Arnold & Wessels, the print shop established in 1948, in Klerksdorp, has bought a Xerox X700DCP digital colour press.
The acquisition positions the print shop ahead of its competition in the North West Province by encouraging new lines of business, improving efficiencies, and speeding up job turnaround times, while delivering traditional litho-type quality.
“Two-thirds of my business is now digital,” says Chris van Eerden, owner of Arnold & Wessels. “The new 700 is really helping my business to grow the walk-in market because people in the region are becoming accustomed to jobs being turned around in a few hours instead of a couple of days. The cost-per-click for my business on the 700 is also far better than anything else available in the area so the competition cannot match me for price either.”
Van Eerden, a long-time Xerox customer through Bytes Document Solutions, authorised Xerox distributor to 27 sub-Saharan countries, was first introduced to the X700DCP at the print show drupa.
The X700DCP offers print shops such as Arnold & Wessels a number of new business opportunities such as getting into the burgeoning photobooks market. The full gamut of X700DCP applications includes coated, saddle-stitched booklets, catalogues, manuals, tri-fold brochures, bi-fold mailers, variable print postcards, direct mail, and photo specialty products, including photo books, calendars and others.
“The 700 is very customisable,” says Van Eerden. “You can adjust the pressure with which toner is transferred, it can adjust the image skew on the paper, it has blowers so it doesn't feed double sheets, it has high capacity feeders; it's just nice to work with, you simply put the paper in and it runs. It facilitates job throughput which means my customers are happier and my volumes go up. In addition, Xerox has very nice software called Printshop Web that essentially makes it easier for customers to order jobs.”
Printshop Web is a Web-to-print system, publication and print automation software that manages promotional printing flows, streamlines customer interaction, and combines the benefits of variable information and on-demand printing.
“The press integrates directly with my print queue, even interfaces with Pastel, and releases pressure on my graphic designers,” says Van Eerden. “Being a print shop in a small town it's even more important that we no longer hit bottlenecks on my litho machines. Now we run all of the short-run jobs on the digital equipment, where we would otherwise have huge set-up times on the litho equipment, and we almost never work overtime anymore. That's made an enormous difference to my business and has given me a huge advantage.”
Arnold & Wessels also operates two DC250s from Xerox and a 4112 black-and-white system.
“The X700 Digital Colour Press has enabled Arnold & Wessels to expand the range of printing and finishing services offered while at the same time improve overall productivity and reduce production costs by automating their pre-press workflow,” says Paul Haglich, marketing manager of the production systems group of the Xerox division at Bytes Document Solutions. “The colour images it produces are crisp and clear because it prints at 2400 x 2400 dpi, the highest resolution available, and it gives a smooth, offset-like matte finish with good shadow detail and halftones because it uses Emulsion Aggregation (EA) toner.”
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