Cutsheet digital is a maturing technology and provides printers with a reliable revenue stream. The battle waged between this pretender to the printing throne and the ruling powers of traditional print are well documented. Short runs and variable print application have been chalked up as digital victories. But recently new applications for digital printing are emerging that help printers gain an edge in dynamic areas of the communications market.
Cross-media campaigns
Whenever you call Telstra enquiries, you are actually speaking to an employee of Salmat Customer Contact Solutions. Some might say that’s odd terrain for a company whose origins are in letterbox delivery and mail processing.
For Australia’s largest transactional document processor, digital print was the wedge that levered open a wealth of revenue from ‘inbound response processing’ for the corporate, government and financial worlds.
It handles 60% of the nation’s business mail volume. “That’s quite a lot of documents,” understates Pat O’Sullivan, Salmat’s general manager, marketing.
Part of Salmat’s good fortune has been due to resources gained from its 2007 buy-out of competitor HPA. The acquired company had considerable data capture and imaging expertise, as well as essential mail business. Blended with Salmat’s strength in unaddressed letterbox deliveries, the combined company now generates more than $900m in revenue. It’s a powerhouse in direct customer communications – anything from bills, statements or share offers, to celebrity TV show voting via SMS. Salmat cover all the communications involved in major companies’ dealings with customers, from print, to SMS, to email, to web campaigns, and voice recognition technology.
In print, HPA was the pioneer of high-volume ‘business colour’, utilising Kodak’s Versamark high-speed, four-colour digital inkjet technology. For the first time, this enabled affordable, high-volume, single-pass variable digital printing. It streamlined the previous multi-step process of mono laser overprintings on pre-printed offset shells.
More recently, it has installed Fuji Xerox’s 980 ‘Sugi’ kit, which utilises four-colour toner technology. “Salmat continues to monitor the latest-generation digital colour offerings” says O’Sullivan.
New inkjet technology continues to be honed by the main contenders in high-speed digital: Kodak, Ricoh/IBM (InfoPrint), Xerox and Océ. Canon, through its proposed acquisition of Océ
is looking to deal itself into the game.
A ‘transpromo’ initiative began trials in 2006 with key client Telstra. Salmat now prints the telco titan’s bills with personalised information and customised advertising. It’s called ‘the fridge factor’. Place a targeted message in colour on an essential-mail document, and the response level skyrockets. In 2008, Telstra’s full billing went ‘transpromo’.
But if it sounds too good to be true, O’Sullivan offers a note of caution. “High-speed digital colour still needs to come down in price, especially to suit today’s communication budgets.”
On-demand books
What makes an established book printing company embrace digital technology?
At BPA in Melbourne, the answer is a changing publishing industry, the explosion of titles, and shrinking run lengths. The squeeze the global financial crisis is putting on publishers’ cashflows also plays its part.
Eight years ago, BPA, which prints academic books for the education sector, saw the advantages of adding digital production. Digital print now represents around 15% of revenues, and is growing, says managing director Brett Turnley. He says the crossover point at which digital costs fall behind offset has shifted 20% in digital’s favour in the past two years.
The Burwood company offers publishers two pricing models. One is for digitally printed work done on its B&W Océ 6000 and Xerox colour cutsheet lines. The other is for jobs on its eight- and four-colour Heidelberg Speedmasters and two half-sheet Komori Lithrones. A common binding line includes a Horizon perfect binder, with PUR binding outsourced to Melbourne finishing house, The Bindery. Casebinding and specialty diecuts, such as integrated CD sleeves, are as readily applied to digitally printed books as to the traditional process.
It runs a hybrid digital and offset workflow with Kodak Prinergy, which eliminates double handling, sending files to the Océ and Xerox machines or to imposing, proofing and Creo platesetting.
“If publishers can spend less and keep it ticking over in sales, they’ll do it,” says Turnley. “Instead of printing 5,000 books today, they’ll spread it over 24 or 36 months. They might end up paying more overall, but they’ll have better cash cycles and they won’t have their funds tied up in warehouses and inventories.”
Packaging production
At Spot Productions in Brisbane, a small but thriving revenue stream comes from digital packaging printing, usually in runs of up to 4,000. Managing director Simon Carmody says the business does not actively seek out packaging jobs for its Xerox 700 and high-speed mono 1100 machines, but is ready to print boxes as an add-on to a project that might involve printing other material as part of an overall advertising campaign.
For example, a promotional project for Brisbane’s TAB Treasury Casino included golfball gifts that needed to be boxed with the corporate logo in a 2,000 run. And boxes featuring a Christmas calendar for a banking institution were personalised to individual recipients, using VDP software printing from a customer database. Ticket wallets for the Brisbane Lions are printed, die-cut and assembled at Spot.
The company’s comprehensive bindery services dovetail carton printing output from its three offset presses with the occasional digital job, with most bindery work performed offline, although there is some inline folding and stitching as part of a workflow from the two Xerox devices.
Special care needs to be taken on grain direction when finishing toner-printed work, but otherwise finishing, die-cutting and assembling digitally printed cartons conforms to the broad principles of finishing conventionally printed boxes, says Carmody.
While laser/toner packaging printing has its niche, inkjet is also taking a slice of the pie, shaping up as a lucrative ‘gap’ technology for package printing giants – companies of the calibre of Amcor, Glamapak and Aperio.
Agfa product manager Paul Garside says printers in the packaging and narrow-web label markets will increasingly embrace digital solutions such as Agfa’s UV-curable Dotrix press, based on Toshiba Tec inkjet head technology.
Australian customer feedback to Garside suggests that printing boxes and packs digitally comes into its own when the conventional flexo and gravure lines are pumping out the long jobs. But he adds that some short-run work – the types of jobs that take over an hour to change over – can create a bottleneck for the larger presses. “If you take one hour to do changeover on a job that runs 3,000m, as opposed to one that runs 300,000m, your changeover and downtimes can make up
a significant amount of your costs.”
Newspaper production
Essential mail printer SEMA has been partnering with Océ for the past eight years to produce limited runs of daily newspapers for the expat market. It produces a digital ‘airline’ edition of Japan’s Nikkei business newspaper.
“The biggest difference between our digitally produced papers and the original is that with our paper, there’s no ink rub-off”. That’s the wry observation of Brent McCulloch, director of SEMA, talking about the digital edition’s no-nonsense 42gsm newsprint stock.
SEMA became involved in ‘boutique’ newspaper editions around six years ago as part of a diversification from its direct-mail activities. At one time, SEMA’s antecedent, Security Mail, held the digital or ‘Day A’ licences for Britain’s Guardian and Observer newspapers, as well as two Singapore-based papers, the Asia-Pacific editions of the International Herald Tribune and USA Today.
The company’s involvement nowadays is more limited, says McCulloch, and revenue from digital newspapers is miniscule. But the model works well within the Asia-Pacific time zones. PDFs of tabloid pages are received from Nikkei via Océ’s newspaper hub after the original edition has gone to press in Japan. By 3am each day, 500 copies of the edition have been printed on an Océ line at SEMA’s Kingsgrove facility in Sydney.
They are collated and cross-folded on Hunkelers, and bundled, ready for delivery to the airport. First-class travellers to Tokyo can be assured of their daily financial read, thousands
of kilometres from the presses that print the analogue edition.
“The reason we do it is because it creates extra income from the digital presses at a time of the day when they would otherwise be idle,” says McCulloch. “It’s utilising downtime.”