Picture the publishing scenario: photos are sent from all over the world into a file logistic and management system, which routes them in real-time through an instant image optimization process sraight through to the editorial system. Meanwhile, advertising files are sent through a premier normalization process which also optimizes the CMYK composition to save ink and improve print quality; in fact complete pages are optimized in the same way, and the processes can be managed centrally yet monitored remotely and from mobile devices. 

The scenario doesn’t end quite there however: while the publication is printed the files are converted to low resolution and prepared for use online. Video and audio links, URLs, contact forms and many more features are added to ensure online readers have a fully interactive experience that delivers greater value for advertisers as well.

It all sounds very good, but is it realistic? In fact it is, and OneVision believes it is ideally placed to deliver such streamlined methods of production for clients right now, following the launch of several new software tools that will be shown for the first time in the UK at Publishing Expo in February 2009, having been first shown at drupa 2008.

OneVision is already well known through its stellar file correction and optimization software tool Asura, which enjoys widespread use in the UK and many other markets. It hopes that new names will become as recognisable, such as Amendo for automated image enhancement, Contenio for preflighting of online advertising, Mirado for publishing online, and Voyager, which provides automated online file submission and approval.

Already in the UK, The Daily Telegraph and sister paper The Sunday Telegraph are using Amendo image enhancing software, and were beta test sites for the tool. The driver for this happening was the move by the newspapers to full colour production. The in-house team of print and online specialists were faced with a difficult situation: full colour on every page would mean a vast upsurge in the volumes of colour images that the team would have to work on. A solution was required that would allow the team to meet that challenge quickly, with little training being required. Assistant production director Paul Shorey picks up the story:

“Producing colour images can take up to five times longer than black and white, so there was clearly going to be a huge hike in man-hours – calculated to be up to 250% more – required to produce a full colour paper. We simply can’t hire 250% more imaging specialists, so we looked at technology to provide the solution.”

The team was already familiar with OneVision, since the newspaper has used Asura Pro since 2005 to streamline and automate file control, correction and optimization processes in print production. The software is well regarded at The Telegraph, with Shorey stating that Asura Pro “gives us rock-solid PDFs that will go through 99.99% of the time”. So the newspaper looked at a demo of Amendo which soon led to a beta test. The software works by automatically adjusting elements such as brightness and contrasts, shadows, highlights and colours. OneVision says the software analyses colour values of elements such as vegetation, sky and skin and modifies the colours according to “human viewing patterns”; for example the human eye expects grass to be green, and clear skies to be blue, as well as expecting textures also.

Amendo also has a browser based front end that allows comprehensive monitoring, control and process automation, with access to logistical features such as image history, thumbnail before and after previews, and resizing and cropping of images.

Shorey says that Amendo worked “out-of-the-box with some minor amendments”. It now delivers processed CMYK files to a network folder. The file is already in the correct format and staff can take the image, open it in Photoshop if a cut-out is required, and proof it. The newspaper is exploring other ways of automating production processes using Amendo, which might include integration with third party editorial and publishing solutions, since the software is fully compatible for future changes in technology, according to OneVision.

It has been a success at The Daily Telegraph, where the transition to full colour has been made without requiring extra staff in image processing. Shorey concludes: “Without Amendo, we wouldn’t be where we are with the number of people that we have, or have achieved this level of automation.”

The point of Amendo and all of OneVision’s software products is to make receiving, tracking and co-ordinating production files through the workflow as simple and effortless as possible. There have been pain points in the switch from print pages to online, and in the transfer of high resolution files between locations. Hence, the new products seek to alleviate some of this pain.

Mirado for example is a simple and intuitive tool that provides an efficient transition between the offline and online publishing worlds, while maximising the impact of the printed page online. Publishers themselves or their print suppliers can use the software, which is built to handle the latest in web-based technology. Most importantly for publishers, Mirado can boost advertising potential, OneVision claims.

“Advertisers are demanding more ways to reach and connect with customers, and online publications provide innovative ways to communicate with readers,” says Barry Tweddell, OneVision UK’s national sales director. “This software features a variety of tools to allow readers to interact with advertisers in real time.”

Users can browse an entire print edition of a newspaper or magazine and zoom into areas of specific interest. Tweddell asks: “Why create an additional online version, when the print version can become an interactive tool? This software enables publishers to fully utilize their current asset – the printed page – and easily repurpose it online. The online version of the print file is created automatically and simultaneously, thereby saving internal labour costs or costs for sending original pages to third party conversion companies.”

Online advertising is the big growth area for publishers and when ads are delivered for online publications, OneVision’s Contenio is able to step in and ensure that staff need no longer spend time checking every ad. Online ads can be preflighted to defined specifications, and a report is produced outlining the conformity of an ad file along with any problems identified and modifications that must be made. Staff can then work with customers to get the files right, and with such guidance the customers themselves become better at creating ads that match the publisher’s requirements in the first place. In addition, Contenio recognises and warns if Malware is hidden in the online files.

Even before that stage, publishers, printers and advertisers have to send large files around the supply chain, and at times this is still done by email or even more traditional methods such as CD sent by courier. This inevitably builds delay into the workflow, as the receiving party waits, while the sending party cannot be sure that a file has arrived.

Voyager has been developoed by OneVision to prevent such delay. It gives staff and customers immediate, automatic responses about a file’s status, and can direct files to the next stage of an integrated workflow for further processing. The most attractive aspects for publishers are that Voyager can hook into ad booking/tracking/production systems where booking data such as unique reference number, ad size, and colour requirement, is maintained throughout the complete workflow; and it has ad approval facility – so once an advertiser clicks the ‘approved’ box , there should be no refunds required.

Voyager can be used either as a simple browser-based application or as a Rich Internet Application (RIA)-based tool, providing users with further functionality. It also benefits from OneVision Workspace, a back end that allows users to remotely monitor every job in the prepress production cycle.

Alongside its existing products for publishers and print suppliers, OneVision believes the new software tools provide a perfect blend of tradition and technology for 21st Century publishing requirements. These advance the company from being a prepress solutions provider to one that exists in the overall premedia sphere – and Publishing Expo will be the first place to see that in action.

Production professionals therefore stand at a crossroads. Their expertise is in print, but online looms large as both a threat and a potential opportunity for career advancement. The imperative is to prove production’s worth by helping to generate revenue, but too much of production’s time is still being consumed with chasing copy, fixing poor files, fighting fires.

Even the largest publishing companies in the land are grappling with the issue of having separate teams for print production and online production. Both Mal Skelton, production director of BBC Magazines, and Jasper Scott, manufacturing director of IPC Media, admitted as much in a session titled ‘Road Map to Production Success’.

“At the BBC we are successfully doing repro in house but the process does not end there,” said Skelton. “I’m very keen that we get closer to our online activites. At the moment we have a separate group of people looking after online. We have complementary skills; people skills, commercial skills, but the online team has a clear advantage in web skills and I want our people to have that too. We may sit separately right now but we won’t always, and the creative agencies are already working in this way.”
Both men concurred that the road map they had been tasked to describe was in fact non-existent, but offered some thoughts for progress, including this question of whether production teams must “change their spots” to add online production skills. Training will certainly be critical.

Skelton urged production professionals to take more initiative within their own businesses, saying: “I have found that success comes to those in the vanguard of change. We must be prepared to take risks but people don’t like to do that. Leading change gives you control over your destiny.”

That the way in which content is managed is subject to radical change became abundantly clear in listening to Karl Schneider, the editorial development director of Reed Business Information. He is engaged in implementing a content management system, and while currently content is created with print authoring tools, such as Adobe InCopy and InDesign, and goes through a workflow that prepares it for print first, then repurposes it online, in the future, he said, Reed will create the content in web native authoring tools, which will give editors huge flexibility in publishing online, through giving them “a bucket of bricks” to build with. Only after that will the print workflow kick in.

To make these systems really sing, publishers will require a higher degree of automation, and to facilitate this, metadata must play a more active role than it currently does, according to Sarah Saunders of image consultancy Electric Lane. Standard metadata fields for digital images have been extended of late by the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council), including more Exif information being captured by the camera itself. She added that a US initiative called PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) seems likely to gain traction in Europe also.

Three major publishers (McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson) have just announced adoption of the PLUS metadata standards (closely linked to IPTC) in the US, and henceforth all suppliers of imagery to them will be expected to embed the correct metadata within a year.

Apply this kind of initiative to the supply of advertising files, and the benefits for production could become very clear. Andy Psarianos of FE Burman estimates that less than 10% of ads supplied are fit for purpose, despite the development of Pass4press standards.

“We have inherited processes from 400 years of history,” said Psarianos. “The supply chain needs to be re-thought out and re-engineered. Publishers have to rise to the occasion and take the initiative to manage the supply chain.”

The time to do this is clearly right now. Production teams need to clear their schedules of manual copy chasing and fire-fighting, and find new ways to add value to the publishing business.

Following up the previous Hulk film, which had widely been considered a disappointment, Empire hoped to create excitement about the sequel. The result earned the publisher a PPA Magazine Production Award for Creative Production Initiative of the Year within a Publishing Company. 

The aim was to create what Bauer and the PPA believe to be “the world’s first fully 3D cover”, with the film’s eponymous hero bursting out of the magazine’s 250,000 copies. The 3D effect required a printed, formed plastic to be used, which would be attached to the cover before shipping the magazines, soldier-packed, to retailers.

Production manager Alex Jones had the responsibility of delivering the creative vision, and she says: “The first thing to do was to talk to the supplier, Vinalith, and find out if we could do it within the production schedule.”

As well as the question of substrates, the idea presented both timing and technical challenges from the beginning. “We did have to adapt our schedule for the cover artwork especially,” says Jones. “It was for the June issue, which had an on-sale date of 24th April 2008, so the cover artwork had to be finished two months prior to our usual press date.”

Testing was required before settling on which plastic could best achieve the desired result, and on which kind of tape and process would be most reliable for fixing it to the cover. “The choice of plastics was limited as there are only a few that you can actually thermoform,” Jones says. “In the end, the product we used was a 250 micron semi-rigid PVC.”

Fixing the plastic to the cover was done by hand, as this actually proved a more reliable method of ensuring it remained square, compared with mechanical means. A non-silicone-based UV varnish was also applied to the magazine cover, as this aided adhesion of the tape holding the PVC.

According to Jones, potential difficulties were also posed when it came to printing on the plastic itself, as “thermoformed PVCs aren’t usually printed, especially with 100% print coverage”. As a result, she says: “Vinalith used specialist UV inks and varnishes with an amazing amount of heat resistance in them so they don’t break away from the plastic, especially when they are stretched and moulded.”

The cover, of course, was just one part of the magazine, although production of the editorial and ad pages probably seemed like a breeze in comparison. “The rest of the issue was done as per our schedule,” says Jones. “Printing and binding was extremely tight, however, and Cooper Clegg was amazingly accommodating: they managed to get the magazines out quicker than usual, allowing the hand finishing to be done over four days.”

As well as receiving the PPA award, there was no shortage of recognition for Bauer’s achievements from the publishing and film industries. Amongst hundreds of emails cited in its award entry, Bauer highlighted feedback from Universal Pictures, producer of The Incredible Hulk, whose head of press commented that theirs was “simply the best magazine cover we’ve ever seen”.

The rising economic pressures from the credit crunch, along with consumers’ increasing use of e-commerce, have made it necessary for catalogues to prove that they can still provide value for money. To combat this, many companies are looking to remove any superfluous costs from a catalogue’s production process, and thankfully there are a number of ways to cut costs throughout the workflow without affecting quality.

One area where cost is predicted to rise in 2009 is paper. This could well seem a daunting prospect as paper costs already account for around half of the total production cost, says Simon Biltcliffe, manager director of the online print management company, Webmart.

He explains: “Paper is the biggest single element of a print job. The cost of paper is going to go up from here as capacity has been taken out of the market faster than the decline has occurred. Around 10% of paper capacity has been taken out of the market in this year alone.”

There are ways to cut down on paper costs without compromising the catalogue’s quality however. Danny Doogan, group environmental officer at specialist paper supplier Media Paper Management, says: “The obvious and most effective way of achieving a cost saving is by reducing gsm. It is usually feasible to step down a paper weight, for example 80gsm to 75gsm, or 60gsm to 57gsm, without compromising too much with opacity or bulk. This may also produce the added advantage of reducing postal costs.

“In general, whiter paper grades such as woodfree and medium weight coated are less opaque in lower weights and more expensive than alternative grades that aren’t quite as white – hence savings can be achieved by switching to a cheaper product and by reducing paper weight.”

It is also possible to reduce costs without changing the paper used by evaluating whether the size of the catalogue’s pages are as effective as possible. Doogan says: “Changing the size of the end product will have an impact on paper usage, for example by reducing the width of a publication from a super-sized A4 to a standard A4 width it could produce an instant saving of nearly 10%.”

Richard Owers, marketing director of print company Pureprint Group explains the impact that changing the size of the publication can have on press. He says: “Instead of going for an A4 format on a B1 press with eight pages to view, it is possible to use the maximum sheet size and by reducing the page size succeed in fitting 12 pages to view on a sheet, which saves money on paper, plates and printing without materially affecting the look of the job.”

Simply making sure you are on the right press can make a big difference with regards to cost, Biltcliffe says. He explains: “It doesn’t matter how good the printer is; if you are on the wrong press, it will cost you. If you see more than a few millimetres of paper coming out of the press ask the printer why, because the chances are you’re on the wrong press.
“You could save around 20% of cost without changing the catalogue simply by making sure you are on the right press. You should also look at the next print process up, such as sheetfed to web offset, as your requirements may have changed and a different process may now be more efficient.”

Changing the catalogue’s pagination and the amount you print can also reduce cost, as Biltcliffe explains: “Generally if the pagination is in multiples of eight it’s efficient, but if it’s multiples of four then you are paying for more than you are using. Also look at your database and distribution channels, as not printing more than you will need will of course save you money.”

For Niel Crozier, head of graphic services at marketing services provider CDMS, whose clients include Shop Direct Group, the parent company of retail brand Littlewoods, says paper, print and transportation are the biggest costs facing its catalogue production.

With the growing use of internet shopping, and e-catalogues on the rise, Crozier says his priority for customers is to produce a printed catalogue as quickly as possible, to the best quality, while reducing or holding costs. This is no mean feat, as CDMS produces the data and manages the print for nine 1,200-page catalogues in January and June every year, and nine 800-page catalogues in March and September, along with a variety of direct mail, leaflet and brochure work. For Shop Direct Group alone, Crozier estimates that CDMS handles 75,000 pages a year.

While Biltcliffe speaks about looking at the next print process to help save money, Crozier has found himself looking at going ‘down’ from gravure to heatset web offset print to improve speed to market and print prices, subject to run length.

Crozier explains: “There are companies now, such as Mohn Media, which have huge capacity with large pagination heatset web offset presses. They are almost matching the speed and quality of gravure. The gap between the two processes is beginning to be blurred. As the marketplace seems to be edging towards smaller volume and lower pagination catalogue runs, this may drive the catalogue market to consider the web offset presses, and as there is more capacity in this market, it may help drive print costs down.”
According to Crozier, CDMS tends to print in Europe, working with printers in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain as the print cost is cheaper and the quality threshold is higher than in the UK gravure market. However, there can be a big difference in the prices charged for the same printing process.

Biltcliffe explains: “The cost of a print job can vary greatly: prices can double from cheapest to most expensive. It’s not that printers are trying to rip people off but no-one knows the price of print. With a web offset job, there can be a 40% price difference from cheapest supplier to most expensive.

“To help ensure you are paying the right price, you should get at least three or four quotes. With Webmart, our customers type in their requirements and it instantly comes back with quotes from suppliers, and reveals the industry average for that work, so customers can be sure that they are paying a fair price.”

Working with suppliers at the start of planning can also help to guarantee that the catalogue is produced as effectively as possible, as Crozier explains: “We have a print production team that has a good relationship with suppliers. We hold an annual Gravure Quality Forum in Europe to establish best process and delivery for our clients, where the team picks up information about new processes the supplier may have which can be beneficial. With catalogues generally going out at the same time, catalogue printers tend to have high peak times of the year, so talking to printers and understanding their work requirements helps us to plan effectively.”

Suppliers often like to be involved with their customers at the start of the process, as Mark Harvey, sales manager for St Ives, explains: “Our catalogue manufacturing experience lends itself to being involved in the production process at the earliest possible stage. Meeting the customer and discussing opportunities to fine-tune the specification of a catalogue can lead to cost savings.”

While getting advice from your printer can certainly help, obtaining independent advice is also beneficial, as printers are likely only to recommend their own services, Biltcliffe says. He explains: “People don’t really want to know about print: its not sexy. Many print buyers do not understand the details of print, so we try to fill the knowledge gap by providing tips and advice about all various print processes on our website, saving you years of pain learning the hard way.”

Learning the tricks of the trade can help to cut costs, but Crozier points out that there is only so much you can do to reduce the cost of paper and print without reducing quality. He says: “At CDMS, we offer advice such as paper grades and optimum press fit to help reduce price, but for our customers, quality is paramount. We therefore ensure that our workflow process is as efficient as possible.

“Electronic approval for us is huge. One page may require five contract proofs, but that can be cut down to two using electronic approvals. It is currently used for smaller publications in our company, but this is increasing. We have also been looking into colour-calibrated screens for soft proofing so we can approve colour on screen from remote locations to increase the speed to market and reduce the use of proofs.”

Crozier adds that CDMS’s AMS asset management suite receives 80,000 images a year and this is expected to rise to over 100,000. This helps to make production run smoothly, by having all images ready for any format in one central location. CDMS has also created Mitto, an image uploader used by photographers, which preflights images to ensure that potential image problems are removed before the images enter the production workflow.

Printers are also aware of how streamlining the workflow can benefit customers so some are offering value-added services. For instance St Ives has a software package called DNA, which provides asset management, paper management, production tracking and quick quoting. St Ives also offers Agfa Delano’s online file upload and approval system to save time for the customer and reduce the need for hard copy proofs.

While streamlining the workflow, reducing the amount of paper used and ensuring that you print most effectively may not individually save you a fortune, when combined they may make significant savings; and when it comes to saving money throughout the catalogue production process, every little helps.

At one time the Financial Times was the local paper for the City of London. Today it has spread its pink tentacles across the world making the FT, as it is known everywhere, a truly global newspaper. Printing on its familiar pink newsprint takes place six days a week at 23 sites around the world, including a Middle East edition that launched in April. More sites are in the pipeline and nothing published today can match its worldwide breadth of penetration while still holding to a local relevance.

The total daily print run worldwide is a fairly modest 500,000 and several print sites have runs of little more than 6,000. Naturally this begs the question – how can such a venture be possible? The answer is that FT Group publishes its newspaper, but does not print it.

The decision to close its printing facility at Bromley by Bow and contract its production print to West Ferry was taken about 15 years ago and FT now no longer owns any printing facilities. This business model has proved very sound; FT has seen year on year growth, with considerable diversification into providing a broad range of business information and multimedia services.

FT may have dispensed with its printing facilities, but that doesn’t mean it has dispensed with a hands-on, day-to-day involvement in the production of each edition. The responsibility to see that the edition, wherever printed, reaches the target audience on the day of its publication falls to Richard Boulton, FT’s Global Operations Director. Hovering in the wings providing additional technical and IT support knowledge is Warren Dupuy.

Boulton is clear about his priorities: “Daily newspapers are more perishable than fresh food.” In other words miss the time slot and that edition is virtually worthless.

He goes on to explain how such a calamity is kept at bay. “All pages for all editions are created here at our offices in Southwark Bridge and converted to single-page PDFs using Eidos, an Italian-developed page make-up system. These are then transmitted to our printing sites around the world according to a schedule, which is drawn up and based on the time the edition goes to press.”

Like all newspaper production schedules there are some pinch points. Putting newspapers to bed on a global scale, as the FT does, suggests there could be a number of them. Boulton says: “It can be pretty stressful between 6 and 9pm, when we haven’t got a complete edition anywhere in the world. However, we do have redundancy and backup services built in.” Boulton makes it sounds simple enough; he is probably being more than a touch modest, as his background is perfect for the job.

In 1979 he was working on remote printing in Frankfurt, FT’s first overseas production site, receiving facsimile pages from a Crosfield Pagefax. At the publisher’s end a scanner would read a plate-ready page, compress it and then send it via satellite. At the production site, the Pagefax writer would decompress the file and a laser would image a new piece of film.

The arrival of a Crosfield Wydnet in 1989 spurred further rapid development introducing a PC-based management of the transmission process. This was still a complex system that required the use of satellites and ground-breaking file compression technology, with many sites needing the FT to install dedicated Pagefax systems.

Developments continued apace with the introduction of IntelliNet, initially a joint venture with HiT (an Italian software developer) and DuPont; and then in 1997 with the replacement of all the proprietary hardware by software that ran on standard PCs and exploited developments in cabled communications.

Around this time, DuPont decided to pull out of mainstream printing and Agfa acquired many of its graphic arts interests. Following the acquisition, Agfa rapidly built on the benefits of IntelliNet. Dupuy remembers developments at the time: “In the latter half of the 1990s, Adobe had developed its Portable Document Format (PDF) and even in those early days it was easy to recognise its potential.” The beauty of PDF wasn’t lost on Agfa, or a number of other newspaper developers. One of these was Autologic, which had developed an extremely sophisticated plate production and management system. Agfa acquired Autologic in 2000 and quickly brought together several other innovations into an applications framework called Arkitex.

Dupuy says: “We decided to go with Arkitex, which was then a well proven product along with a data transmission system that Agfa had under development, called Courier.” Arkitex had a major attraction, as Dupuy observes: “It offered us the opportunity to phase in Adobe’s PDF and, as Courier came on stream, to phase out IntelliNet in a constructive way.”

It should be recognised that these developments had been taking place against the backdrop of the FT’s continuous global expansion. Boulton is rather self-effacing when it comes to talking about the challenges of worldwide print production: “As a newspaper, the FT has a structure we try very hard to retain; generally it is two 16-page sections printed broadsheet collect; but in some regions, such as the Far East, printing collect is largely unknown. There are large variations in what is broadsheet. For example, in some regions the paper is shorter in height but wider. We have to strike a balance that reflects what is achievable in a particular region in which we wish to print.”

The production strategies built up around Agfa’s Arkitex have a rigour about them that leaves very little to chance. For example, the daily flatplans are settled early on and now that four-colour process printing is available at virtually all the sites, Arkitex makes it possible to forward any CYM PDFs as soon as they are available. The text plate can be left virtually until the last moment to be streamed in, so that if there are any changes, only one plate – the black – is affected.

There are many benefits Boulton sees in Agfa’s Arkitex; a major one is that it provides a high degree of standardisation. As a software programme, it can be tasked to manage the requirements of each particular site, taking into account the presses, folders and cut-offs available, and so on; but the really clever bit is the way Agfa has teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to produce a standard configuration on which Arkitex runs. HP has brought together a series of process controllers onto a modular stand-alone chassis rack where additional processor boards and storage can be slotted in. All 23 sites around the world have the same rack: the numbers installed at each site may vary depending on the measure of redundancy required, but the only variations are likely to be in the interface with the newspaper’s plate- or filmsetters.

Such an approach delivers a number of benefits; FT can strike a lease agreement for each site, as the cost of setting up and maintaining them is predictable. Local maintenance and support can be put in place as well and the built-in redundancy capacity ensures integrity of service. The introduction of a new printing facility can be carried out without interfering with or disrupting that newspaper production site’s established working regime; and the integration is complete within a predictable time frame, usually about two weeks.

This is an area where Dupuy is very active and he has considerable praise for the contribution Agfa makes: “They handle the preloading and configuration of each Arkitex system and Geert Verecken, Agfa’s systems specialist, is in many ways my right hand man. He oversees all the aspects of getting Arkitex up to speed at the new site and if there are any hardware problems, he sorts it out with Hewlett-Packard.”

Dupuy also explains that Verecken’s team is able to remotely monitor all the Arkitex systems from Belgium. This is a particular plus as it provides the opportunity to call out the local service agents to undertake remedial maintenance or servicing by switching operations to the built-in redundant capacity. A team could be on site before any of the operators are aware of a need for a service call.

The FT takes an active role in making sure the global network runs smoothly. Boulton says: “I handle troubleshooting using a site assessment schedule which includes visiting most sites around the world over a given period. There are issues that I have to deal with from time to time, but I have always been able to do this within a very positive framework. Issues vary and there is no particular pattern. To be honest, the printers we work with are fantastic and the visits are as much about team building and exchanging ideas as rectifying any problems.”

Because Arkitex runs on a common platform there is a considerable cross-fertilisation of ideas and information amongst the newspaper producers. “There is considerable kudos for the printers who produce the FT, mainly by association with our product; but it definitely brings in other business opportunities, both for them and for us,” says Boulton.