The business produces up to six million publications a year for West End theatres and more modest fringe venues across the UK and Ireland. But it was the smaller numbers that prompted the traditional litho house to look at moving into digital production.
The growth of digital has thrown up enough exciting features to coax litho firms into giving the technology more than just a walk-on part on their production floors, says operations director Simon McKay. Delivering a fast and fluid performance with stylish delivery and no prompting, however, can be as elusive on the shopfloor as the stage.
The challenge
Such a big move can cause confusion and culture shock to an existing cast of press minders and operators used to their tried and trusted litho machines. Last year, however, McKay started to analyse print volumes. These ranged from tens of thousands for “extreme customers” to runs of 300 or so for smaller clients. A pattern was emerging, and it was short and fast.
John Good provides a full creative service of print, branding and graphic design, illustration and animation, through to account management and distribution across three sites. Clients from arts, education, finance and legal sectors include the Royal Opera House and the National Theatre.
“The cost of producing lower volumes on our Heidelberg litho kit was okay, but taking the digital route was potentially better,” recalls McKay. “It could give us more flexibility while the shorter turnaround times would give clients greater satisfaction. These days, everyone wants their print yesterday and theatres are no different – we were getting more enquiries for shorter runs.”
And this all but forced his hand: up to that point the company was sending out these smaller jobs to a local digital printer and racking up £80,000 costs. But if the case was clear on a financial spreadsheet, winning over the hearts and minds of the people who were to use this new kit called for a more delicate approach. McKay had to convince not only his print team, but clients too.
“I had studied the market and wasn’t too concerned about the capabilities of digital print, but it was getting into the mindset of our staff that worried me: they had to understand what they could do and how they could use the technology. When they saw the kit perform, they soon realised its potential.
“Another concern, and something that played on my mind, was whether the customers would accept the quality. Some materials such as uncoated stocks won’t work on toner-based technology, but we have other presses to take on that kind of work.”
And having played the long game on background research, McKay could see how the technology had evolved into something altogether more classy than the output from those early pioneering machines. Much of the striping and banding problems of old had been largely banished and anyway, litho machines could also throw up similar quality issues, he says.
The method
McKay looked at several machines including Xerox iGens and HP Indigos, took advice from the BPIF and sharpened his networking chops at events like trade shows and the PrintWeek Awards to find out what was hot and what was not. In the end he came to the conclusion that the best possible option was the Kodak NexPress SX2700.
The NexPress together with a NexGlosser unit were installed at the firm’s production base in Coventry, replacing a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 75. That swallowed up about half of the total £500,000 spend; the remainder went on Duplo finishing kit: an iSaddle stitcher and DC640 slitter-cutter-creaser.
“The NexPress was cheaper than the HP and Xerox machines we looked at, but one of the biggest boons was that it can go in beside our Heidelberg presses, whereas some digital kit needs a separate fully controlled environment. It was more of a swap-in, swap-out situation, requiring a small refurbishment and newly painted floor,” says McKay.
The decision to run the digital press and finishing kit alongside the litho machines was not just a practical one, it also had a symbolic value: “We all needed to understand not just how the new equipment worked, but how it was going help our business to diversify, to offer more than litho. Its physical presence at the heart of operations was important.”
Kodak timed the installation of the press to tie in with the arrival of the finishing kit. At the same time two members of staff, a press minder and a pre-press expert, were despatched to Germany for a week’s training. On their return, the two staffers had a week of on-site training to hone their newly acquired skills, while other staff were trained on the new pieces of finishing equipment.
“A key issue for our operators was getting used to maintenance: digital machines have different requirements and staff had to grasp this along with other issues such as how files come over to the press and how to handle stock after it’s been through the press. It’s completely different to litho, with more static, and our guys had to learn how to feed it through the finishing system.”
All that training paid dividends; the NexPress requires half an hour of upkeep and cleaning a day, which is about 10% more costly than cleaning litho kit, a weekly affair. McKay says the extra cost is a “given” with this type of technology but, unlike some digital press platforms that require specialist maintenance, the John Good team can carry out all the routine work.
The result
The NexPress SX2700 is a five-unit machine, offering CMYK with another shade, red, green or blue, to extend the colour gamut. The technology, which can add coating for a high-gloss look or a tactile feel, runs off around 2,500 sheets an hour at SRA3 size or slightly larger, 356x530mm.
The machine was installed in March and in its first six months has produced about 2.4 million A4-equivalent pages, with a further 3.5 million pages expected in the next six months. It averages 9,500 sheets a day but can do 17,000 sheets. And while volumes go up, turnaround times are shrinking.
“Previously we would not have taken on anything that needed to be out of the door the same day. Now we can turn around jobs in six hours, and knowing that when we put something on the NexPress it will be finished within a couple of hours tops is a cultural as well as physical change.”
Another big shift, as practical as it is cultural, is staffing the new equipment. One digital operator does pretty much everything: “He can create a brochure from start to finish, rather than needing a press minder, a folder operator and a stitching person. So I now use one person instead of three or four. The press can’t do the same volume of work, but it shows how the market is changing.”
John Good recently won a job from a high-street clothing company that wanted six sales brochures in French and 25 in German for presentations, while a supermarket wanted small but multiple numbers of shelf talkers and pricing materials.
McKay has other plans to fill the extra capacity including an imminent venture into web-to-print. He is looking at more innovative finishes such as metallics to try and help add another £500,000 to the company’s turnover of just over £10m by the end of the kit’s second year. And McKay is also toying with entering competitions and signing up for events to “shout our name a bit more”.
The move into digital was right for John Good, but the technology has its limits, says McKay: “Unless digital machines start churning out high volumes at high quality, I don’t see us switching over completely. We will be a litho house for at least another five or 10 years, if not more.”
VITAL STATISTICS
John Good
Location London, Coventry and Oxford
Inspection host Operations director Simon McKay
Size Turnover: £11m; Staff: 120
Established 1980s
Products Theatre programmes, brochures, print for schools and magazines, posters and pop-up banners
Kit NexPress SX2700, Heidelberg Speedmaster SM 102 perfector, Speedmaster XL 105, Duplo iSaddle and DC640 slitter-cutter-creaser, Muller Martini stitching line
Inspection focus Moving into digital print
TOP TIPS
Get into the mindset Train staff to see digital as a printroom equal: the technology is not replacing litho, it is complementing it and is good for your business.
Do plenty of research It’s hard to over-research when toying with moving into digital, says John Good operations director Simon McKay who compared the pros and cons of various machines.
Win over clients Like staff, clients will need reassurance that the quality of their print will not be compromised when it starts rolling off a new digital machine.
Stay ahead of the curve Digital machines have different requirements, and training on how to handle and finish stocks can be a “steep learning curve”, says McKay.
Think about maintenance Upkeep of digital kit can be more costly than for litho and is mostly a daily affair against the weekly routine for conventional presses.
Be realistic on limitations Until digital machines “start churning out high volumes at high quality”, McKay can’t see them replacing litho kit completely for several years.
