When Garry Muratore left his position as marketing manager of Agfa Oceania, the shock waves reverberated across the industry. The resignation of such a well-respected pre-press specialist was felt in many of Australia’s graphic arts firms. Few can boast Muratore’s broad career background, industry profile and technical authority.
Muratore dragged himself up by his bootstraps from a humble photo engraver/camera operator apprenticeship in the mid-1970s to become arguably one of our graphic industry’s most authoritative voices. He was at the bleeding edge of technology and business as the industry progressed from the early days of analogue to the sophisticated pre-press of today.
Muratore has always been an accessible contact point for anyone seeking directions and comment on industry issues and technical developments. So many were dismayed when it seemed as if this era had come to a premature end.
On leaving Agfa, Muratore announced he would spend his time as a sometime consultant. But now he’s back at the forefront of the local pre-press sector. He recently joined German colour management specialist GMG. The appointment came about through a chance meeting in a Chicago hotel corridor with his one-time Agfa colleague Paul Willems.
Willems is currently managing director of GMG, based in Tuebingen, Belgium. The company specialises in high-end colour management and proofing solutions.
Owners Joerg Weihing and Robert Weihing, having stepped back from day-to-day management, charged Willems to take the helm of GMG’s recent rapid-paced international expansion. The company has launched version 4.6 of its ColorServer and Ink Optimiser, the colour conversion technology that eliminates errors occurring during conventional colour conversions.
During his meeting with Muratore, Willems identified Oceania as the only world market where GMG did not operate with the use of a direct factory representative. Six days later, the deal was done.
Colour mandate
Muratore’s mandate is defined as supporting the two regional distributors, Sydney-based Kayell and New Zealand’s Frontline Technologies, and acting as liaison between their customers and Tuebingen.
“The customer expects to have direct contact with the factory and this will now be possible in the region,” says Muratore. He stresses this is particularly the case with the larger corporate print groups in both countries.
It is a roving commission. Muratore has joined the burgeoning brigade of well-dressed from-home operatives. He wryly notes he is business-suited to be ready for every short-notice video conference.
One of Muratore’s early priorities is ongoing sales and marketing training, which had only been sporadic undertakings by infrequent visits by GMG’s vice-president of sales, Christian Schwarze. The aim is to increase the sales skills of distributor technicians who call on customers.
“I’ve got to get them to learn to visit a customer, understand if there’s a need there and offer a solution. Technicians tend to want to solve the problem and move on to the next job; we need to get them to see the bigger picture.”
It’s still early days of Muratore’s foray into the GMG marketing effort. But he has been at the forefront of pre-press developments in this area long enough to appreciate that the industry in Australasia is “surprisingly” colour sophisticated. Most printers, regardless of size, he says, have some sort of colour management system in place, especially those whose shops are equipped for CTP.
Safety nets
“When you are involved with CTP, you have to have [colour management] because when you go from analogue to digital, you take away some of the safety nets, such as the analogue proof. For digital proofing, you must have quite sophisticated colour management to make it work,” he adds.
However, he goes on to point out that this kind of sophistication is not yet apparent in some emerging business areas, such as the new wave of digital printing and the wide-format arena.
In colour management terms, Muratore described these areas as “just frontier” since many of their proponents come from outside conventional print environments. Moreover, their colour matching priorities are disproportionately critical given that more often than not they are asked to print on a wide variety of substrates.
Muratore says this is an area where Australia lags behind Europe, where much printing is done to ISO colour standards to ensure uniformity of output by diverse suppliers. He describes his ultimate role in Australia and New Zealand as prioritising the need to make the region’s digital print community more aware of the need for greater process control.
“It’s about knowing everything about your process, being able to record it and being able to reproduce it,” he says.
ISO future
Muratore sees the future for process management as “huge”. He says that due to the onrush of globalisation, the world’s major brands will determine how jobs are to be printed.
“Australian printers are going to have to be ISO-certified with process control in place and have staff experience in working with their sales people to explain this to their customers”, he says.
Muratore cites the RGB-based workflow installed at the Stockholm headquarters of global furniture chain Ikea, where proofing is done using GMG’s ColorProof. This has led to significant time savings and greater overall quality consistency. As a result, all aspiring Ikea catalogue print suppliers throughout the world now must have this process control in place before they can be considered. Moreover, their ink supplies need to be standardised since, as Muratore pointed out that a change in ink (or paper) supplier may vary the end result, hence the importance of this being included within the specification.
He may be relatively new to the GMG camp, but even a short conversation with Muratore confirms his totally authoritative overview of the sector. It also proves that the local Australian printing industry still has a great deal of ground to make up in process control and ISO certified standards of production to draw level to its overseas counterparts.
Fortunately, it has Garry Muratore to guide it to a process-controlled future.
Comment below to have your say on this story.
If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.
Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter