CJ King in Perth transforms its workflow with Fuji Xerox

Online ordering and workflow solution from Fuji Xerox brings new customers, quicker turnarounds and increased profits.

To create an online environment, whereby the initiation, confirmation, tracking and fulfilment of all print jobs start - and end - with the touch of a button, CJ King opted for iWay Prime.

Background


Founded 10 years ago, CJ King is one of the largest offset, wholesale printers in the Asia Pacific region, specialising in business stationery, short-run brochures, flyers and small booklets.

(L to R: Chris King, founder and managing director of CJ King and Brendon Smith, account manager from Fuji Xerox Australia)

The company produces full colour work ranging from business stationery, annual reports and books - mostly outsourced from other printers. The operation's largest volume is in printing half a million business cards on average per day.

“We receive 300-400 requests for print jobs every day,” says Chris King, founder and managing director at CJ King. “This means we make approximately 500 metal plates daily for customers in the US, UK and New Zealand as well as all over Australia.”

“We are like the McDonalds of printing,'” explains King. “Customers select from our extensive range of services with a choice of added options and that's it - it's that simple; they match their appetite with our menu and costs.”

Challenge

“Print procurement and print scheduling is a difficult process. People make mistakes. To rectify these take time. The workflow can slow down or stall and errors can eat away at productivity and profitability,” said King.

Before purchasing iWay Prime from Fuji Xerox, CJ King received jobs from clients as email attachments. These were then imported into InDesign templates, manually imposed and printed.

These manual processes created a bottleneck in the workflow, were time consuming, vulnerable to human input error and limited the amount of work CJ King could accept each day.

“We needed to streamline the workflow by automating the slow, manual prepress processes,” said King.

Solution


The solution was a fully automated process by which clients receive an immediate quote for print jobs and upload their files to iWay Prime for automatic preflighting and approval for printing. Clients can also track the progress of their print jobs online.

“iWay Prime won us over because we saw that its functionality was in line with our vision of where the company is heading,” continued King (pictured).

“Fuji Xerox has been very supportive throughout the entire installation - including comprehensive training and through detailed discussions about ways to make the software work best for us and our customers.”

CJ King's online customer service centre, branded Press Boss, allows customers to order printed products 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without any intervention by the customer service or art departments.

iWay Prime eliminates the difficulties of differences in time zones, the need to fax order forms and dramatically reduces the need for phone calls.

When submitted jobs are approved through iWay Prime, they are released to an imposition system and automatically imposed before being output on a platesetter for printing. To further streamline the process, iWay Prime generates a job ticket, which accompanies the job through to invoicing.

“CJ King is taking automation to a new level in offset print workflows,” said Eliot Harper, Production Software Solutions Manager at Fuji Xerox Australia. “iWay Prime was designed to accommodate a broad spectrum of business models and customer requirements. To this end, the system offers new growth directions to match specific business needs of individual printing organisations.”

Benefits

CJ King customers now receive unparalleled service, extremely competitive prices, quick response time and the ability to track orders and pay for printed products over the web.

“Press Boss has a very user-friendly interface. It requires minimal input or understanding from customers so they love it,” explained King. “Without the need for our staff to re-key the job information, provide manual quotes or answer common job status queries, we have been able to save time and money. This allows us to charge up to 75 per cent less than we would otherwise.”

Internal errors due to incorrect job ticketing have virtually ceased altogether as customers now have direct control of the job specification input and confirmation.

“The office is open 12 hours a day and the print factory operates around the clock for customers across the globe,” said King. “The great thing is that while we have taken much of the human element out of the job processing, our staff numbers have not diminished - in fact, as customer demand increases, we will continue to bring on new resources.”

“Since installing iWay Prime last year, our workload has increased by approximately 60 per cent. As a result, we decided to no longer take on smaller runs - and consequently, ceased working with 1,000 customers.

”However, we attract at least 3-8 new customers every single day. At the moment, we have 3,800 printers and users on our system. We are proud of this achievement - printers as a rule are very picky about printing so if they keep coming back, we must be doing something right!”

iWay Prime

iWay Prime enables print providers to manage their print operation from even the most remote locations using web-based tools such as full PDF workflow, Job Definition Format (JDF) support, scalable print management, automated pre-flight checking, and a powerful imposition engine.

iWay Prime also offers e-procurement tools that simplify the creation and management of personalised print jobs. Using iWay, print buyers can request quotes based on actual job characteristics as well as track jobs and delivery schedules.