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Keeping it personal
With its HP Indigo press 5000, KallKwik can anticipate a 50:50 divide between digital and conventional production
With digital printing, as the price per unit continues to fall, one can make favourable comparisons with other printing processes. Here we look at commercial digital in action and explore why it is becoming popular in the mass personalisation market by Tracey Rushton-Thorpe
Let’s start with HP’s Indigo 5000, a favourite with KallKwik Edinburgh and used to service print-on-demand needs and provide an extended range of marketing collateral including personalised and variable data print to the city’s businesses.
Within a week of the press becoming operational, KallKwik won a major contract to produce a quarterly, 16-page, full colour, financial document with high levels of personalisation. Prior to installing the machine, samples were printed at the HP Indigo demo suite in Bracknell which proved the quality achievable.
KallKwik director, Mark McCluskey, said: “The transition to new premises and new equipment was very smooth and we have been really impressed by the HP support during and after installation. The HP Indigo press 5000 will help differentiate our business and we are now able to meet, and often exceed, the speed and quality expectations of our customers producing products that offer better value for money.”
With its HP Indigo press 5000, KallKwik can now anticipate a 50:50 divide between its digital and conventional printing production and has already migrated 35 per cent of conventional jobs to the new machine.
Mark added: “The opportunities possible with digital printing are astounding and we are looking forward to exploring new markets with our press. The HP Indigo 5000 will enable us to maintain our reputation for high-speed business printing while developing a name for premium quality collateral.”
Customer demand
Growing demand for short run, variable data printing is driving digital demand. This is a chicken and egg situation. Customers want more personalisation in their marketing collateral. Press manufacturers look for new ways to provide this, which makes customers want more, and the cycle repeats.
However, to stay one step ahead of your competitors you have to ensure you have the fastest machines at your disposal.
Yazz Marketing, a niche marketing agency specialising in the entertainment and music sector, is one company which has seen this happening first hand and has replaced two traditional B2 offset presses with one Screen Truepress 344 DI offset press.
Yazz Marketing’s managing director, Henry Arnold, said: “The extremely short five minute make-ready times of the Truepress has enabled us to replace our existing B2 presses and keep one step ahead of our competitors. We have seen a tremendous increase in productivity and quality enabling us to take on more jobs with tighter turnarounds and we are absolutely delighted with the results.”
Yazz Marketing specialises in printing marketing collateral associated with the demanding UK licensed retail sector, including national pub operators, leisure companies and breweries nationwide.
Henry added: “These businesses are very demanding people to supply, simply because they, like all of us, are in a very competitive business. Among a whole host of print jobs we produce for our customers are promotional leaflets that are handed out on the street, and here we are not talking about 48 or even 24-hour delivery times, sometimes all we get are hours and we have to design it as well.”
Fortunately for Yazz, Screen’s B2 Truepress 344 digital offset press is capable of printing 7,000 A3-plus sheets per hour (on stock up to 300gsm) and can produce a 500-sheet single-side job in less than 15-minutes.
Now it’s personal
Kodak’s Nexpress 2100 digital production colour presses are also proving popular in this market, with one installed at Digital Printing Network in Sweden.
DPN has pioneered this technology which is why the family-run, traditional print house decided to evaluate communication and media options and ask customers what they really wanted. Analysis showed that customers increasingly favoured digital printing to complement emerging new media opportunities available through the Internet. As a result, managing director, Ragnar Andersson, decided to break with the company’s litho tradition (stretching back almost 90-years to its formation in 1918) and move to the new arena of digital colour printing.
Today, DPN produces upwards of 500,000 pages per month, offering its customers more than just print production. With its breadth of digital services, DPN helps its customers automate the supply chain for marketing services and is said to have become one of the most successful digital print providers in Sweden.
Just one example of how more forward thinking companies have embraced the development of their CRM systems to improve the effectiveness of printed material is apparent in a recent project for Sweden’s DaimlerChrysler operation.
The Voyager is one of the most important vehicles in the range, so DPN and Basilicon presented a technical solution to attract customers, with the goal of increasing car sales in the region. The solution sets them apart as one of the few companies working this far ahead.
Visitors to the Voyager website can choose to design a car to suit their own taste from a variety of options and then request a personalised brochure. Through database and design integration, the request is passed to DPN’s Nexpress press and a personalised brochure is printed on demand and arrives with the potential customer within three working days. Once a brochure is printed the information is fed to DaimlerChrysler’s CRM system and a follow-up can be implemented: the dealer now having the advantage of knowing exactly which Voyager options a customer is interested in, an approach proven to have increased sales.
By using the Nexpress for this type of brochure production, the quantity of requested brochures can vary considerably from day-to-day without affecting the printing process. A fully personalised, quality, glossy brochure worthy of a high-end car is produced in no time at all.
Since the launch the system has been running smoothly which has encouraged DPN and Basilicon in their efforts to migrate the solution into other industries.
Making the most of digital
Digital machines are also gaining popularity in-house as repro departments switch to this versatile technology to deliver quality documents on quick turnaround. One such company is Nuon, a Netherlands-based energy company which has installed an Océ CPS700.
Document manager, Mr Van Strien, said: “We have two Océ CPS700 colour systems in our repro department. An organisation of our size and the market we’re involved in means there is mountains of information being exchanged and paper plays a substantial role in this.
“More and more of our employees and departments are making use of our Océ CPS700s. After all, they handle so many different jobs, from presentations to circuit diagrams, from news flashes to brochures. Océ technology makes it easy to run a single job on both printers without having to calibrate beforehand. Handy when the workload is piling up to the ceiling. We never have to worry about colour deviations either.
“We’re intentionally working on directing more and more printed matter from the decentralised circuit to our central processing unit. The message here is that delivering a digital product from the workplace assures you of quality. Its cost makes it interesting too.”
And finally
It is easy to see why the world is turning to digital and, as the cost per unit continues to fall, this technology will appear in more places. It allows creative people free reign to make their marketing collateral interesting and customer specific. At the same time it lets bigger companies make savings on essential documents.
Wherever you work, there are savings to be made so it is worth looking into this technology to see what it can do for you.
