By Melissa Donovan
B&W printing is used for specific applications. Dedicated commercial printers may consider a B&W press integral to the business based on services offered. In plants are among those that find an advantage with B&W production.
Many corporations require continuous B&W printing of employee manuals, customer instruction booklets, and informational brochures depending on the products and services offered. To combat associated costs and time wasted on outsourcing, some companies weigh the benefits and bring printing in house.
Mountains of Printing
Schneider Electric, a global energy management corporation, runs its own stable of B&W presses at its Solutions Support Group in Nashville, TN. With over 140,000 employees in more than 100 countries, the business requires constant updating and creating of manuals for training and operations in addition to other documents. A very limited amount of this collateral requires color, making B&W presses an ideal solution.
At the Solutions Support Group in TN, seven production specialists produce operation and maintenance manuals, brochures, training materials, poly-vinyl equipment labels, large format signage, and other digital media for the company.
This division of Schneider Electric is a completely digital shop. In 2012 it installed a Canon U.S.A., Inc. imageRUNNER 8095 and uses it to handle three-hole, saddle stitch, and 44-hole punch documents. Later in 2012, it implemented a Canon imageRUNNER Advance C9280 Pro, also used daily for three-hole, saddle stitch, and 44-hole punch documents.
According to Jason Plum, print production supervisor, Solutions Support Group, Schneider Electric, “the short-term goal for implementing the presses was to bring the production of operation and maintenance manuals back in house to produce them properly and improve customer satisfaction.”
The company implemented a number of Canon Océ VarioPrint 110 devices over the next few years, with the most recent addition in early 2014. The Océ VarioPrint 110 prints at 100 images per minute (ipm) in simplex and 110 ipm in duplex mode. The VarioPrint line is based on Océ DirectPress Technology, which consistently prints high-quality images on a range of media.
The technology eliminates unstable variables such as charge, static, and light. Océ HeatXchange reduces energy consumption through clever reuse of energy, which provides for a smaller footprint and helps eliminate bricking, without the use of additional cooling. Océ EnergyLogic provides maximum performance without sacrificing quality by efficiently using available energy. The result is a fast first print out time and optimal production of mixed media jobs. Océ ScreenPoint offers image quality and automated smooth grayscale reproduction from all files—B&W or color.
Three Océ VarioPrint 110 presses are regularly used at Schneider Electric’s Solutions Support Group to produce operation and maintenance manuals, training manuals, and operating instructions. They help the company continue to achieve the long-term goals it set back when the digital B&W presses were first brought in house.
“We continue to save the company money by in sourcing more projects,” explains Plum.
Illustrating the efficiency of printing with dedicated monochrome devices, Plum provides an example of an order run through the in plant. As with many jobs, the internal customer required a quick turnaround. To create 54 binders, 23,616 pages were run through the three Océ VarioPrint 110 presses. 702 divider tabs were also printed on. Everything was done inline on the printers with two staff members overseeing the operation.
The pages were submitted in 27 separate requests, so the Solutions Support Group team combined all of the documents into a single PDF file for the customers to review prior to print. To quickly collate all of this information, including tab pages and bookmarks in the electronic file, the team used both Adobe Acrobat X Pro and B2BeDocuments’ SmartPDFPrintware. As a workflow solution, SmartPDFPrintware is sourced by Canon and enables automated print production of the highly complex, low volume, heavy number of divider index tabbed documents produced at the facility.
“Not only do you save time in receiving approval on a digital proof before printing and shipping, but you save the customer time when building the document, as well as providing them with a digital file to provide their own clients,” explains Plum.
The entire job was completed in approximately three hours.
In the B&W
Schneider Electric benefits from the efficiency its dedicated B&W presses offer. Plum estimates that nearly 1.5M pages are run off all of the presses combined per month. The printers provide the guarantee of proper production of its manuals, which reduces waste and limits customer dissatisfaction. “Turnaround time is also reduced, thus creating customer satisfaction and significant cost savings over outsourcing,” he concludes. dps
Nov2014, DPS Magazine
