According to the Print Shop Supervisor, Richard Such, the challenge lay in colour production, most notably the full-colour posters as well as the interposing of full colour covers over their mono race books, which was causing a bottleneck.
Following implementation of the Ricoh Pro C900 at the Print Shop, and a seamless integration with the Greyhounds WA network operating environment, productivity gains were almost immediate. Ricoh product specialists provided on-site training and worked alongside Such and his team to develop accurate colour profiles that would deliver optimum colour accuracy on a range of specified media for their race book covers and posters.
From that point on, the Print Shop’s productivity soared. So much so, that within a matter of weeks one of the three team members was able to move to a different area of operations without any impact on productivity.
As Greyhounds WA were producing over 2500 A4 saddle stitched race books each week, creating an efficient workflow was paramount to the install. The Ricoh Pro C900’s integration with the Print Shop’s existing equipment, particularly the Ricoh Pro 1356EX, resulted in a fully-finished book being produced with very little operator intervention.
"Increasingly, digital print production is more economical – in time and money – than traditional offset printing," Such states. "And when it comes to quality, the advances have been so great that where I used to be able to tell easily the difference between offset and digital prints, with the Pro C900 and Pro 1356EX, I now need a magnifying glass.
In 2008, the Print Shop introduced a Ricoh Pro 1356EX black-and-white production print engine that provided it with the on-demand ability to produce high volumes of black-and-white prints, complete with in-line finishing to create folded and saddle-stitched booklets.
In commenting on how the introduction of the Ricoh Pro C900 in conjunction with the Pro 1356EX resulted in such a large gain, Such says: "It’s due to a large number of factors, not least of those being an increase in print speed, a dramatic reduction in the amount of time required to manage and maintain the environment, and a highly streamlined workflow."
The time savings are remarkable when it comes to producing the full-colour covers for the race books. "We simply take the printed pages to the guillotine, trim them, then transfer them to the 1356EX’s interposer tray, which inserts them as wrap-arounds of the black-and-white prints, ready for automatic saddle-stitching," Such explains.
A number of features of the Ricoh Pro C900 have eliminated instances of production hold-ups. "Just the fact that we’re able to swap toner cartridges in the middle of a print run without halting production is a major advantage," Such says. "Added to that is the ability to have different media stock already loaded, means we’re no longer swapping paper every time a print job requires different stock. Those are the sorts of features that enable us to concentrate on generating print output rather than constantly managing the equipment."
Aside from race booklets, the device is producing in-house collateral such as special tickets, brochures, business cards and tent menus. Not surprisingly, time is generally always of the essence. "In the majority of cases," Such says, "all it takes is just a few minutes to set up the job and slot it into our production schedule, then have it delivered within a matter of hours."
"The addition of the Pro C900 to Greyhound WA’s Print Shop has offered them increased versatility while improving cost control. They are now benefiting from an internal print production environment that was designed to respond rapidly to all print requests," says Mark Katrakis, National Business Development Manager – Production Solutions, for Ricoh Australia. "We listened carefully to their needs and proposed the right device, services and support to significantly improve the way they were operating."
"When you consider that since introducing the two Ricoh production systems we have reduced our personnel overheads by over 30 per cent while actually increasing our workload, any initial financial concerns there may have been are well and truly negated," adds Such.
"Justifying it even more," Such continues, "is the fact that the quality of our colour printing is now massively better than we were ever able to achieve."
This article was originally posted on Bertl.
