Domestic quality at off-shore prices

With today’s tight budgets, off-shore production is a fact of life. Pronk&Associates is pleased to offer the top-quality, hassle-free production work expected from our North American offices—at off-shore prices.

When Pronk&Associates opened an office in Pune, India, in 2006, we created a seamless extension of our Toronto studio. Our India staff, an exceptional team of graphics professionals, consistently deliver the same high-quality product that we provide in Toronto and Chicago.

Through superior training, stringent quality assurance, and strong communication between our North American and Pune teams, we have created an off-shore workflow that delivers India pricing with high quality work and no headaches.

The Pronk India difference

Here’s how we can offer a North American experience and product at off-shore prices:

Project management in Toronto

We deal with the hassles of international communication so you don’t have to. For production work in India, all client communication is handled by your assigned production coordinator in Toronto. The production coordinator ensures your guidelines and schedules are followed, conducts weekly update meetings, and troubleshoots any issues that may arise. Read our Pronk Fan Mail for testimonials about our fabulous production coordinators.

Our workflow

Each project has a dedicated project management team. The team consists of the production manager, who oversees all composition work done in Toronto, Chicago, and Pune; a production coordinator based in Toronto; a project team leader in the Toronto office, who works directly with a project leader in Pune; and the Pune office supervisor.

• At the beginning of each project, the production coordinator works with you to ensure all necessary guidelines, files, and start-up information have been received.
• A Toronto production team leader is assigned to the project to review the files; set up the file structure; and prepare the files, design templates, and style guidelines for Pune—all to your specifications.
• In the Pune office, a project team leader is assigned and begins working directly with the Toronto team leader.
• As the project moves forward, the Toronto team leader continually monitors all pages coming from Pune and provides supervision and feedback to ensure your needs are being met. With this close communication between Pune and Toronto and the integrated workflow, you are assured of accuracy matching Pronk’s domestic quality.

Exceptional quality assurance processes

The Pune office has two Toronto-trained quality assurance staff, who follow the same stringent processes that we use in our Toronto office. This consistency helps to maximize both efficiency and quality, so that our Pune team works to the same standards as our domestic quality assurance team. All project updates, examples, and global changes are posted and updated in real-time via Pronk’s Quality Assurance intranet site. This practice facilitates seamless communication of project updates and status to our India quality assurance team.

Training, training, training

Ongoing training is one of the core values of Pronk&Associates. Training never stops and even the most experienced staff in all locations continue to hone their skills and learn new techniques and new applications.

Our training program

We train our Pune staff through a rigorous ongoing education program that provides many different opportunities for skills development to occur. There are two key ways in which we train Pune staff:

1. We bring Pune staff to Toronto for a three-month term during which they work and train in the Toronto office. This work term achieves the following goals:
   • Expose Pune staff to the pace and energy of the Toronto work environment
   • Build a close relationship and connection with Toronto staff
   • Foster a clear understanding of Pronk values including a sense of pride in our work
   • Familiarize Pune staff with North American culture
2. We send key Toronto staff to Pune to provide extended training.
   Here are some examples:
   • Stanley Tran, production manager, and Andrew Garcia, senior production artist, traveled to Pune when the office was opened, to provide start-up training. Stanley has been back several times to provide further training.
   • Francis Cowan, QA supervisor, went to Pune to train the Pune QA staff. Francis continues to provide feedback and training from Toronto.
   • Jessie Lin, our most senior and experienced Toronto production team leader, recently completed a six-month stint in the Pune offices, providing valuable, ongoing on-site training.

Stanley, Jessie, and Francis spend time in Pune to provide in-depth training.

A better off-shore philosophy

Our Indian business model allows us to offer quality off-shore work through superior training and staff retention.

The guiding principles we used to build our India office enable us to hire, train, and retain a team in India that turns out production work to North American standards.

• Control the hiring and hire the best. We control the hiring, workplace culture, and training practices of our Indian team to guarantee a stable, reliable, well-trained staff. To do this, we went to India to personally interview and choose each member of our team.
• Know the team to ensure we use everyone to their best advantage. We want to truly understand the exact skill set of each individual who works for us. We want to be intimately involved in all aspects of each individual’s training so that we can create efficient, stable, talented project teams.
• Retain employees so the skill of the team grows. Our top priority from day one was to achieve extremely high employee retention levels, in sharp contrast to Indian vendors that use the multi-shift, high-volume model. We have accomplished this goal through on-going training, implementing a single shift, and fostering a close link to our Toronto office. As a result, we have been very successful at building a stable, loyal group with a high level of career satisfaction and pride in the work they produce.
• Leverage Pronk-developed technologies and processes. In Toronto, we use a great number of proprietary techniques, technologies, and scripts to streamline and automate our production processes. We also have an enormous amount of client-specific experience and product knowledge. By establishing our own Indian group, we have achieved the goal of seamless composition so that you get the highest quality at the prices you need.

North American equipment

We purchase our workstations, servers, tape backup systems, and software in Toronto. This equipment is configured and tested in Toronto and then crated and shipped to India. The equipment is accessed remotely from Toronto for upgrades and routine maintenance.

All workstations are equipped with a PowerMac G5 and a 23-inch Apple monitor.

We have the following equipment in our Indian office:

• HP server with two terabytes RAID 6 central storage
• LTO-2 tape backup library
• PowerMac G5 with 4 GB RAM
• 23-inch Apple Cinema display
• Gigabit Ethernet network
• 4Mbps of dedicated Internet connection

We’d love to discuss how together we can ensure the success of your off-shore production and full service projects.