QuarterPack GmbH adopts Esko WebCenter as their backbone for packaging management and customer collaboration

The Customer

A proud provider of packaging prepress solutions

Established in 2013 in Vienna, QuarterPack GmbH is a well-structured packaging services provider with a unique approach to supporting brands to resolve their packaging prepress challenges. Whether a brand is seeking labels, flexible packaging, displays, folding cartons, signage or corrugated packaging, no job is too big, too small or too complex, for the QuarterPack team to handle.

Unlike other reprographics businesses, QuarterPack sees its role as a supply chain partner that sits in the center of the business, organizing everyone to be efficient, wherever they sit in the process from pack design to press.

Alexander Gruber, QuarterPack CEO, explains: “Our company name comes from a passion of mine as a child. I was a keen American College Football fan and the concept of being the Quarterback, at the center of the field with the main job of throwing the football and encouraging teammates to play well, seemed to resonate with what we’re trying to achieve as a business.

“We focus on a wide range of packaging applications to ensure the brand, whatever they need, can rely on us. It’s a great way to grow the business, we become an intrinsic player to them and focus on consistency, quality and service, archiving their information and data to make it as easy as possible for them day in, day out for any new project needs they have. Our service is irresistible. Whether they want a new pack design, branding support for an advert, or simply an update to a current range, our holistic approach to doing business serves them really well.”

Alexander Gruber continues: “The reality today is that a brand can need letterpress printing for a cup application that will be sourced in Poland, a lid that’s printed flexo in Germany, the wrapper required is offset printed in Austria and the box it will all be shipped in is flexo printed in Croatia. This means multiple suppliers, substrates, print processes and demands are placed on to the brand management team, who need to ensure their products look as consistent and similar as possible. This is where QuarterPack and Esko software steps in.”

The challenge

A highly complex software project needs a high quality and high-speed solution

The QuarterPack team has worked with Esko technology for many years, typically operating PDF based workflows. In 2018, the company began a project with software from different suppliers to deliver a customer-oriented project management solution, with the aim of streamlining and smoothing the complexity of operations in the company.

Alexander Gruber comments: “We needed a web-based software solution for archiving and improving our approval cycles with our customers. It needed to be simple and effective. We are incredibly people-focused as a business. This wasn’t about achieving big automation for us but trying to smooth out and speed up what we do. Our people know what counts and they are at the core of our business, offering knowhow and support to our customers. We felt we simply needed to boost that value with automation of the archiving and approval processes to add additional speed and accuracy to what we achieve.

“We reached out to alternative companies to Esko, searching for an open solution that could be customised to our business, but the software was too complex to handle and not fit for purpose for QuarterPack. We expected to have more usability, more customisation capability to our specific processes and importantly, ease of integration into the way we do business. It needed to adapt to us, not the other way around!

“The situation was disappointing. Most of the software was too expensive and too complex. It also had several gaps in its usability, so we stopped the whole development and turned to Esko to help us solve our problems instead, incorporating an update to our already reliable workflow solution.”

The solution

Esko saves the day with WebCenter

Alexander Gruber contacted the Esko team to share his experience and see what Esko could do to quickly resolve the problems he had been experiencing.

“At QuarterPack, it seems obvious, but we expect quality. We expect software that works and does what it says when you purchase it. That hadn’t been the case with the competitors, and we turned back to Esko, who we knew to be a reliable partner.

“Our account manager and all the people at Esko worked to help us out promptly. They supported us in quickly analyzing our issues, selecting WebCenter to resolve the problems and providing a team to test the implementation and ensure everything was running successfully and on time. This is the type of support we expected and Esko delivered.”

The benefits

A powerful secure packaging management solution that met the demands of a world-first server installation

Esko WebCenter is a packaging management solution designed for both brands and their suppliers. Suitable for a wide range of packaging applications, WebCenter is a powerful, secure, web-based packaging management and collaboration platform that allows for companies of all sizes to meet their business challenges head-on.

WebCenter manages all aspects of preproduction specification, approval and project lifecycle to remove the bottlenecks that are most commonly associated with the packaging design to production process.

In the case of QuarterPack, WebCenter not only needed to solve the problems of the now removed competitive solutions, easily integrating in to the QuarterPack business model and speeding up approval times and the archiving process, but it also had to be compatible with an Amazon S-3 Cloud Server; an extremely secure and highly reliable server solution that QuarterPack was the first company in the world to use.

“We wanted a cloud-backed solution and knew S-3 may present a challenge but the integration was smooth, we finally achieved the results we had been seeking all along and the support from Esko was superb. Our customers like our products and like what we do. This project should never have interfered with that, and we know now that Esko delivers. They provided the deployment services we wanted and the support we needed, and got us on track quickly.”