Case Studies

How Much is a Picture Worth? Xerox® iGen4® Helps Adlis SAS Find the Value of Thriving New Business Opportunity

Background

The art of digital printing… It’s an area in which Adlis SAS has always been a master. Adlis has excelled in the demanding world of commercial printing in one of the world’s centers of fine art. Adlis has been printing in Paris, the city of lights, for more than a decade. And it has always excelled in the art of turning digital print into profit—with direct mail and digital book printing.

“Adlis was founded about 10 years ago,” explains Philippe Hourdain, Adlis President and Founder. “I took over a small offset printing company and soon after moved to digital printing. I immediately had the idea to use offset and digital as a duo. So we designed this offset–digital combination for advertisers, and the business started to kick in right away.”

The Challenge

And while Adlis produced outstanding work for creative services organizations and advertising agencies, more opportunity was out there that was just out of reach.

It was opportunity in the form of snapshots and moments in time. Family holidays. Blue skies at the beach. Blue eyes looking back at the camera. Virtually every moment, large and small, captured in billions of photographs that consumers take every year. New applications and new revenues were presenting themselves in the form of memories and the demand to turn those snapshots into photo books.

But the necessary image quality was lacking to produce photo quality images and to fully grasp the opportunity at hand. A higher level of quality was needed to allow Adlis to expand and continue its art of excelling in the world of digital printing.

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Xerox
Case Study

Turning Wax Into Silver

Combine creative people and unlimited technology, and anything can happen. That’s what we advocate and live at 3D Systems. Since we’ve got both creativity and technology in house, when projects come along, we like to see for ourselves just how far we can go. So when a request came for some 3D Systems cufflinks, we went to work.

Our training specialist, Lu McCarty took on the project, utilizing 3D Systems software and hardware, along with some friends in the jewelry business, to see this project from concept to manufacturing. What makes this story so nice is that it parallels the manufacturing process that a jeweler might use everyday, and it shows the power of 3D design and 3D printing technology to supercharge that process.

The request came on August 3, 2013, when Senior Director of Functional Design Scott Summit sent out an internal request: “Does anyone have any 3D Systems cufflinks? I’m going to a black tie dinner.” 

Lu began work on the project shortly thereafter, creating a design using a combination of Geomagic® Design™ Direct, a comprehensive reverse engineering and direct modeling CAD package, and Geomagic Wrap®, which transforms point cloud data into 3D polygon meshes. When it came time to print, he used the ProJet® 3510 HD Max for prototyping and the ProJet® 3510 CPX for printing wax casting patterns.

Here’s how he got to the final product.

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3D Printers
Case Study

Lexmark MPS Reduces Customer's Print Volume by 3 Million Pages Per Month

Organization

Cummins is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of diesel engines and related products. The company reported 2010 revenue of $13.2 billion and serves its customers through 550 company-owned and independent distributor facilities, and more than 5,000 dealer locations in 200 countries and territories.

Challenge

Cummins is a company with 40,000 employees and global operations throughout 200 countries and territories. With such a vast distribution of locations comes the challenge of selecting, deploying, managing and maintaining technology—even output devices. Whether at its U.S. or remote operating sites worldwide, Cummins employees need to print, copy, fax and scan critical business documents reliably. 

“Whether it is Russia or places like Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa, there are significant challenges to providing IT service, and that is a critical business requirement for us regardless of the physical location,” said Bruce Smith, Cummins’ Director of Computing Services. 

Its existing fleet of output devices had aged and became prone to breakdowns that were increasing maintenance costs and negatively impacting device reliability and employee productivity. At the same time, Cummins wanted to further trim output costs and reduce paper consumption in support of its sustainability initiatives. These business goals and challenges became the genesis of a corporatewide initiative Cummins inaugurated called Print Smart.

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Case Study
Lexmark

Amica Mutual Insurance Company

Executive Summary

Not long ago, Amica found itself maintaining a problematic fleet of printers. Significant time was being spent maintaining printers, handling help desk calls to correct printer problems, ordering toner and managing the complexities of an aging, diverse printer fleet with units spread across 39 separate branch locations and at headquarters.

Amica turned to its long-time partner, Lexmark, to help the company reduce output costs, improve the performance of its devices and reduce the administrative and IT burden of maintaining the devices. In just under two months, Lexmark replaced all of the legacy printers at Amica and established a distributed fleet management (DFM) partnership with Lexmark that has significantly reduced its printer maintenance and management costs.

As part of the agreement, Lexmark replaced all of Amica’s printers with new, faster and more feature-rich devices, began monitoring the devices proactively over the network to diagnose issues before they impacted end users and established a plan so that it would automatically detect toner-low conditions so that replacement cartridges could be shipped just in time to the right location, rather than stockpiling back-ups.

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Lexmark
Case Study

ProJet® 3510 CPX 3D Printer a Gem to Uptown Diamond & Jewelry

Traditional jewelry design is a meticulous and incremental process. Because labor and materials are a large investment for both the jeweler and the customer, confidence is the baseline requirement for both sides of a commission. Traditional design begins with an artist’s sketch for the customer to inspect.  Once the sketch is approved, it is carved out of wax and re-inspected before casting. If the wax mold is not close enough to the original sketch or fails to meet the customer’s expectations in any other way, it must be redone, or else the customer loses confidence and the jeweler loses business. Either way, a large amount of time is put into this process, which typically spans anywhere from two to three weeks.

Uptown Diamond and Jewelry in Houston, Texas, has found a way to ensure not only that their customers’ expectations are repeatedly met, but that owner Rick Antona’s confidence in his business’s abilities is sturdily reinforced. Uptown Diamond’s not-so-secret secret? The ProJet® 3510 CPX professional wax 3D printer by 3D Systems (formerly the ProJet 3500 CPX).

The ProJet 3510 CPX produces micro-detail wax patterns with outstanding surface quality and extremely fine features, ideal for intricate direct investment casting applications, such as jewelry. Compatible with VisiJet® Hi-Cast Material, the ProJet 3510 CPX produces precise, mirror standard wax casts within a 11.75 x 7.3 x 8 inch build platform for increased productivity.

Uptown Diamond decided to incorporate 3D printing into its workflow because the company wanted to both speed up its manufacturing process and ensure a quality product. Cost cutting was also a large consideration. Although championship rings are a great inlet for jewelry business, the metal molds traditionally used to cast them can cost anywhere from $4,000 - $7,000. For general wax casting, Uptown Diamond was familiar with CNC machines, but the time involved was still considerable, requiring four to five hours per machining.

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Case Study
3D Printers

No More Hit-and-Miss Color: Colorproof™ XF Drives Quality and Effi ciency

CHALLENGE:

As a national player in India, Comart needed to ensure that print distributed to multiple plants delivered consistent color regardless of where it was produced. This challenge was complicated even more by the company’s broad range of printing capabilities from a number of different manufacturers, including sheet and web offset, digital short-run and large format for indoor and outdoor signage.

In choosing a proofi ng solution that could effectively operate across multiple plants, Comart investigated a wide range of alternatives. Comart prints to ISO standards as well as its own rigorous internal standards, producing printed
pieces ranging in size from postage stamp to building wrap, and clients want consistency both across all elements of each individual campaign and from campaign to campaign. But Comart also needed an affordable solution. “Although
there are some great solutions out there,” says Rane, “most are quite expensive. We found the price/performance of EFI Colorproof XF to be the best in the market.”

Comart installed EFI Colorproof XF in its Mumbai plant in May of 2007. Rane says, “We serve a number of demanding international brands, including L’Oreal, Zodiac Clothing, Kingfi sher and FCUK, in our key advertising, publishing and
packaging markets. Our stringent internal color standards and our compliance with ISO standards have always delivered the highest quality to our customers, but it often took signifi cant time to get the fi nal product exactly right during the production process. Now with EFI Colorproof XF, we produce accurate color 100% of the time, without fail. No more hit and miss!”

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EFI
Case Study

People Matter, Results Count

The company is the partner of choice for leading businesses around the world and when it comes to Capgemini’s own technology requirements the company requires collaboration, agility and a competitive approach from its partners.

Eddie Ginja, UK Head of Infrastructure Management, Capgemini said: ”I run our UK internal IT services estate covering 5 sites throughout the UK and although we are very knowledgeable about Managed Print Services having been through the first generation we wanted to see where the major players were taking their solutions. Having worked with the market leaders for many years we knew that they simply couldn’t meet our current requirements. We weren’t initially aware of KYOCERA, however we’d been speaking to Gartner and saw a case study on ECOSYS technology which piqued our interest. We did our research on KYOCERA and found out that the company had won lots of awards while the innovative ceramic technology behind KYOCERA printers was intriguing and it soon became a clear that KYOCERA had some key differentiators.”

KYOCERA outlined its Managed Document Services offering, which is an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-aligned, environmentally friendly yet cost-saving approach which has won the MPSA’s Best Practice Global Leadership Award 2012. KYOCERA’s approach focuses on Managed Document Solutions (MDS) rather than Managed Print “We did our research on KYOCERA and found out that the company had won lots of awards while the innovative ceramic technology behind KYOCERA printers was intriguing and it soon became a clear that KYOCERA had some key differentiators.”

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Kyocera
Kyocera Printers
Kyocera-Mita
Case Study

Fiery XF proServer and VUTEk Printers Deliver Blazing Speed and Top Quality for HPI and API

In business since 1976, originally as a photo processing shop, HPI of Houston is known for high quality, high-speed digital print work. President Steve Hogan has been at the helm since 1987, and relies on cutting-edge technology to exceed customer expectations and grow the business.

HPI operates two EFI™ VUTEk® GS3200 UV hybrid printers and a VUTEk GS5000r UV roll-to-roll printer with the new EFI Fiery® XF proServer as their production RIP solution. API runs a mirror copy of the same printers and RIP in Austin. HPI’s typical jobs are in quantities of 100 or 200 prints for applications like large full color signs, billboards, point-of-purchase signs and displays, menu boards and cut-out displays. Typical turn-around times are 24 to 48 hours.

With these large files and demanding deadlines, Steve was looking for more speed, and turned to EFI for the solution.
“We’ve been running VUTEk printers for over ten years,” says Hogan. “We’ve moved up in models from the original VUTEk PV200/600 to the QS2000, then QS3200 to the GS3200’s we own now. We added the GS5000r for even greater speed. The quality of all our printers is exceptional. We switched to the Fiery XF RIP recently, and then to the Fiery XF proServer
to take advantage of every bit of performance from our printers.”

Continues Steve: “Adding the Fiery XF proServer has cut our processing time for jobs in half over our old Fiery XF RIP system. And it’s eight to ten times faster than the ColorBurst RIP we previously used. The net gain in productivity is a 25 percent increase in throughput on each printer every day. I can’t fathom running the shop without the proServer!”

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EFI
Case Study

ProJet™ Transforms Ideas into Products!

With a penchant towards risk taking and a keen sense of humor, Teenage Engineering works with global brands  like IKEA, Ericsson and Absolut to develop market leading communications strategies. Along with keeping the team engaged and financing their interest in product development, these efforts often generate great ideas for  new products. As a result TE began to acquire technology to facilitate their emerging product development process. 
 
From CNC machining and laser cutters TE graduated to building concept models and functional prototypes through outsourcing to local service bureaus with Stereolithography and Selective Laser Sintering Systems. While the quality was exceptional the cost and the time required to a finished concept model prompted them to evaluate 3D printers. 
 
So earlier this year, in the midst of completing their first commercial product TE was introduced to 3D Systems.  They attended a demonstration of the ProJet™ HD 3000 Professional 3D Printer and were immediately impressed with the extremely fine feature detail and accuracy of the high definition parts. They decided that the cost savings of an in office 3D Printer and the ability to iterate, producing a revised model in a matter of hours, 
far outweighed the initial investment. 
 
Teenage Engineering has been very successful with the use of sound in the communications efforts so it is only fitting that their first commercial product is based on sound; an exciting portable, multi-function synthesizer. Teenage Engineering is clearly, in the groove. And we suggest you stay tuned because with the help of their ProJet™ 3000 they plan for many new products to come. 
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Case Study
3D Printers

Ricoh Printer Case Study

Moving to a new print environment

In 2011 Computershare ran a Global Green Office Challenge called the PaperLess challenge, with the objective of reducing paper consumption globally. What we discovered from the challenge was, it difficult to track what you cannot measure! Volume reporting was either unreliable or non-existent from our existing printer fleets, hindering us in consistently tracking and measuring results of this challenge. In UK and Australia our existing printer fleets were ageing and becoming unproductive for our daily business needs. Maintenance of the old fleets and toner costs were beginning to outweigh viable replacement costs.

In light of these issues UK and Australia each undertook a comprehensive tender process to replace our entire networked office printer fleets. The selected vendor would review, consolidate and replace the existing printer fleet in order to standardise equipment, reduce costs, simplify fleet management, improve office functions and productivity, increase printing security, create financial and operation efficiencies, and meet Computershare’s sustainability criteria.

We also required all devices to meet Energy Star qualifications, including low energy consumption and energy saving modes in order to reduce power consumption and realise further cost reduction.

We easily achieved our objective of fleet reduction and consolidation. Fleet reduction was not just about reducing the pure numbers of printers - in Australia alone we had over 60 different models of printers, scanners, faxes and copiers, making fleet management problematic for our technology division.

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Ricoh
Case Study

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