Prepress Manager/Operator

Prepress Manager/Operator– Folding Carton Packaging

We are seeking an experienced Prepress Manager/Operator to lead our prepress operation within a fast-paced folding carton manufacturing environment in our East Coast facility. This position requires a strong combination of technical prepress expertise, color management experience, leadership, automation, and continuous process improvement. You will split your time between departmental leadership and hands-on production, directly building and prepping jobs for print.

The ideal candidate has more than 5 years of prepress experience, preferably within folding carton or packaging manufacturing, and understands the demands of working with major brands where color consistency, quality, accuracy, and repeatability are critical. The candidate should also be comfortable working with the Prepress Management team across the platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the daytoday prepress department, including workflow, scheduling, priorities, quality, and employee development.
• Able to handle a hybrid role of building jobs as an operator as well as managing the needs of the department.
• Manage artwork from customer file receipt through final plateready production.
• Work closely with customers, brand owners, customer service, CAD department, graphics, pressroom, ink suppliers, and other manufacturing departments to resolve technical and colorrelated issues.
• Maintain and improve processes for brand and spotcolor management, ensuring customer color expectations are clearly defined and consistently achieved.
• Manage color standards, approved color targets, spectral data, and color libraries used throughout the production process.
• Support color communication using Pantone/PantoneLIVE, CXF spectral data, LAB values, ICC profiles, and industry color standards.
• Partner with press and ink departments to troubleshoot color variation and improve repeatability from prepress through production.
• Develop, document, and maintain prepress standards, SOPs, quality checks, and best practices.
• Identify opportunities to eliminate manual steps, reduce errors, shorten lead times, and improve overall workflow efficiency.
• Lead automation initiatives within the prepress workflow, including automated file processing, preflight, trapping, color handling, imposition, approvals, and job routing.
• Establish measurable KPIs for prepress performance, including turnaround time, errors/rework, automation rates, quality, and ontime completion.
• Participate in rootcause analysis and corrective actions for internal and customer quality issues.
• Work with IT, production, and equipment/software vendors on system upgrades, integrations, troubleshooting, and workflow improvements.
• Train and develop prepress employees while building a culture focused on quality, accountability, standardization, and continuous improvement.

Safety Policies and Practices:

• Follow all Plant rules, Processes, and Hygiene procedures, related to production of Safe Quality Foods.
• All employees are required to wear safety glasses and steel toe shoes while in the manufacturing area. Sound protection is required in designated areas.
• Keep work area clean and organized: remove scrap, sweep, and maintain clear walkways in accordance with housekeeping standards.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional prepress experience, with folding carton, packaging, or commercial printing experience strongly preferred.
• Ability to quickly prioritize, delegate, and shift functions, as needed
• Previous experience leading or supervising a prepress, graphics, or productionart department.
• Strong understanding of offset printing and folding carton production.
• Advanced understanding of process and spotcolor reproduction.
• Experience working with brand color standards and customerspecific color requirements.
• Strong knowledge of color measurement and colormanagement principles, including LAB, Delta E, spectral data, CXF, Pantone standards, ICC profiles, and press color tolerances.
• Strong knowledge of Adobe Creative Cloud, particularly Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat.
• Understanding of trapping, overprints, separations, screening, imposition, proofing, plating, and print production requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to analyze existing workflows and implement meaningful process improvements.
• Strong troubleshooting, organizational, communication, and leadership skills.
• Ability to work across departments and communicate technical issues clearly to both technical and nontechnical employees and customers.

Preferred Experience

Experience with any of the following is considered a strong plus:

• Kodak Prinergy
• Kodak Pandora
• Prinergy Workflow automation
• Automated preflight and fileprocessing workflows
• ColorFlow or similar colormanagement systems
• PantoneLIVE
• CXF/X4 spectral color workflows
• Techkon or other spectrophotometer/colormeasurement systems
• Automated imposition and stepandrepeat workflows
• PDF workflow automation
• JDF/JMF or MIS/ERP workflow integration
• G7 methodology and process control
• Experience developing workflows that connect customer intake, prepress, proofing, plating, press, and quality systems

Process Improvement & Automation Focus

A major responsibility of this position is to evaluate how work currently moves through prepress and identify opportunities to make the operation faster, more standardized, more automated, and less dependent on manual intervention.

The Prepress Manager will be expected to challenge existing processes, identify bottlenecks and repetitive tasks, develop standardized workflows, and use available technology to reduce touches and prevent errors before they reach production.

Candidates with experience developing Prinergy-based automated workflows, rules-based processing, automated preflight, color mapping, imposition automation, or integrations between prepress and business systems are especially encouraged to apply.

This is currently a small team locally that is expecting to grow and expand. Support across the platform will be available from other locations with additional teams.

What Success Looks Like

The successful Prepress Manager will build a department where customer files move through production predictably, color expectations are clearly communicated and controlled, repetitive work is automated whenever practical, problems are caught before reaching press, and processes are documented and consistently followed.

This position is ideal for someone who understands traditional prepress at a high technical level but is also interested in modernizing the department through automation, data, standardization, and continuous improvement.

Schedule:

• Fulltime position: Fully Onsite
• 24/7 production
• Overtime and weekends based on production needs.

Salary: $110k-120k Annually

Benefits:

• Medical, Dental, Vision
• PTO/Vacation
• Paid Sick Leave
• 401k
• HSA
• Company Paid Life Insurance
• 10 Paid Holidays

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER /AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PLAN

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, or creed, religion, sex, marital status, familial status, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran’s status, status with regard to public assistance, or any other class protected by Federal, State, local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment.

About CENTURY BOX GOOBY INDUSTRIES CORP

Our Company: Century Box is a leader in the folding carton manufacturing space. Our packaging company has serviced customers across the U.S. in providing a broad range of packaging services that improve our client’s speed-to-market, industry presence and profitability margins. The foundation of our success are the people who have come to work at Century Box and our amazing long-term client partnerships. We promote a workplace of continuous learning, teamwork, and mutual respect.