FormsXpress, one of South Africa's largest full-service print, design and production companies, has deployed a Xerox iGen3 digital production press to significantly increase capacity and reduce printing costs. The Xerox iGen3 press was supplied by Oxbow and supported by Bytes Document Solutions, for its versatile, high quality production printing that rivals offset and enables a wide range of applications.
FormsXpress managing member John Donaldson says: "We wanted to ramp up our digital printing capacity to complement our existing offset printing business, but we needed to do so at a lower cost.
"Because the local industry is fairly small, printing companies either need to specialise in the production of specific products, or be able to offer as broad a range of products at the right quality as possible," he says.
"We fall into the latter category. We were the first and are still the only company to offer computer to conventional plate production technology in Cape Town, for example. One of the real growth areas right now is the delivery of high-quality, low-cost and high-volume digital printing, and the Xerox iGen3 is unique in its ability to provide all three."
The industrial strength digital press can process a large selection of A3-plus standard and specialised media at speeds of up to 110 pages per minute.
"The Xerox FreeFlow Print Server for iGen, combined with our own software, gives us incredible control over what we can print, and also allows us to offer some of the highest 3D, ISO-certified colour management options on the market," adds Donaldson.
"For example, we can take a run of 5 000 colour-matched postcards, each with a unique name and image for the intended recipient, and run it through the iGen in a matter of minutes, whereas with older technology the job would have taken us a full day to complete."
Since going into full production with the Xerox iGen3, FormsXpress can run up to 20 000 high-quality colour digital images per job, where previously its volume ceiling was closer to 3 000 or 4 000.
Oxbow managing director Brett Furlong says the Xerox iGen3 is the logical next-step for medium-to-large printing companies that want to offer their customers even better value with a wider range of possible products.
"Companies like FormsXpress are taking a leadership role in high-volume production by combining short-run, on-demand digital products with other forms of traditional high-volume offset printing, binding, laminating and cutting services," says Furlong.
Donaldson concurs, and says success in this industry is purely based on performance.
"Customers often ask us what our secret is, and the answer I always give them is that we keep our promises," Donaldson says. "But we can't do it alone. The service we've received from Oxbow and Bytes Document Solutions has gone above and beyond, and combined with new technology like the Xerox iGen3, allows us to deliver ever more ambitious promises and set our targets higher each year."
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