stronger integration between offset, toner and digital, C.J. began looking for another workflow environment.
APOGEE quickly became interesting.
One of the first benefits was color consistency. Inland can now move work between offset presses, HP Indigo, and Konica Minolta toner production while maintaining color closely enough that, as C.J. puts it, putting the sheets side by side makes it difficult to identify which technology produced each sheet.
But automation is where the economics become particularly interesting.
Preflight and imposition are handled within APOGEE, and jobs containing hundreds of pages that previously could require hours of preparation can now be imposed and prepared in around 20 minutes. That gives Inland production capacity back without simply adding more people.
The integration with Pace is equally important. ECO3 and CAI have been working specifically on connecting MIS and APOGEE so job information can move directly into prepress while production and cost information can flow back into the business system.
And Inland isn’t finished.
The next objective is increasingly hands-off customer approval. A customer uploads the file, APOGEE preflights and imposes it, creates the approval, and allows the customer to approve, reject or replace pages without requiring somebody inside Inland to manually manage every step.
That is ultimately where workflow automation creates its value.
Not automation because software is interesting — but because hours are freed up in production, capacity increases, and employees can concentrate on the jobs that actually require human knowledge.
Watch Pat McGrew’s conversation with C.J. Urban from Inland Group at the ECO3 / CAI booth at PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas.
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Sat September 26th
Doug Richards · Product Partner Line Manager...
A surprising amount of print production still starts with an email. At PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas, Pat McGrew meets Doug Richards from Fiery to see how Fiery Scribe can remove much of the manual work normally involved in turning those emails into production-ready jobs. The traditional process is familiar. An operator opens the email, reads the customer instructions, downloads the attached PDF, imports it into the Fiery, interprets the specifications, sets copies, media, color, imposition and finishing — and only then can the job move toward production. Fiery Scribe uses AI to shorten that process dramatically. A customer can simply send an email describing what they want — perhaps 25 black-and-white booklets — and attach the PDF. Scribe interprets the request, applies the relevant job properties and sends the file directly into Fiery Command WorkStation, ready for the operator to review. The human is still in control. If information is missing or something needs clarification, the operator can see both the original request and the settings Scribe has applied, make adjustments and communicate back with the customer. For busy print environments where dozens of jobs arrive through email every day, removing repetitive job-entry clicks can create a significant productivity gain. Doug describes one early user returning to an inbox containing 40 untouched job requests and using Scribe to quickly move those emails into the Fiery workflow instead of manually recreating each job. Fiery Scribe supports selected FS500 Pro/FS500 servers and later and is available as a licensed application within Command WorkStation. Email in. Job ticket created. Operator checks it. Print. Watch Pat McGrew's conversation with Doug Richards from Fiery at PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas.