A pre-media provider to many advertising agencies in the New England area, Williams & Partners implemented Xinet® to offer clients the type of robust, powerful Digital Asset Management that helped Williams & Partners to stay competitive and achieve profitability.

Frank Williams
Williams & Partners, Inc.

In 2000 Walter Williams, Neil Stockbridge and Frank Williams founded Williams & Partners Inc., bringing more than 75 years of printing experience to their company. With more than 15 employees, Williams & Partners provides prepress, printing and display graphics for some of Boston’s most prominent advertising agencies and corporations. The company’s investment in Xinet’s software helped the company grow and achieve profitability right from the start.

Xinet was one of the first investments the company made at its inception. Williams & Partners initially implemented
Xinet FullPress® because they needed an easy-to-use solution for FPOs and image swapping. FullPress’ powerful prepress server package streamlines production workflows with seamless file sharing, print spooling, output optimization and an image replacement engine that is the industry standard.

Because of its uniquely reliable image engine, FullPress is not prone to some of the problems seen in other image substitution systems. At other service bureaus where Frank Williams, partner, co-founder and plant manager at Williams & Partners had worked, he had witnessed clunky, problematic and costly workflows involving a Delta RIP and SPARC station making dot lay files. There would be problems maintaining the links between the low resolution and high resolution, which lead to printing the wrong files.

Williams says: “FullPress implementation was incredibly easy. We got a day of training and were up and running a day later, using it. We could do twice as much work with Xinet, because we don’t have to wait for the links between high-res and low-res images.”

When clients began requesting a Digital Asset Management solution, Williams & Partners added the Xinet WebNative®

Suite two years later which enabled them to reach customers outside the Boston area and give clients access 24/7 to an image bank. After a password-protected login, users can download, upload and repurpose their assets through a standard web browser from any location, whenever they want. Because the Xinet WebNative Suite is easy-to-use and customize, Williams & Partners is able to enhance the user experience by tailoring to customer requirements.

“A big reason we got WebNative is that agencies wanted us to become a full-time image bank for their large clients,” Williams said. “Since we were doing their prep work, WebNative lets us provide a secure area for clients to download their high- and low-res images.”

Adds Williams, “We didn’t look at any other DAM solution. The Xinet WebNative Suite was built to work with the system we had. It was easy to put in and once you use it, you see more and more benefits.”

Williams & Partners is working on building automated pre-media workflows using Triggers and Actions for approval and delivery.

“I’m very happy with Xinet; in the seven years we’ve been using Xinet’s software, we never had downtime related to Xinet,” Williams said. “Xinet helped us be profitable from the beginning, because we didn’t have to hire a lot of people. It also helps us compete with shops that are much larger then we are by giving us the same capabilities that they have.”