Having settled chiefly on the east coast of Australia so far, production inkjet technology is now on the march further west. The latest installations of colour presses in Adelaide and Perth signal the next stage of the technology’s expansion to the furthest corners of the country.
In the four years since the current crop of production inkjet machines started arriving on our shores, the main axis of development has been in the Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane corridor with practically all the machines in Australia going into the three major capitals. The only regional outposts have been with the books printers, Opus in Maryborough and Griffin Press in Adelaide, both of which installed HP machines.
Increasingly though, the east coast focus is shifting further west. Fuji Xerox DMS, the only truly national operator in this sector, has installed Fuji Xerox 1400 press in Adelaide and Perth while Canon/Océ is also spreading its installed base further afield with installations of the ColorStream 3700 with Lane Print and Zipform in Adelaide and Perth respectively. These two latter installations are also the first to feature LaserMax Roll finishing equipment as part of a high-speed continuous web inkjet system.
Zipform cracks the bottleneck
Based out of Perth, Zipform was founded in 1984 by Dave Edwards and quickly become an iconic direct marketing and transactional specialist. Covering everything from high-end DM through to statements, bills and invoices for some of Australia’s leading brands and institutions, Zipform is now one of the largest providers of customer communications in the country. The company’s monthly print figures rack up in the millions and operations manager, Richard Vaughan, is no stranger to the print bottleneck. The problem was speed and, for the team at Zipform, the solution came in the form of the Canon ColorStream 3700 inkjet press, with Vaughan overseeing the installation last year.
“We certainly didn’t make the decision lightly,” he comments. “It’s a big investment whichever way you look at it. Canon just has such a long history in inkjet, we had confidence in their ability to deliver. Along with their experience in implementation and systems, it just gave them the edge on the competition. For us the ColorStream delivered a product that’s top of the tree, and is going to stay that way for a good few years to come.”
Zipform decided to take it one step further with an Australian-first team-up with Lasermax Roll inline finishing. Distributed locally by Australian Graphic Services (AGS), the new high speed finishing line has been up and running for nearly a year now, and is well and truly earning its stripes. According to Ross Gilberthorpe, sales and marketing manager, AGS, the Lasermax Roll equipment is rapidly gaining traction as an alternative option for high-speed digital press packages off the back of its success at Zipform.
“The install in Perth was our first one in Australia, and that was a big thing to see how it went. You never know until you put the first one in, but now it’s going great guns,” he says.
Taking it to the next level
Meanwhile, although the company had previous experience with colour inkjet technology, the installation of the ColorStream 3700 has catapulted Zipform to the next level. The press’s unique DigiDot technology delivers a perceived quality of 1,200dpi running at a regular 100 metres per minute and consistently hitting Zipform’s print benchmark. The balance of performance and speed has allowed the team to deliver same-day lodgements and secure new business.
“For me it’s all about speed to market,” says Vaughan. “You don’t have to slow it down to get the quality out of it. Print used to be a bit of bottleneck for the business, now mailing is the only issue.”
Built on Canon’s top-of-the-line DigiDot piezoelectric drop-on-demand inkjet heads, the ColorStream 3700 was quick to prove its worth to the Zipform team. The install was handled by Canon’s Peter Williams, who buckled down and had the ColorStream up and running live jobs within three weeks.
The ColorStream is optimised to enable a fast switch between long monochrome and full-colour print runs, a flexibility which is perfectly matched to the company’s diversity of transactional and DM work. The new installation has also enabled it to move from dye to pigment inks, a key factor for making the switch. No longer limited to dye ink compatible stocks, the ColorStream has unlocked room for greater flexibility, both in product offering and efficiencies, and opened up opportunities for new business.
Down to the drop
Over the past few years Zipform has strategically targeted transactional work as a growth market, work that the ColorStream has fuelled in the 11 months since the installation. When Vaughan joined the business in 2007, Zipform saw around 75 per cent of its work from direct marketing customers with the rest in transactional mail. Six years later the split is closer to 50/50 and, according to Vaughan, that’s without any major drop-offs in the DM.
“Processing and speed are critical to those jobs. As a transactional house we run a very intensive front-end that calls for a huge amount of processing power. So another reason we went with the ColorStream was PRISMA. As a front-end it’s tried and tested software that can RIP transactional files at the speeds we need.
“We pride ourselves on having top end IT capabilities. We try and get involved with the customers as early as possible in the process too. It’s really all about using data for what it is capable of doing,” says Vaughan.
As well as RIP’ing through the staggering sums of data that drives Zipform, PRISMA has streamlined efficiencies for the business in other ways. The software running at the Perth site is kitted out with an accountancy module designed to accurately record the real-time metrics on ink and paper usage. For the first time, the business is able to access its actual usages instead of using system estimates.
As Vaughan explains, “We’re going in there down to the litre, to the drop, and what we’ve found is ink usage is actually about 5-7 per cent less than the estimates. Now we can go in there and tighten up our stock management, and our ink management, and that makes us more efficient and, of course, more competitive.”
Lane follows same path
The success of the Zipform installation in Perth was followed last year by the announcement that Lane Print & Post in Adelaide would also be taking the same route with the installation of a similar Canon ColorStream 3700 and Lasermax Roll combination.
The privately-owned family print business with more than 40 years of industry experience under its belt is best known for its combination of commercial offset print work and digital business communications print. Although not in the same league as the big transactional print businesses on the east coast, Lane’s decision to invest in high-speed colour inkjet is indicative of the spread of the technology and the need for print businesses in this sector to stay up-to-speed with the latest systems.
Four years after its arrival, the advance of high-speed inkjet across the country continues to gather pace, pointing the way towards a colourful new future.