Hiflex expands North American operations

Hiflex have recently expanded its North American Operations by appointing Gary E. Marron as president of Hiflex Corp. Gary was previously a sales executive for Agfa Corp, where he had worked for 16 years.

Gary stated: ‘Hiflex Corporation has carved a groove in the granite surface of the printing industry as the first Print Management Information Systems (PMIS) provider that makes the promise of JDF (Job Definition Format) automation a reality. Hiflex is the only vendor who can demonstrate the reality of an end-to-end JDF workflow with virtually every major vendors’ systems and whose products are not only available, but are installed in live production environments, today.’

He continued: ‘Hiflex have established themselves as the market leader in this arena and their number one objective for the North American business operations is to continue to educate the industry on the real deliverables of JDF-based automation that Hiflex Systems offer and make this concept a reality in the region.’

‘I was first introduced to Hiflex when they were at the Agfa booth during Graph Expo 2004 in Chicago and began to work with them as a partner selling our ApogeeX workflow. In early 2005 we installed Hiflex in our Ridgefield Park, NJ Technology Learning Center where we began giving joint demonstrations with Hiflex. In doing so, we demonstrated the fullest and most advanced connectivity available on the market today’, Gary explained.

He closes in stating that he joined Hiflex after many productive years with Agfa because "Hiflex truly has the systems that will help our North American customers to return to profitability levels that this great industry once enjoyed and I am very enthusiastic about entering a revolutionary new era in this industry that will reshape how we do business and create a new paradigm for our operations."

To date, Hiflex has a number of North American customers that are already making use of JDF connectivity to prepress and press (sheet fed and web printing) or have implemented the Hiflex eBusiness solutions to automate the procurement of their customers’ print products. Moreover, Hiflex MIS is installed at several partners’ North American demonstration and R&D facilities including Agfa, Kodak, Komori, MAN Roland, Mitsubishi, Muller Martini and Screen.

About Gary E. Marron

Gary has worked in the printing and publishing industry since 1985 where he started as director of field services and technical sales for Alan Graphic Systems, Inc., Peekskill, NY a producer of high quality optics and lenses used in devices such as the ‘Opticopy’ and Dow Jones Imaging Systems. During his tenure at Alan, Gary implemented process control in manufacturing, ran a highly profitable field service organization and visited customers in 45 US states and 15 countries in Europe, South America, Canada and the Caribbean.

Gary joined Agfa Corporation in November of 1989 as a technical sales representative and has held various field sales roles with Agfa as an account executive and enterprise consultant. In this role Gary assisted Agfa's customers with their businesses, focusing on workflow throughput productivity, file preparation and automation. Gary also specializes in JDF technology and process/task automation.

He speaks regularly in open forums on ‘Productivity in the Printing and Publishing Industries’ and on the ‘Opportunity to Return to Profit in Our Industry’ where Gary believes huge opportunities exist to gain far higher productivity and margins than are currently enjoyed in our industry.

Gary is currently vice chair of the AGC Franklin Committee, a major New York, New Jersey and Connecticut annual event held at Chelsea Piers in NYC.

Gary is past employment co-chair and current executive board member and treasurer of partnership in print production, (also known as ‘P3’) a leading NYC, non-profit, industry association, 600 members strong, who come from publishing, advertising agency and corporate brands. P3’s members represent a variety of people who generally work in print and pre-media production and are aligned with print procurement and the ‘media-buy’ process.