Abbotts Creative Print Ltd
Leicestershire, UK

“Today, we are able to produce a wider variety of jobs than ever before, in a much shorter time. And, we can do it much more cost effectively too.”
— David Loach, Business Development Director

Based in Leicestershire, UK, Abbotts Creative Print is the winner of the 2003 BPIF (British Printing Industries Federation) Best Use of Digital Print Award. The company’s ability to deliver high quality, marketing-based digital print solutions, has enabled it to build an enviable client portfolio, which includes national and international blue chip companies.

Established in 1904 as a commercial colour printer, Abbotts has withstood changes in the print industry through a willingness to embrace new technology. In 2001, looking to diversify its product offering and provide a total communications solution to its clients, the company invested in its first XEROX DocuColor 2060 digital colour press driven by a CREO SPIRE color server. A second was purchased within six months and the company has not looked back.

“Our digital print technology requirements are very demanding,” says David Loach, Business Development Director at Abbotts Creative Print. “The high standards our clients have come to expect are reflected in their expectations about the quality of digital work we produce, and our service commitments to customers require almost 100% reliability from our equipment. In our opinion, the image quality we achieve on our DocuColors is remarkable and since installation, our SPIRE RIPs have hardly missed a beat. Furthermore, the SPIRE’s data processing capability is very impressive, which is vital as we really push the boundaries of the software when it comes to personalisation.”

ABBOTTS digital division provides much more than an alternative to small-offset printing. Its understanding of its customers’ markets and their marketing requirements enables the company to lead the brief with design solutions that are developed with digital printing in mind and all that it can offer in the way of personalisation, fast turnaround and colour quality.

“Our XEROX DocuColor 2060s and SPIRE color servers enable us to produce very complex work with variable images. As far as our customers are concerned, image quality is more important than the production speed of the press, and with our skilled operators and accurate calibration, we consistently produce work of the highest quality. Customers are amazed at the results, and we have the testimonials to prove it,” continues David Loach.

In 2003, Abbotts Creative Print won a very competitive pitch for British Telecom’s online telegram business. The service, now managed by international telegrams company, Unitel, utilizes many of Abbotts resources as it involves the development and management of the telegram website; creation of 26 different designs from Santagrams to wedding congratulations; handling of orders and production of the telegrams. It is an impressive task with orders downloaded at 3pm, processed through the SPIRE color servers, printed on the DocuColor 2060s, trimmed, creased, folded, inserted into envelopes and, with all postal documentation duly completed, collected by the Royal Mail at 5pm each weekday.

“Telegrams have existed for over 150 years and we take the responsibility for their continuation seriously. The messages they convey are very important to both the senders and recipients, and our client’s reputation for ensuring delivery simply cannot be jeopardised. With such a time critical service, it is vital to have confidence in your technology and the DocuColor/SPIRE solution gives us the reliability we need,” says David Loach.

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bezier Corporate Print
London, UK

“The XEROX DocuColor 2060 and the CREO SPIRE color server have enabled us to offer innovative, added-value solutions to our customers that they previously did not think possible. Creating 100% variable targeted documents, in full color litho quality is not a Utopian idea for the future. It is an elite service that we offer right now to our clients.”
— Gary Knights, Managing Director

bezier Corporate Print, specializing in point-of-sale printing, is part of the prestigious bezier Group. Focusing on the color market, bezier Corporate Print expertise lies in personalization projects. Its customer-driven, print-based solutions are an integral part of the company’s business model. Representing a new breed of print and logistics management, bezier Corporate Print provides more than just prints; it offers an end-to-end solution for print and business communications, based on effective management of the customer's business needs. To this end, Bezier Corporate Print purchased a XEROX DocuColor 2060 printer driven by a CREO SPIRE color server and a CREO DARWIN Desktop variable information (VI) software package.

Gary Knights, Managing Director at bezier Corporate Print, says, “We use our equipment for a variety of applications, including short run printing of small documents, which would not be cost effective without digital production. More importantly, we use the equipment to show our clients how customization and personalization can bring a new dimension to the materials they are producing. I suppose you could say that we’re trying to steer our clients in the direction of one-to-one marketing. This is now a cost-effective reality, and by demonstrating the impact it has on response rates, we persuade them that the possible extra costs are in fact an investment.”

bezier Corporate Print uses the CREO DARWIN Desktop to produce a range of VI documents. “We are currently working with several major blue chip corporate clients to produce complete variable targeted marketing and financial projects,” notes Mr. Knights. “The SPIRE, combined with the DocuColor 2060, delivers litho quality digital work. When we put our samples alongside samples of any other digital production device, they blow the competition out of the water for image quality.”

“The CREO SPIRE RIP has given us accurate color matching, while providing the very fast RIP we need for delivering thousands of variable documents. The color that is generated from the SPIRE is far superior to even its nearest rivals. The DocuColor 2060 is the most advanced digital press on the market, and the CREO SPIRE RIP complements and enhances that image quality and versatility.”

When asked to name the five most valuable features offered by the SPIRE color server, James Kenchington, Digital Manager at bezier Corporate Print, was quick to name image quality - “far in advance of its nearest rivals”; RIP speed, VPS and Gallop function - “great for fast turnaround work”; ease of use - “no major training needed for an experienced prepress operator”, in-depth functionality - “professionally oriented interface”; and the ability to change job parameters after a job is RIPed - “another great way to save time”.

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CMD Services, Inc.
Duluth, Georgia

“We have not found any other solution that matches the robustness of the software environment of Creo and Xerox. The SPIRE software technology environment gives us exactly what we need for our workflow.”
— Tim Peacock, Director of Print Technology

CMD Services, Inc. is a nationally recognized leader in the digital print and order fulfillment industry. Specializing in the production, warehousing and distribution of training, benefits, marketing and financial materials, it serves a blue-chip client list of Fortune 500 companies, major training and benefits companies, financial institutions, advertising agencies and consulting firms.

With most of CMD Services’ work data-driven, a hallmark of the company’s success is its longstanding commitment to providing customers with best-in-class technology and solutions, supported by outstanding customer support. Ensuring that it meets the technology challenge, CMD Services has been steadfast in its use of XEROX digital printers with CREO color servers, beginning with a SX3000 for the DocuColor 40, and graduating to a SPIRE color server for the DocuColor 100. Today, it relies on two DocuColor 2060s, each driven by a SPIRE Color Server. A single operator handles both machines, running them non-stop throughout every shift to produce 180,000 impressions per month.

“Our volume had grown and our production standards had advanced to the point that we were looking for a solution that would give us more flexibility, more options,” said Kim Vilardi, Manager of Creative Services at CMD Services. “It was right when the DocuColor 2060 was being launched, so we got one of the first SPIRE color servers with VIPP capabilities.”

The benefit of CMD Services’ early purchase was immediately obvious: “It enables us to offer more capabilities to our clients,” Ms. Vilardi explained. “With the increased speed and volume that we have achieved, we’ve also become much more productive.” Tim Peacock, Director of Print Technology added: “Our color printing volume and revenues have grown 100 percent since we put in the first DocuColor 2060 and SPIRE 18 months ago. We’re very pleased.”

Beyond setting new productivity records for itself, CMD Services is also winning national awards, using its DocuColor 2060-SPIRE color server solution. Its “Year in the Life” benefit statement job for a nationwide healthcare provider, won the 2002 XEROX Variable Application of the Year Award. Two-sided full-color piece, containing 102 variable elements, won acclaim for design and complexity of variable information. “The SPIRE was instrumental in this application,” said Ms. Vilardi. “The coding was very complex, and the ability to preview on the SPIRE was key.”

Maintaining their technological edge, CMD Services is one of the first companies to test run on the new SPIRE-driven DocuColor IGEN3, with very favorable results. Mr. Peacock commented: “We are very impressed with the quality of print and the robustness of the software.” CMD Services will keep moving forward in innovation and productivity with the DocuColor 2060 and the SPIRE Color Server. “Outside of the DocuColor IGEN3, the quality of output is one of the highest we have seen,” concluded Ms. Viladi. “We’ve compared it to some other systems, but the combination of the DocuColor 2060 and SPIRE simply makes it the strongest solution.”

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Colour Tech Marketing, Mississauga
Ontario, Canada

“I can pull out a business card file that we printed six months ago and be able to color match it. That to me is a big advantage.”
— Don Copeland, Manager

Colour Tech Marketing Inc. based in Mississauga, Ontario, with offices in the US is a graphic design and printing production company. Colour Tech Marketing provides personalized marketing materials to real estate agents across North America, including Royal LePage, Century21, Re/Max, and Exit. Colour 4 You, a division of Colour Tech Marketing, supplies printers, copy shops, and designers with short-run digital and offset print jobs for their clients, some of which include Microsoft, Molly Maid, and the Firkin Group of Pubs.

With a XEROX DocuColor 6060 and DocuColor 2045, both driven by CREO SPIRE color servers, Colour Tech Marketing produces high-quality business cards, letterhead, brochures, postcards, labels, flyers, and sell sheets with exceptional color fidelity. For Colour Tech Marketing, color consistency is essential. "Our clients want to be able to come back time after time knowing their corporate colors will be maintained," explains Don Copeland of Colour Tech Marketing. "We can't use pink for Royal Lepage when their color is red. Repeatability is very important for us."

Colour Tech Marketing moved into digital printing four years ago with a XEROX DocuColor 2045 Digital Color Press. Unable to accurately reproduce color with their initial color server, they turned to Creo. "We found the SPIRE color server’s repeatability was much better, and that was one of the major reasons for choosing Creo," says Copeland. "It also gave us a lot more control over the color that was being produced on the DocuColor 2045."

The SPIRE color server's solid color-management capabilities allow Colour Tech Marketing to continually meet their existing clients' needs and attract new customers. "We won the Molly Maid business from a commercial printer that couldn't get consistency of color for their logo," recalls Copeland. "Now we produce business cards for all of Molly Maid's franchises throughout North America and the Caribbean. We're able to come up with that dark blue card every time."

When Colour Tech Marketing was faced with the challenge of achieving consistent color and brightness levels between different paper stocks, Creo recommended the PROFILE WIZARD Digi. "The Digi was very easy to use. The step-by-step documentation took us right through it," says Copeland. "We've already noticed a big difference. During calibration, and we calibrate quite often around here, we put all the different stocks through with the sample file. Now they stay consistent after calibration.”

Copeland continues: "I can pull out a business card file that we printed six months ago and be able to match that. That to me is a big advantage. It means that customers will keep coming back because they get what they're looking for."

Colour Tech Marketing also credits the PROFILE WIZARD Digi with increasing productivity. "Before introducing the Digi, we were only able to achieve color consistency between different stocks through manual manipulation of the colors. It slowed us down like crazy," recalls Copeland. "We're in business, and we want to be able to make our business more efficient. CREO solutions enable us to do that."

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dsi group, Rainham
Essex, UK

“By partnering with Creo and Xerox, we developed and manage a unique production solution for producing personalised travel documents within tight deadlines and with 100% accuracy.”
— Fraser Church, Business Development Director

The Direct Solutions International (dsi) group, headquartered in Rainham, Essex, UK is a service company for integrated document management, print, mailing and distribution solutions. dsi group provides business-to-business and business-to-consumer communication products to blue chip clients in several business sectors, including financial services, charities, local government, insurance, and the travel industry.

dsi group is a leader in digital variable data printing for the travel industry. Since 2002, it has been running the largest fully-variable, digital print application in the world, which revolutionised traditional travel documentation. dsi group has two of Europe’s first XEROX IGEN3 presses and three DocuColor 2060s, all driven by CREO’s Spire color servers. The company produces personalised travel documentation for TUI UK, owner of the Thompson Travel Group. This includes tickets, document booklets with flight information, departure airport (location and baggage allowance), resort and hotel information (including money vouchers), and details of the travel agency that sold the holiday. There are even pre-printed personalised luggage tags.

“Most companies see digital colour as efficient short-run printing, but for us it’s a way to deliver products based on customer profiles. TUI travel documents rival the colour and quality of offset printing. They reflect the right combination of print experience, programming skills and technology partners,” says Fraser Church, Business Development Director.

“While developing the production process for TUI, it was clear it had to be a colour digital job,” added Mr. Church. “We approached Xerox and Creo, started trials using four DocuColor 2060s with Spire CSX2000 color servers, and went live five months later. Later, the IGEN3 and its greater capacity allowed us to meet holiday requirements.

”Variable information is received as legacy data from TUI, processed through dsi’s proprietary AnyDoc platform into a print-ready file, and sent through the Spire digital workflow. The data is sorted by number of passengers, holiday brands, and the information for each holiday. Today, dsi group outputs 100 A4 digital colour pages per minute (25 million annually).

“Spire is the only digital colour server that can handle such a complex job” says Scott Bramley, Technical Director of dsi digital and Talisman Print. “Its Variable Print Specification file format whips the data through; other RIPs can’t keep up with the printing.” Mr. Bramley praises the Spire for excellent colour handling. “We were awarded the TUI contract based on offset printing, so the digital printing had to match offset quality - and it did. Colour consistency is also crucial, since we run three DocuColor’s and two IGEN3’s at the same time and the match has to be perfect. Our XEROX digital presses run 24 hours and we produce over a million travel booklets a year. We need stability and reliability for peace of mind, and Spire delivers this.” It means that customers will keep coming back because they get what they're looking for."

“Our data-handling capabilities with Spire and IGEN3 technology enabled us to achieve “impossible” volume and personalisation. Partnering with Creo and Xerox has made future possibilities seem endless,” concludes Mr. Church.

As a digital print industry management consultancy, DocuGlobal provides comprehensive printing solutions to clients in both the equipment and applications.

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The Document Centre
Carol Stream, Illinois

“The SPIRE, with the DocuColor printer and the DARWIN VI authoring tool, enables us to offer a cost-effective, production-efficient system for producing a whole new level of personalized applications. This solution gives our customers increased response rates, closer customer identification, and improved brand awareness. ”
— Dave Rohe, President

The Document Centre specializes as an outsource vendor for the production and distribution of technical and marketing literature. It serves a wide range of customers, from billion dollar national accounts to smaller companies with specialized repetitive projects. Bringing together all phases of production under one roof, The Document Centre customizes workflow and databases to support the unique needs of each customer.

Working with DocuColor 2045 and 2060 printers, both driven by the SPIRE Color Server, The Document Centre focuses on offering customers a full digital solution. Dave Rohe, president of The Document Centre, said the heritage behind the CREO SPIRE is a valuable element in The Document Centre’s marketing. “Creo gives us the advantage of its accumulated background in commercial print. They understand trapping and Pantone colors, giving us expertise that others just can’t match. This expertise also increases the comfort level for our customers who are more used to offset printing.”

The complete SPIRE/DARWIN/DocuColor solution gives The Document Centre “a dependable, predictable, smooth way to generate complex variable data files,” said Mr. Rohe. One job involves 120 photos, 58 variable information rules running out of a spreadsheet with 45 columns of data. It takes The Document Centre team five days of programming and about four days of production to produce 9,000 eight-page documents. “With some other systems, we just couldn’t do it,” said Mr. Rohe. “The sheer number of variables would overwhelm almost any other system, and if we were to use a non-DARWIN variable information tool, it would probably double our set-up time.”

The Document Centre is dedicated to growing its business by focusing on variable information. Mr. Rohe notes that to achieve this, they have to invest heavily in educating customers about the power personalization can bring to print marketing campaigns. “The days of ‘Dear Occupant’ are gone,” according to Mr. Rohe. “Response rates for non-personalized documents are typically less than half a percent. Independent studies and our own experience have shown us that heavy personalization improves response rates by about 500 percent.”

“The numbers can really grow,” continued Mr. Rohe. “A year ago, we were doing print runs of 5,000 to 15,000 tops, but now we’re quoting highly variable runs of half a million.” After an initial education period of about six months, The Document Centre is seeing a strong return on its investment. “Our variable business has increased by 50% over the past six months. I anticipate our overall business doubling over the next year, with virtually all of that growth coming from color variable data applications.”

The Document Centre is already taking steps to fuel its growth on into the future. Originally a beta site for the SPIRE Color Server, the Company is now scheduled for one of the first installations in the Mid-West of XEROX DocuColor IGEN3 high-speed printer. The SPIRE will be the only third-party server offered with the new generation printer.

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TBC Digital
Teterboro, New Jersey

“We’ve gone from $1.6 million in sales to a projected $2.5 million this year. We’ve definitely taken advantage of the CREO SPIRE and XEROX IGEN3, 100 percent.”
— Chad Logan, vice president

TBC Digital is a digital printing shop offering full-service electronic prepress, wide-format poster output, binding, and mailing services. Magazines, short-run books, mailers, business cards, postcards, retail signage, bottleneck tags, and menu inserts are just some of the pieces produced by TBC Digital on their XEROX DocuColor 2045 and IGEN3 Digital Production Press. CREO SPIRE color servers drive both devices.

For TCB Digital, it was the CREO SPIRE color server that assured a clean transition to the XEROX IGEN3 Digital Production Press.

"At first, we wanted a front end by Creo Print On-Demand Solutions operating our equipment because Creo PODS means color," explains Chad Logan, vice president of TBC Digital. "We also found that the SPIRE color server interface is very user friendly. Our operators, who came from a prepress environment, very easily relate to the controls on the RIP and don’t have many questions after training.

"We were able to make a very clean transition from our DocuColor 2045 and 2060 to the IGEN3 press, because the SPIRE color server for IGEN3 worked almost the same as our first SPIRE front end," recounts Logan. "Training our operators was fast. I think we made the transition within a week."

According to Logan, the CREO SPIRE color server and XEROX IGEN3 Digital Production Press and have dramatically improved productivity. "We currently print about 500,000 impressions per month on the IGEN3 press. That rate has been rising every month for the past two years. And I think that we'll be somewhere in the 600,000 impression ratio pretty soon," he says.

With the SPIRE color server and IGEN3 press, TBC Digital is able to meet its customers’ tight timelines. "Last-minute turnaround is now the rule rather than the exception for us," says Logan. “We’re able to meet the deadlines our customers want: 24 hours or less.”

Since introducing the IGEN3 press, TBC Digital has attracted new clients, leading to higher revenues. "We’ve gone from $1.6 million in sales to a projected $2.5 million this year. We've definitely taken advantage of the CREO SPIRE and XEROX IGEN3, 100 percent," says Logan.

"We're getting many compliments from our customers in terms of color and quality with our print. When using the IGEN3 press, we're now able to print on many different types of substrates without any problem with permanency."

Logan is equally impressed with the level of customer service TBC Digital has received. "When there's a real issue that needs to be fixed or something that we found that could be improved on the SPIRE color server or IGEN3 press, we found that people are more than willing to listen. The responsiveness has really been excellent for us."

Overall, Logan attributes TBC Digital's ongoing success to the IGEN3 press and its SPIRE color server. "I really don't think we would have been able to weather some of the ups and downs of the economy without having a leg up on our competition with the IGEN3 press, and so far we've been very happy with our SPIRE front end," he concludes.

"We see ourselves expanding with another digital press in the near future, and it's going to need another front end. We definitely see CREO SPIRE color server being that front end."

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Foto Lamprechter
Innsbruck, Austria

"The CREO SPIRE digital color server has proven to be far superior to the company's former color server. In terms of reliability and efficiency, it is in a league of its own"
— Peter Musch, Production Manager, Foto Lamprechter

Foto Lamprechter is an Innsbruck-based photographic dealer with its own digital printing studio and approximately 60 employees. The company introduced two new products targeted at digital photographers, the FOTOBOOK and the FOTOBOOK Index. Already a success among Foto Lamprechter customers, the FOTOBOOK and FOTOBOOK Index are produced on the company’s XEROX IGEN3 110 Digital Production Press, which is driven by a CREO SPIRE digital color server.

Foto Lamprechter is enjoying expanding sales of its new FOTOBOOK products with the successful pairing of the CREO SPIRE digital color server and the XEROX IGEN3 110 Digital Production Press. The company initially conceived the FOTOBOOK and the FOTOBOOK Index to help boost the dramatically declining demand for traditional photographic processing. Today, only a fraction of digitally photographed images are processed into prints. “That is why we have reflected on how to persuade customers to have their pictures processed. With digital printing in particular, there is a wide range of interesting possibilities,” explains Peter Musch, Production Manager.

The FOTOBOOK is a completely finished photo album with up to 84 pictures that is available in formats of either 13 x 18 cm or 9 x 13 cm. The FOTOBOOK Index is a brochure with up to 672 individual thumbnail photographs—ideal for archiving photos—that replaces the classic contact sheet. Both products are being offered at very attractive prices, designed to appeal to a wide range of customers. For Musch, print quality is extremely important because the FOTOBOOK is compared directly to the traditional photograph. “Thanks to the Creo SPIRE digital color server, we have had hardly any complaints so far, and when we did, it turned out that this was due to the quality of the original image data,” he says. Musch has also found the SPIRE digital color server’s hot folder function and imposition tools to be indispensable.

The SPIRE digital color server has proven to be far superior to the company’s former color server in terms of reliability and efficiency. “Our former RIP was extremely unstable and unsupervised production was simply out of the question,” recalls Musch. “It required 75 minutes for a 300- page order. The SPIRE color server managed the same job in less than 15 minutes.”

“ The IGEN3 digital press represents an absolute quantum leap for us as far as achievable quality and productivity is concerned. The IGEN3 digital press can show its strengths, especially in the choice of printing materials,” continues Musch. The SPIRE color server’s efficiency, flexibility, and speed are what make this possible.

Foto Lamprechter started the FOTOBOOK project in September 2004, and within four months, more than 1,200 FOTOBOOKs had been sold. This achievement has encouraged the company to widen the sale of the FOTOBOOK family throughout the photography industry. More than 100 dealers in Germany and Austria are now successfully selling Foto Lamprechter’s products with increasing profitability.

Musch concludes: “We are convinced that these products are ideal for specialized photographic dealers. They bring the customers back into the shops, the profit margin is satisfactory for the dealer, and we can make full use of our equipment—an absolute win-win situation.”

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bd3
Surrey, UK

“Variable Information Printing, using CREO Spire color servers and XEROX DocuColor digital presses, enables us to enhance our clients’ marketing materials, by including personalisation into the designs and producing high quality colour products with a fast turnaround.”
— David Scott, Managing Director, bd3

Based in Surrey, UK, bd3 Ltd. is a print, design and marketing services agency. The company produces high quality, fast turnaround ‘print on demand’ for a broad range of industries. Products include brochures, flyers and invitations, in print runs from one to twenty thousand.

“Compared to most other print and design agencies, we go beyond plain print production. We offer solutions that raise the value of our clients’ marketing and focus on the details throughout the production cycle. It’s what happens before, during and after production that preserves the quality and value of our print products,” says Vicki Baumann, Director at bd3.

After a comprehensive search for a digital press, Managing Director, David Scott chose the Spire-Xerox combination as the best solution. The company started out with XEROX DocuColor 2060 and DocuColor 6060 digital presses. Both presses, driven by CREO Spire CSX2000 Color Servers, average 100,000 printed pages monthly. ”I had experience in digital printing, but found variable printing difficult and the presses expensive to run,” he explains. “I was satisfied with the DocuColor digital front end, but when they demonstrated the CREO Spire Color Server I was very impressed - this is the solution I wanted for bd3.”

“Print and colour quality, and ease-of-use, are priorities at bd3. The technology of the CREO color server and XEROX printers enabled us to output high quality print from the first day. Not many vendors can promise this without a trained operator to run their machines,” comments David Scott.

“Whenever problems occur, hardware support from Xerox is excellent and software upgrades downloaded from CREO’s 24-hour eCentral online service, outstanding. Minimum downtime is critical for on-time delivery,” added David, “so our print team is qualified to diagnose faults rapidly and make repairs using parts stored in-house.”

Praising the Spire color server, David explained, “The automation tools are very useful. RGB files are effortlessly separated into CMYK, and job planning is straightforward. I like the way Spire stores the calibration for each job, since this is reset every time the paper stock is changed. Reprints need consistency from job-to-job, since a main benefit of digital printing is giving customers the quantities they need at any time.”

He comments, “I found VIP on other vendor devices unstable and complicated; however, Spire is dependable and easy to use. We are confident that the software can support complex jobs and plan to offer customers personalisation where it will add most value.”

Finally, David Scott is enthusiastic about the image quality: “The colour capability is just stunning, especially on large areas of solids and tints. It’s a pleasure to see what can be achieved. When we send our own brochure, customers who understand colour are immediately impressed by the quality.” David Scott concludes. “We believe we are leading the way for a change in perception and in educating the industry about the realities of digital print. The quality of the CREO Spire –XEROX DocuColor solution is helping us do this.”

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Color DPI
Panama City, Panama

“The combination of the CREO server with the DocuColor is what makes it possible to have a machine that is totally reliable. It’s like a workhorse, with very consistent color and quality.”
— Gilberto Guardia, President, Color DPI

Color DPI, a leading provider of digital printing services in Panama, is a company of firsts. The first print shop in Latin America to install a XEROX DocuColor 6060 and Spire color server, it is also Panama’s first (and so far only) printer to offer variable printing (for which they use CREO’s Darwin VI authoring tool). Serving a broad range of companies and advertising agencies, Color DPI prints anything from short-run business cards through to long-run full-color variable printing jobs. Almost all their work is in color and 40% involves variable information.

Color DPI’s first machine was a DocuColor 100, with an SX3000T from Creo’s forerunner – a combination that did not prove successful for them. Due to that experience, Color DPI switched to a different digital front end for the DocuColor 12. They had fully intended to stay with the same server provider for the DocuColor 6060, but one short demo of the Spire Color Server changed everything.

“I went to the lab and saw the DocuColor with the Spire and I just fell in love with the Spire,” Gilberto Guardia, President of Color DPI, recalled. After seeing side-by-side demos of the DocuColor 6060 with the Spire and with the competitor server, Mr. Guardia had no doubts about the color server of choice for him. “I was convinced I would get more by using Creo.”

Key to Color DPI’s decision was the way the Spire color server handles color and the color quality which was a major factor for them. The advanced imposition capabilities were also important. “More than 90% of the things we print go through a CREO imposition template because the art is smaller than the sheet. Previously we had to create multiple copies of the art and impose them ourselves. Now we just deal with one copy, and the imposition is handled by the Spire. We get better use of the sheet, which means reduced waste.”

Once the new CREO-XEROX solution was installed, Color DPI wasted no time in getting into production. Mr. Guardia reported that the learning curve lasted no more than a few days: “With the Spire, it was almost plug and play.” Within six months, Color DPI easily outstripped its production goals, printing an average of 80,000 impressions each month.

One of the more challenging projects that Color DPI has run on its Spire and DocuColor 6060 was an 80,000-impression, variable data loyalty program for a major telecom carrier. It was printed in just a couple of days of print time spread over several weeks (to accommodate other jobs).

As the digital printing pioneer in Panama, Color DPI’s goal is to move beyond variable text – to create a market for variable images and to position digital printing as a powerful tool for individualized marketing. Color DPI will look to Creo and Xerox to help make it happen. “Our experience with the Spire and the support I have had from Creo for Darwin and the Spire is very important. We couldn’t get better service than what we’re getting from Creo,” said Mr. Guardia. “If I have to buy another DocuColor 6060, I wouldn’t dream of buying a server that wasn’t from Creo.”

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DocuGlobal, Inc.
Atlanta, Georgia

“Our customers rely on us to come up with the optimum solution for their company. Therefore we choose XEROX presses, driven by Spire color servers, as we feel comfortable in the knowledge that we’ve chosen the very best and we know that our customers will feel the same.”
— Joel Rowland, President

DocuGlobal, Inc., an enabler to the digital print industry offers IT support, consulting services and a digital production facility for all types of service providers. The company’s goal is to simplify the digital printing and specifically Variable Information printing process and to reduce the costs associated with setting up such a venture. DocuGlobal provides production services, both on-and off-line, as well as variable information application suites designed to meet the needs of all digital print providers from start-ups to established companies.

As a digital print industry management consultancy, DocuGlobal provides comprehensive printing solutions to clients in both the equipment and applications spheres. Says Joel Rowland, President and founder of DocuGlobal, “We depend on the reliability of the equipment, not only to provide proof of concept to our customers, but to show them that it really works. Once we do that, printers realize that there is no discussion. The SPIRE consistently provides top quality in print.” He continues, “The SPIRE is a great front end for the XEROX digital presses. Together, they allow us to meet all our customers’ needs and more.”

When it comes to Variable Information, the right choice is clear, explains Rowland. “If a customer wants to do variable data printing, then the CREO Spire is the only real option. The flexibility of the Spire together with its robust platform allow our customers to perform even the most complex variable information jobs with the greatest ease.”

Rowland is well acquainted with Creo. In the industry for over a decade, Rowland was one of the first to purchase the initial servers in the SPIRE product line. DocuGlobal’s satisfaction with Creo extends to the customers to whom they recommend the purchase of XEROX digital presses, driven by SPIRE color servers. “We swear by our Creo and Xerox equipment,” he states emphatically.

Mentioning just a few of the Spire’s advantages, Rowland elaborates, “The CREO Spire is the only server that really allows us to take real advantage of VIPP. Its unique architecture and advanced capabilities assure data processing at the rated speed of the fastest digital presses on the market.” Rowland continues, “In addition, the SPIRE is the only product that lets printers do professional color calibration. The color capability of competitors is just not the same. They don’t allow you to play with color the same way.”

Summing up the company’s success, Rowland states, “We have had excellent feedback from customers using the Spire color server for XEROX digital color presses. In fact, the only real dilemma our customer face is which printer to choose, never what server they need to drive it – it’s always the Spire. Once we’ve shown them what we can do with the SPIRE and Xerox combination, there’s no holding back.”

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Druckwerker
Vienna, Austria

“If one values quality, reliability and user friendliness, the road leads straight to CREO’s Spire color server. Only in combination with a Spire color server, can all the capabilities of the Xerox DocuColor be fully exploited.”
— Hannes Fischer,Managing Director, Druckwerke

“The Vienna based digital print provider Druckwerker, has successfully created a customized ice cream menu card for the ice cream maker Eskimo. The result - over 10,000 Austrian companies are now annually supplied with their own personalized ice cream menus. The driving force behind this creative process is the digital print solution provided by Creo and Xerox.”

In 1999, Eskimo introduced an initiative to provide its customers with personalized ice cream menus. Previously, ice cream vendors could only apply labels and pictures to existing pre-printed menu cards, adding prices in by hand, however, the menus looked unprofessional, and “for a standardized company image, this was not very advantageous”, explained Druckwerker’s Managing Director, Hannes Fischer.

Eskimo and the full-service agency, Zone 42, developed a concept for the production of customized ice cream menus. The number of different menus and the short runs of 1 to 100 copies made it evident from the beginning, that a project of this scale, could only be undertaken if it was both automated and digitally printed.

Druckwerker, an established professional digital print service provider in Vienna since the nineties, was approached. With eight employees, the company today handles the full production range of a digital print shop, from data preparation through to finishing, from business cards to catalogues and books. Starting out with a XEROX DocuColor 70, Druckwerker soon acquired two XEROX DocuColor 2045s. All three printers are powered by Spire color servers, selected because of their peerless reputation in the graphic arts industry for quality and performance.

“If one values quality, reliability and user friendliness, the road leads straight to CREO’s Spire color server”, declares Hannes Fischer, Managing Director, Druckwerker, “Only in combination with a Spire color server, can all the capabilities of the XEROX DocuColor be fully exploited. He added, “None of the other solutions deliver what they promise, especially with regard to quality and performance.”

Druckwerker designed a workflow to meet all the requirements from design creation to production and logistics. Initial estimates indicated that several thousand jobs would be handled annually, requiring a database publishing solution, which the Zone 42 agency co-developed with IT specialist group “nc digitalis”. With up to 22 layouts to choose from, customers select menus according to the design and price. The data is transmitted to Zone 42, where it is processed and sent to Druckwerker.

Hannes Fischer describes the workflow process, ”We sort and collect jobs, and when the volume exceeds 1000 copies, printing starts automatically. This guarantees us optimal utilisation of the press." In this production scenario, high-resolution images aren’t sent via the Internet. Instead, low-res images and CREO’s “Automatic Picture Replacement” (APR) function are used. This reduces the network traffic and speeds up data transmission. Druckwerker produces 100,000’s of customized menus annually. With these volumes, the performance and reliability of the color server is crucial to ensure a continuous production. Druckwerker is extremely pleased with the reliability of the CREO solution.

Eskimo insists on a high level of quality, which considering the volume of jobs, is no easy task. Creo recognizes the importance of superior performance and supports their user base with a selection of professional tools. “It becomes obvious very quickly, that behind CREO’s color server stands the experience of 20 years of colour management know-how," concludes Hannes Fischer.

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Edwin Buckley & Co Ltd
London, UK

“We produce between 40 and 60 thousand color pages a month, but have the capacity for more since our productivity has increased considerably with the Xerox-Creo solution.”
— Paul Buckley, Digital Print Manager, Edwin Buckley & Co Ltd

In 1967, a family business, Edwin Buckley & CO, was established just outside the city of London to print record sleeves. Today Edwin Buckley & Co Ltd offers the latest in printing technology. Using traditional techniques, the printer provides a broad range of professional print services to its customers, which include blue-chip public limited liability companies (PLCs), local and national government bodies, and other leading agencies.

“We began digital printing five years ago because we believed it was going to be very significant in the future. Today, we can’t see how we could get by without it," states Paul Buckley, Digital Print Manager at Edwin Buckley and Co Ltd. Edwin Buckley understands the importance of keeping abreast of technological developments. By adding digital printing, the company was able to offer a short-run, fast-turnaround service for business cards and compliment slips, which proved very useful to its city-based business customers.

“Digital had become an important alternative revenue stream for us, but after a number of years we needed to offer more. We wanted to improve quality and achieve results that were close to litho color printing so that we could pursue work on jobs we had once turned away—anything with flat tints, solids, or grey text,” explains Paul Buckley.

In 2005, Edwin Buckley brought in a XEROX DocuColor 8000 Digital Press driven by a CREO Spire CXP8000 color server. “We tested all the alternatives, but the Xerox-Creo system was easily the leader in its class. It has the largest sheet size, is the fastest, has the best PANTONE matching, and can print on heavier stocks. Its print is more durable and the quality is excellent,” says Paul Buckley.

“The Spire features that I like best are its spot color editor and automatic imposition capabilities, which save time compared to our old digital press,” continues Paul Buckley. “We use the spot color editor to identify the best possible match for Pantone spot colors, and once the best match is made, the information is captured by the Spire color server so that it can be repeated in later jobs. With our old digital press, we had to start from scratch each time.”

Spire variable information features and the CREO Darwin VI authoring tool have also proved useful to Edwin Buckley; many city offices prefer to send their mail-merge jobs to be printed on the XEROX DocuColor rather than doing them in-house.

“We started to offer one-to-one marketing awhile ago, but it was slow to take off. Now that it has taken off, we have the Xerox-Creo solution, which is much more powerful, and provides us with more control and powerful troubleshooting tools. It is a solution designed for repeatability and so re-runs are no problem. In the past we could only support one-off jobs, so we are delighted with our new capabilities,” concludes Paul Buckley.

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Österreichische Staatsdruckerei
Vienna, Austria

“The Spire color server is exceptionally good in the field of color reproduction. Only four colors are available in digital printing, making it difficult to meet the high quality requirements of Österreichische Post. Spire enables us to exceed their expectations.”
— Reinhart Gausterer, General Director

Österreichische Post has made philately exciting again with a series of innovations, including personalized stamps. A huge commercial success, the personalized stamps are produced by Österreichische Staatsdruckerei in Vienna using a CREO Spire color server and a XEROX DocuColor 6060 Digital Color Press.

The Österreichische Post project, called "Meine Marke" (My Stamp), aims to give stamps a new look by allowing customers to create their own personal stamps. Starting in 2003, Österreichische Post went further than other postal administrations in exploiting the opportunities for personalization. "Instead of just personalizing a tab, we wanted customers to decide on the design of the stamp," says Dr. Erich Haas, head of the philately department at Österreichische Post. Given that personalized stamps can be used as postage stamps, steps needed to be taken to combat counterfeits.

Österreichische Staatsdruckerei (OeSD), a world leader in stamp printing, stepped in at this stage to implement their expertise in security and stamp printing. The printer developed a process for safeguarding against counterfeits. This involves adding the word "Österreich" and the value of the stamp in Euros (€0.55) to a preprinted border using photogravure and a special security ink. As with bank notes, the security ink creates a tilting effect that cannot be reproduced with a scanner or laser printer.

The entire workflow is processed online—from ordering through to printing and billing—at a user-friendly Web site (www.meine-marke.at). The only manual intervention required is a content check to ensure that the image is politically and morally innocuous.

After the design is approved by Österreichische Post, a PDF of the stamp is e-mailed to OeSD. CREO Spire CXP6000 color server becomes an important component in the fully automated workflow. Using Spire hot folders, an operator can automatically trigger a range of tasks—imposition of the stamp, color management, and preview generation—by dragging the PDF into the portrait or landscape hot folders. The customer's personal design is printed digitally within the preprinted stamp borders.

OeSD chose the Spire color server for its comprehensive automation tools and high production levels: the system currently handles 400 orders a month, and rising. The Spire color server drives a DocuColor 6060 Digital Color Press, which produces 60 sheets of stamps every minute. The DocuColor 6060 handles the gummed and preprinted paper without any difficulty.

"The Spire color server is particularly good in the field of color reproduction. Only four colors are available in digital printing, making it difficult to meet the high-quality requirements of Österreichische Post. Spire enables us to exceed their expectations," explains Reinhart Gausterer, General Director of OeSD. In the first four months after this application was launched, 1.4 million personalized stamps were printed. With the help of OeSD, the Spire color server, and the DocuColor 6060 Digital Color Press, Österreichische Post has managed to take an existing product and turn it into something new and exciting.

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eXpansys
Manchester, UK

“We chose Xerox because of its pedigree — the print and color quality are superb! With CREO Spire, we can link the solution to our back-end system, and integrate it seamlessly with our finishing equipment.”
— Ian Harrison, Content and Design Manager

eXpansys is the largest online specialist and catalogue retailer of wireless technology in Europe and North America. The company’s products include personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, and laptop PCs, as well as storage and networking accessories.

eXpansys was established in 1998 to promote a single make of PDA via the Web. It soon snowballed from a software-development business to a highly successful retail business with outlets in France, Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States, with its head office in Manchester, England. eXpansys produces numerous marketing materials printed in English, French, and simplified Chinese. A 12-page catalogue, flyers, and various other promotional pieces are delivered with every product purchased from the company’s Web site to facilitate additional sales. The company also sends regular mailers to its extensive customer base.

In the past, the production work for this material was handled by a design agency, which outsourced the printing. However, due to rapid pricing changes—sometimes weekly—the catalogue and other items were often outdated by the time they were ready for print.

“We needed to retain control over the production of our marketing materials so that we could ensure that the right information was being issued at the right time,” says Ian Harrison, Content and Design Manager at eXpansys. “We decided to bring production in-house and wanted a solution that could link into our back-end system so that we could rapidly update new pricing and marketing information.”

After a thorough research process, Ian and his team chose a XEROX DocuColor 6060 digital color press driven by a CREO Spire CXP6000 color server that is complemented with a Horizon Bookletmaker. Since installation, the company has printed in excess of 1.3 million full-color A3 pages.

“We chose Xerox because of its pedigree and the fact that it could integrate seamlessly with our finishing equipment. We are very pleased with the results—the print and color quality are superb,” continues Ian Harrison.

In addition to gaining greater control over the production of its marketing materials, eXpansys is also benefiting from the value-added business features of the CREO Spire color server. At the top of this list are the server’s accounting capabilities, which track all products that have been issued and keeps a record of items in stock. “This feature is especially useful if we have a breakdown in communication between the head office and the warehouse, and means we have a reliable record of what exactly has been done. The ability of the DocuColor and Spire solution to integrate both upstream and downstream to our business and finishing systems, makes it much more than a high-quality printing system,” concludes Ian Harrison.

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Act+/Palmer Printing
Chicago, Illinois

“The CREO PODS Spire color server is the best. Creo Print On-Demand Solutions has the most experience in digital prepress. They're the choice for any front end that you want to drive a digital press or digital platesetter. Since they're also the leaders in variable, the Spire color server seems like a logical choice.”
— Ed Rossini, President

Act+/Palmer Printing is a commercial printer that has recently introduced digital printing into its service offering. With its two XEROX IGEN3 110 Digital Production Presses driven by CREO PODS Spire for IGEN3 color servers and its KODAK offset workflow, comprised of the KODAK Lotem Quantum platesetter and the KODAK Brisque workflow solution, Act+/Palmer Printing produces collateral and direct mail pieces for Chicago financial institutions and agencies.

Act+/Palmer Printing first turned to digital printing to “give customers a better product and a larger range of services.” The printer has not been disappointed. “When you’re talking variable, and you're talking quick turnaround times, and you're talking cost per page on the lower quantity, it's a very easy decision to go digital,” says Ed Rossini, President of Act+/Palmer Printing.

“Creo PODS and Xerox have helped us become more competitive,” explains Rossini. “We can do more services in-house as opposed to sending those items out or refusing to do those jobs.”

Rossini estimates that anywhere between 900,000 to 1.5 million pages are printed per month on the XEROX printer’s IGEN3 110 Digital Production Presses. “The XEROX IGEN3 press was a good choice because it does give us commercial-quality color,” says Rossini.

The CREO PODS Spire for IGEN3 color server was initially chosen for its variable data printing capabilities. “We had two choices of front ends,” recalls Rossini. “The Spire color server seemed to handle variable data better, and that is where I see the future of this business running—100% variable work.”

Rossini sees the benefit of unifying its offset and digital operations. “Saving time and sharing server space would be the advantages of a unified workflow. If I have someone that's out of the plant I can have someone from the other department fill in, because the workflow is the same.”

Act+/Palmer Printing is on its way to achieving a unified workflow. “We've integrated our prepress on the commercial side of things with our prepress on our digital side of things,” describes Rossini. “Currently we're upgrading our server to make that happen. I'd like to be able to move jobs seamlessly between the two departments and share resources.”

“I have heard people say that digital will consume commercial printing,” reflects Rossini. “Offset printing will become a dinosaur that's been put out to pasture. I think that that is not the case. There's always going to be a market for commercial printing. But I think that an integrated approach, a company that has both digital and commercial, is the right approach. There's a lot of work that will use both technologies and integrate them to add a lot of value to the customer’s dollar. The demand for digital printing will increase as it becomes less costly to produce. It will grow. And I'm excited about that.”

Rossini sums up his experience with the CREO PODS Spire for IGEN3 color server: “It is the best. Creo PODS has the most experience in digital prepress. They're the choice for any front end that you want to drive a digital press or digital platesetter. Since they're also the leaders in variable, the Spire digital color server seems like a logical choice. The Creo PODS Spire color servers will be the choice for us for the future because I know that the size of the company behind them will keep the product updated and cutting edge.”

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Act+/Palmer Printing
Chicago, Illinois

“DARWIN will help digital printers streamline their workflow. It's easier than other methods of creating VI jobs, so in the big picture, it will make them more efficient, it will make them more money, and it will give more value to their clients.”
— Peter Wagner, PrePress Operator

Act+/Palmer Printing is a commercial printer that introduced digital printing into its service offering a couple of years ago with the addition of two XEROX IGEN3 110 Digital Production Presses driven by CREO PODS Spire digital color servers. Combined with the CREO DARWIN VI authoring tool, the Spire color server allows Act+/Palmer Printing to produce variable data printing jobs for Chicago financial institutions and agencies.

Variable Data Printing (VDP) was one of the reasons Act+/Palmer Printing first incorporated digital printing into its plant. “That is where I feel the most profit-margin-laden work will lie, is in the variable market,” says Ed Rossini, President of Act+/Palmer Printing.

The CREO Spire color server was chosen for its VDP capabilities. “We had two choices of front ends,” recalls Rossini. “The Spire server seemed to handle variable data better, and that is where I see the future of this business running—100 percent variable work.”

“The Spire color server is probably without a doubt, the most versatile RIP for the IGEN3,” says Peter Wagner, Prepress Operator at Act+/Palmer Printing. “It handles all the VI file types—CREO VPS, XEROX VIPP, and a few others—that most other RIPs just aren't capable of handling. It's probably the most powerful tool that I've been able to use for doing variable printing.”

Wagner initially chose the DARWIN VI authoring tool because it was a QUARKXPRESS plug-in. “Being a QUARK user for many years, I definitely wanted something that worked invisibly with QUARK and didn't do too many out-of-the-ordinary processes.”

“I've been a DARWIN user for approximately two and a half years,” says Wagner. “I like it. I like the ease of use, I like the flexibility, and I like how seamlessly it integrates with QUARK and ADOBE INDESIGN.” Act+/Palmer Printing is currently using DARWIN 6.5.

The DARWIN VI authoring tool, a plug-in to both QUARKXPRESS and ADOBE INDESIGN, now operates on both MACINTOSH and WINDOWS platforms allowing more users to enjoy its robust VDP capabilities. With DARWIN, designers can create full-color personalized communications and produce complex variable data campaigns—text, graphics, charts, colors, layouts, backgrounds, and even entire pages can be dynamic.

“DARWIN enables us to accomplish variable programming a lot faster because we have a visual, more comfortable interface,” continues Wagner. “It's very straightforward and that, by itself, definitely streamlines the workflow.”

Since introducing digital printing and DARWIN, Act+/Palmer Printing has been producing increasingly more VDP jobs for its customers. “We're doing more and more variable programming as more people become aware of how powerful a tool the VI jobs are. I would approximate that 50 percent of my workflow consists, to some degree or another, of VI jobs,” says Wagner.

“We do direct mail programs every month or every other month for financial institutions, sending out everything from ‘save the date’ invites to special event notifications, to progress reports on projects that they have with their clients. We also do a lot of personalized invitations.”

Wagner highly recommends the DARWIN VI authoring tool to any digital printer. “It will help streamline their workflow. It's easier than other methods of creating VI jobs, so in the big picture, it will make them more efficient, it will make them more money, and it will give more value to their clients."

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Foxfire Printing and Packaging, Inc.
Upper Marlboro, Maryland

“With the Spire running the IGEN3, we can send tens of thousands of pages with variable data and lots of color to the printer. Creo’s VPS makes it possible for us to do jobs that are not feasible with any other solution.”
— John Ferretti, CEO

Foxfire Printing and Packaging, provides comprehensive graphic design, printing, website development, fulfillment, warehousing, POP advertising, and cost benefit analysis services. The company’s printing business has traditionally been dominated by offset production, but, over the past three years, Foxfire has dramatically expanded its capabilities, placing it at the leading edge of digital printing.

Foxfire took its first step into color digital printing with the XEROX DocuColor 2060, driven by the CREO Spire color server. Within two weeks, Foxfire’s operators were successfully using the Spire and DocuColor 2060 on VI production jobs. “The Creo- Xerox solution was easy to understand and easy to use,” recalled Foxfire CTO, Bob Hill, noting that they were very pleased with how quickly their operation became “very efficient, very controlled, with excellent results”.

This experience gave Foxfire the confidence to become one of the first to use XEROX DocuColor IGEN3 Digital Production Press driven by a CREO Spire color server. Since installing a beta version in October 2002, the Company has not looked back. “We are delighted with it. Within six months of getting it, any problems we had are gone, and the Spire server and IGEN3 are humming along, giving us really good color, and reliability” said Mr. Hill.

The Spire-IGEN3 solution enables Foxfire to take on for the first time complex color VI jobs and short-run full-color printing jobs. A major part of Foxfire’s business is producing signs for grocery chains, and they have now moved much of that work from offset to digital, enabling them to offer new capabilities to their customers. It is common for them to create unique sets of color signs for each store in a chain of thousands of stores.

“The major benefit of Spire color server and IGEN3 for these jobs is pure throughput,” said Mr. Hill. “We can use a variety of heavy and coated stocks, running at 100 pages per minute. Since the Spire server has been integrated with the IGEN3 regarding handling stocks and creating a stock library, we can predefine stocks and use them without any other setup other than loading the trays. That is a true step above.”

CEO, John Ferretti added: “The Spire server for the IGEN3 is powerful, with a large disk. The Spire color server can RIP 50,000 pages of color variable information, and to keep up with the iGen3’s production speed. This is a key benefit.”

The IGEN3 and Spire solution has enabled Foxfire to fulfill a dream for one long-time grocery chain client that wished for blackboard-style signs for the chain’s 200 stores. This requires Foxfire to produce up to 90,000 pages weekly, made up of 200 unique sign sets, with variable information and varied page sizes. “Without the Spire server and IGEN3, we couldn’t meet the volume or schedule. The total solution makes it feasible, and the consistent quality of the solid blacks is really amazing,” said Mr. Hill.

Foxfire has every intention of staying with Creo and Xerox. Bob Hill summed it up: “We are very happy to have gone the IGEN3 and Spire route. There’s no way we’re going to change a winning solution.”

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Hunter Lodge
Hertfordshire, UK

“To deliver clever communication solutions we select the best technology. As such, Spire is fast, reliable and especially easy to use. Show someone once and they begin to run it.”
— Andrew Wells, Production Director

Hunter Lodge, based in Hertfordshire, UK, is a marketing and design agency offering strategic expertise, brand development, direct marketing, advertising, design, multimedia, and print. Established in 1987, the company has a reputation for excellence and professional service. ustomers include health, local government and education authorities as well as blue chip internationals such as Compaq, Microsoft and MacDonald.

“Our quality results from combining commercially relevant thinking, creative design, strong project management and print expertise. We invest in the best technology to deliver clever, outstanding communication solutions,” says Andrew Wells, Production Director at Hunter Lodge.

Before the summer of 2002, Hunter Lodge outsourced its printing to local suppliers of offset or digital depending on the job. When developing a digital printing solution for Quadriga, the European market leader in providing in-room entertainment to hotels, Hunter Lodge recognized that digital variable information printing (VIP) was the best solution for Quadriga – less costly than offset, with faster turnaround times and comparable quality.

“The complexity of the job was staggering but we knew we could handle it with the right technology partners,” said Andrew Wells. “After thorough research, the combination of Xerox’s customer support and the clever way Spire handles variable data printing, won the day.” Hunter Lodge now boasts three XEROX DocuColor 2060 digital presses each driven by a CREO Spire CSX2000 color server.

Quadriga provides films, music videos and internet connection to rooms in 2,500 hotels based across 26 regions in Europe, Printed menu cards for each room detail the available films and show times, so each hotel has different data requirements like language and number of television channels.

Since a core competence of Hunter Lodge is data management, the company developed a database to handle the source data files from Quadriga and prepare them for print output. Andrew Wells explains: “Every month we receive two files from Quadriga: one lists the films, and one lists the hotel requirements like the number of menu cards needed and the design format. Our proprietary database queries the files to match the fixed information to each hotel. We then output records, with raw tagged data and definitions of each menu card, to CREO’s DARWIN Desktop variable information authoring application. Darwin pulls in the correct physical print data from its library of language and image templates, and creates a print-ready file. The Spire servers and DocuColor 2060 presses do the rest, producing excellent quality colour menu cards ready for finishing and shipping.”

The Spire/DocuColor digital variable printing solution has enabled Hunter Lodge to succeed with Quadriga, and market its digital capability. They envision an exciting future.

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NW Coughlin, Inc.
Livonia, Michigan

“The CREO Spire and XEROX DocuColor 2060 solution fills an important niche in higher end, full color printing. We can now provide our customers with a total digital printing service that is fast and cost effective. For example, on one variable information job, we have cut turnaround time to one-third of what it was, with a 20% lower cost.”
— John Kepshire, President

NW Coughlin, a full-service printing services supplier, provides data management, high-speed digital laser printing, offset printing, and complete lettershop and fulfillment services to manufacturers, agencies and institutions. The Company prints a broad range of applications, with variable information color jobs forming a growing portion of its business.

When NW Coughlin acquired a XEROX DocuColor 2060 printer in late 2000, the CREO Spire digital front-end was recommended as the server most suited for handling large amounts of variable color printing along with various other color applications. Since then, NW Coughlin has seen its color digital printing business grow – through the ability to produce high-quality jobs with a higher percentage of color variable information, faster and more cost effectively.

For example, NW Coughlin is now producing a quarterly marketing document for one of its major automotive company customers in significantly less time, while offering its customer a lower overall cost and a higher degree of flexibility. The job was originally set up on the DocuColor 40, but ran slowly due to the amount of variable information. Now, NW Coughlin is printing the job with 100% variable information, featuring an average of six different charts or graphs, in onethird the time and at 20 percent lower cost. “When it comes to graphically intense documents, it all boils down to speed,” said John Kepshire, president of NW Coughlin. “The Spire and DocuColor 2060 is much faster than our older systems. I can safely estimate that we have cut production times by around 50 percent.” Brian Sciatto, NW Coughlin’s network operations manager, added: “My overall impression of the Spire is that it is very reliable, quick and versatile. The RIP speed is a significant factor – we’re able to RIP even complex, variable information-heavy documents in about half the time we were able to before.”

When working with the Spire and the DocuColor 2060, increased speed has not come at the expense of quality. “Another advantage of the Spire, and the tools it comes with, is that it is much easier to match colors,” noted Mr. Sciatto. For NW Coughlin, this is an important marketing benefit because convincing color-conscious customers to move to a digital process can be a challenge. But, according to Mr. Kepshire, once companies recognize that the vast majority of their audience won’t be able to tell the difference between digital output off the DocuColor 2060 and offset output, they are more open to using a digital solution. “More and more of our customers are realizing that they can enjoy the speed benefits of digital printing without compromising on color in a meaningful way,” commented Mr. Kepshire.

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PrePart B.V.
Eindhoven, The Netherlands

“Because of the RIP speed of the CREO Spire Color Server, I can now take on high-volume variable data jobs that I used to let go because they would take too long to RIP.”
— Wim Helms, Manager

PrePart is a well-established full service digital printing bureau in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Offering everything from pre-press through to mailing services, from small format through to super wide printing, PrePart focuses on serving a demanding market of advertising agencies and marketing campaign bureaus that need perfect color brochures, banners, folders, and leaflets. Most jobs are characterized by a demand for high quality in low volume. Since its inception, PrePart has printed only in color, building a solid knowledge base of color that continues to serve it well as it begins to take on more variable printing and higher volume jobs.

PrePart has been working with XEROX digital printers and CREO heritage front ends since 1997, when they acquired their first DocuColor 40 and 70 machines, both with Scitex (now Creo) front ends. Most recently, the firm acquired a Xerox DocuColor 2045 digital color printer, originally running it with a Fiery front-end. In December 2001, the firm upgraded to a CREO Spire Color Server for the printer.

“We tested the CREO solutions at the XEROX demo site and were very impressed with the high-speed RIPping, particularly of variable data jobs that have a lot of images,” said Wim Helms, PrePart’s manager. “We decided to upgrade to the CREO Spire because it gave us competitive speed, with more quality advantages. Also it’s very stable, which is very important to us.”

Mr. Helms also praised the Spire for its ease of use and color management. “Making color corrections is simple, particularly because you can work with your own profiles,” he noted. “Our customers pay close attention to color quality and often they need small runs of digital printing that must have the same radiation and tone, and be parallel to their offset printing. The Spire can handle this kind of quality.”

Another benefit of the Spire is its ease of use. “It’s very easy to understand the structure of the RIP and the interface is quite easy to navigate. That’s important because the operators can get up to speed very quickly,” Mr. Helms said.

Beyond the immediate color quality and ease of use considerations, moving over to the Spire color servers was also a strategic decision, providing PrePart with the necessary capabilities to further develop its variable information business. Mr. Helm explained: “Variable data printing is a small percentage of our total business now, but we have made it a major point in our marketing strategy and it will grow. We work with the CREO DARWIN variable data application, and, combined with the Spire, we now have a very good, high-speed solution for this expanding area.”

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Progressive Impressions International
Bloomington, Illinois

“The big factors are speed and color accuracy. Using the CREO Spire server, we can manipulate the files better and easier, we get consistent color, and we can turn the jobs around in a lot less time.”
— Jeanette Kavanaugh, Digital Printing Supervisor

Progressive Impressions International (PII) is the world’s largest full-service direct marketing solutions provider. It serves some of the largest national and multinational computer companies, financial institutions, insurance firms and other major companies. At its Bloomington, IL corporate headquarters, PII is constantly breaking new ground in the production of direct marketing collateral.

For the past five years, PII has walked hand in hand with Creo and Xerox for digital color production, starting off with a DocuColor 40, and acquiring more advanced systems as they became available, and using Creo (or its Scitex forerunner) servers to drive them.

With its latest acquisition of four XEROX DocuColor 2060s, each driven by a Spire color server, PII has been able to push the digital printing envelope far further than ever before. PII uses CREO’s DARWIN Desktop variable information authoring tool for some VI jobs and hand codes CREO Variable Print Specifications (VPS) for others.

Using the Spire and DocuColor 2060 solution, PII consistently turns around complex, highly personalized, high-quality, high-volume jobs. “The jobs we do are often too challenging for most other companies,” says Jeanette Kavanaugh, digital printing supervisor at PII.

One of PII’s most challenging jobs is for a company that photographs individual participants at sports events. PII integrates each photo with personalized text and sends out the completed documents. Depending on the size of the event, PII turns around anything from 20,000 to 50,000 unique pieces, each with individual images, all within one to four days from the time they get the data and images from their customer. “The Spire is one of the main reasons that we could take on the sports events job. What makes it possible is the high degree of color accuracy, and the ability to break the file down into small segments and run them on all four of our DocuColor 2060s at the same time,” explains Ms. Kavanaugh.

To produce this job cost effectively and on time, PII makes the most of the exceptional ease of use and reliability of the Spire/DocuColor solution. Just two operators are needed to manage the four machines, and all the machines are kept running two shifts every day.

The business impact of the Spire/DocuColor 2060 solution has been immense. Fourteen months after getting the first one, PII’s color business has quadrupled. To help maintain that phenomenal rate of growth, the firm intends to purchase two more systems this year. “We will have no trouble keeping them busy,” concludes Ms. Kavanaugh.

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Prontaprint
London, UK

“By investing in Creo and Xerox, we are positioning ourselves for future growth in variable data printing. I am convinced that this is the future for print-on-demand.”
— Peter Donaldson, Managing Director

Prontaprint operates Europe’s largest print-on-demand network with approximately 185 centres across the United Kingdom and Ireland. Founded in 1971, Prontaprint strives to offer readily accessible, high-quality digital design, print, and copy services to businesses at affordable prices and rapid turnaround.

The Prontaprint center on Crawford Street in London, is one of the most technically advanced in the country, servicing the central London area and also some overseas customers. In such a large, office-based district, Prontaprint is kept busy producing reports and presentations, as well as leaflets, invitations, badges, and menus for local event companies. Much of this work is straightforward color printing, but handling large digital files, for example POWERPOINT presentations, and the substantial print volumes required by customers, were causing the franchise’s management headaches.

“Many of the jobs required by our customers were very time-consuming to produce in terms of processing and were also labour intensive if hand collating was required,” says Peter Donaldson, Managing Director at Prontaprint. “A successful Prontaprint franchise must offer fast turnaround times, so we decided to invest in the equipment required to improve our ability in handling large files.”

Prontaprint invested in two XEROX DocuColor 3535 printer/copiers driven by CREO Spire CXP3535 color servers. The decision was based not only on the current need to shorten turnaround times, but also on a long-term view, which sees an increased demand for variable data printing.

Peter Donaldson explains: “We already do a degree of personalization work that has me convinced that in the future, customers will want more. By investing in CREO Spire now, we are positioning ourselves to reap the benefits of future growth in this area. As customers improve their ability to collect the information required for variable data printing, we will be ready to deliver fully personalized documents when they are needed.”

The Prontaprint centre has already begun to see the results of their Xerox-Creo investment. Following training, described by Peter Donaldson as “straightforward—we find the devices very user-friendly,” Prontaprint is enjoying greatly increased processing speeds, the choice of a wider range of stocks, and the ability to build jobs using the DocuColor collating capabilities.

“We are delighted with the XEROX DocuColor 3535 printers. We bought them for their quality and speed, which has jumped from 12 pages per minute to 35 per minute on each machine. This gives us the ability to produce 70 pages per minute on both printers and is greatly enhanced by the Spire’s ability to crunch large files. Jobs that were previously time-consuming and slow are now flying through.”

“This installation has provided us with an all-round better system, and because Spire is a really smart device with impressive variable data handling abilities, we are well positioned to meet the growth of personalization in the future,” concludes Peter Donaldson.

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Aspen Marketing Services
Chicago, Illinois

“When it comes to our biggest challenge of maintaining a color, typically a corporate color for one of our clients, we’ve found that the CREO Spire has been very beneficial in quickly matching the type of color that our client expects to get.”
— Bobby Kennedy, director of letter shop operations

Aspen Marketing Services is a full-service production company with seven locations across the United States and revenue, currently at $180 million, that is constantly on the rise. Aspen creates, prints, folds, cuts, inserts, and posts direct mailers for its prominent clients, which include General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, SBC Communications, Qwest Communications, and the American Cancer Society.

Bobby Kennedy, director of letter shop operations, credits the CREO PODS Spire color server and XEROX IGEN3 110 Digital Production Press combination with making Aspen Marketing Services more competitive.

“We do a real good job producing millions of print pieces for our larger customers," he explains, "but the niche is really in the 50,000 to 100,000 range. There we really didn't have a solution in the past until we got the Creo-Xerox solution.”

Aspen Marketing Services has two XEROX IGEN3 110 Digital Production Presses, both driven by CREO PODS Spire color servers for IGEN3.

“We've been dabbling in the digital print arena for a number of years,” Kennedy continues. “We really found that the most cost-effective solution for us was to go with the Creo-Xerox solution. “We have done anywhere up to 200,000 pages a day. On our IGEN3 presses, we're probably averaging about 40 to 50 jobs a week.”

“When it comes to our biggest challenge of maintaining a color, typically a corporate color for one of our clients, we’ve found that the CREO PODS Spire color server has been very beneficial in quickly matching the type of color that our client expects to get,” reports Kennedy.

“Most of our customers and our internal folks are very surprised at the quality we're getting with digital. They're used to getting something that just doesn't have litho-type quality. They're now seeing spectacular graphics, particularly on the glossy postcards that we produce,” he adds. “We’re very pleased with what the digital arena has brought to the table for us.”

Kennedy is equally pleased with the training he and his staff received after installing the Spire color servers and IGEN3 Digital Production Presses. “Creo and Xerox were really holding our hands from the onset,” he recalls. “When we installed the equipment in late June of 2004, we had probably two weeks of very intense training. They helped us through to the point where we were producing live work in less than two weeks.

“Our learning curve, although very steep initially in the color arena, really plateaued. We became almost experts here within a few months of installing the equipment.” According to Kennedy, Creo and Xerox work very well together. “I'm very confident in the future with the Spire RIPs,” he says. “The enhancements that we've seen over the last year have been very beneficial for us.

“I think digital printing is really going to grow,” concludes Kennedy. “Our customers in particular are just really starting to grasp what they can do and the power of changing up variable data on the fly in very high quantities. The future is wide open.”

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QuantumMail.com Inc.
Austin, TX, USA

“Since getting the new Spire and IGEN3 two months ago, volume has grown by about 20%. We expect to add another 15-20% by the end of the year.”
— Freddie Baird, Executive Vice President

Since 1986, QuantumMail.com, the Austin based company has been providing a nationwide client base with the full range of direct mail and variable messaging services. One way it differentiates itself is by promising - and delivering - a 24-hour print and mail turnaround.

In 2000, after purchasing a XEROX DocuColor 2060 printer, QuantumMail.com turned to Creo to drive its digital printers. “We chose the Spire because we wanted more control over color and workflow issues,” recalls Freddie Baird, executive vice president, QuantumMail.com. This was the beginning of a strong relationship between Creo and QuantumMail.com. In 2002, they replaced all printers with XEROX DocuColor 6060s and new Spire color servers. “Once we received the Spire CXP6000, we built our workflow around it. We’re a PDF workflow shop and Spire helped us to enhance and speed up some of the things we do with PDFs,” says Baird.

The latest addition to their CREO pre-press equipment is a Spire color server for the XEROX DocuColor iGen3 digital production press. Says Baird: “With the Spire, we were in production the day it was installed.” Since then, they have moved two-thirds of the workload to the iGen3 and Spire solution, increasing volume – by about 20%. “We expect to add another 15-20% by the end of the year,” says Baird.

“Over three years, volume has grown 200%. We’re 60% ahead of the print volume we achieved this time last year. The Spire is essentially the same, with all the functionality we utilized with the DocuColor 6060, but the combination of a Spire and Xerox’s new equipment, enables us to handle growth without adding staff or sacrificing turnaround times.”

QuantumMail.com produces personalized direct mail pieces for many customers, who design and submit jobs via a special Web application. "Customers can create a color variable, customized piece. The information goes from the web to the printer. Our Spire color servers allow us to process complex files in seconds – most servers can only do this in minutes or even hours,” says Baird. With the Spire and IGEN3 solution “the speed enhancement is incredible. Every 2-3 days we execute 200-300 pieces, 80% variable data. We’ve cut processing and print time by one-third. Most of the speed gain is due to the print engine. It’s hard to quantify the improvement that is due to the color server alone, because it was already so fast with the Spire CXP6000, but it’s definitely faster,” adds Baird.

“Spire produces great color with the IGEN3 engine,” says Baird. “It looks like offset printing. We’re able to handle the color more effectively, and you can’t beat the control of the Spire and IGEN3. “It’s so easy to define - we can now handle a wide variety of mixed stocks.”

According to Baird, customers are delighted. “The prints they get off this system are simply better,” he says. “They get more flexibility, more stock choices and we can offer complex variable data because we have more processing horse power.”

QuantumMail.com is planning more purchases. “We’ll probably add another Spire and IGEN3 later this year. Long-term, whatever equipment upgrade path Xerox has on their equipment, we plan to keep Spire a part of it. I have looked at other servers and I haven’t seen anything as good as the Creo Spire,” says Baird.

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Relationship Marketing, Inc.
Des Moines, IA

“With the Spire, the benefits are not only related to production. We now have more flexibility in design and we can offer our clients things that are much more creative, more variable.”
— Al StofferVice President, Solutions Development

Relationship Marketing specializes in providing highly effective, comprehensive one-to-one marketing solutions to a growing national customer base. Founded in 1993 in Des Moines, Relationship Marketing started out as a one office outfit staffed by two, providing personalized black and white print solutions on color shells. Today, the company has grown considerably, and with two additional sales offices, has a staff exceeding 30, and now services a nation-wide customer base, offering full-color print, and both online and email personalized marketing solutions.

In mid-2000, the Company bought a XEROX DocuColor 2045 digital color press. “When we originally installed the press, the Spire wasn’t available, so we went with a competitor’s digital front end,” said Al Stoffer, Vice President, Solutions Development, at Relationship Marketing. “Our goal was always to be able to run the DocuColor 2045 at engine speed, and not to have the speed restricted by the front end. But, once we started dealing with a lot of variable data, we just couldn’t reach the speeds we wanted.”

Two years later, Relationship Marketing upgraded to a Spire Color Server. “Now that we’re working with the Spire and with Darwin, we’re a lot closer to running at engine speed,” noted Mr. Stoffer. “And, we haven’t had to turn down any jobs or redesign them to be less variable, as we did with the former competitor server.”

With the new, optimized Darwin and Spire workflow for the XEROX DocuColor 2045 press, Relationship Marketing now has all the power and flexibility to produce the designs it wants. According to Mr. Stoffer, the Company is “doing jobs that we just couldn’t do before. To process hundreds of fields of data and tens of graphics areas, with the library of graphics potentially in the hundreds, we need a lot of flexibility in the design tool and a lot of power in the processing. Now, that we have the right workflow, we’re easily running multi-page spreads where anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of the document is variable.”

With the Spire Color Server running the DocuColor 2045, Relationship Marketing has cut production time on highly variable jobs by 30 to 40 percent. Moreover, the impact on design has been even more dramatic. “Having this new workflow has not just increased our production capabilities,” commented Mr. Stoffer, it has opened up more creative avenues for our designers. It’s still early in the process, but we probably have doubled our creative freedom and capabilities; we’ve expanded the ideas we can take out to the market by 100%.”

In terms of real-life projects, this enables more cost-effective, more highly variable marketing solutions. Using Darwin and the CREO Spire Color Server, Relationship Marketing has transformed the product catalog of a long-time client from a weighty generic catalog of 100 or more pages into a customized three or four-page catalog precisely targeted to each individual customer. For the client, this translates to tremendous savings on production and mailing costs, and it also provides a more effective, customized marketing solution.

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S.Print, R. Sporr GmbH & Co.
Vienna, Austria

“Changing to the Spire color server after we acquired a DocuColor 2060, was the best thing we did. When performance and colour control are concerned, the Spire is superior to all other solutions.”
— Rudi Sporr, Managing Director.

A classic offset print shop, S. Print, R. Sporr GmbH & Co. in Vienna, recognised the potential of digital printing, and today is a reputable full service provider in digital printing, offering print-on-demand as well as customised and personalised jobs in large format applications.

Founded in 1992 as a four-colour offset print shop, S. Print was dedicated to high quality and top service. Rudi Sporr, managing director of S.Print quickly identified the growing interest in digital printing and began steering his company towards it. “The systems available then did not meet our productivity or quality requirements, but it was an important learning process,” he confirms. Drupa 2000 marked the company’s transition to digital colour printing, with installation of a Xerox DocuColor 2060.

“To match the quality of our digital printing to that of offset printing, and improve performance, we replaced the original server with a Spire color server, which was the right solution for S. Print. We significantly reduced our RIP times to less than 10 minutes for a 4 GB job with imposition," Rudi Sporr recalls. "This speed allows us to insert an urgent job into the normal schedule at any time. For fast processing of repeat jobs, we save data as Ready-to-Print (RTP), and output without effort." Since 2000, digital print volume has grown 30 percent every year and today is 180,000 A4 pages monthly.

S. Print digitally prints mostly short runs up to 3000 copies. Recently, the company produced 50 copies of a magazine, “Lust & Leben,” in record speed. The client, a Viennese advertising agency, wanted to present the new magazine at a press conference, and gave S. Print three hours for printing and finishing. “Three hours was really tight, even for us. Yet at the press conference, every journalist received a personal copy of the magazine," Rudi Sporr proudly recounts.

Another demanding project was a 92-page catalogue for Doll, a company that designs folkloric decorations for hotels and exhibit organisers. The catalogue is their primary marketing tool, so quality demands are high, but the print-run of 200 copies was not economical by offset. S. Print transposed the colour tints in various shades, a key feature in the catalogue, into digital printing, aware that solids in digital printing often show stripes or other defects. The Spire function ’Target Calibration’ allows definition of optimal density values, and the Spot-Colour-Editor converts spot colours into process colours. “After extensive testing and calibration we printed the solid colours evenly and in full harmony,” Rudi Sporr confirms. “Today we achieve about 90 percent of all Pantone colours with the DocuColor 2060 and the Spire," he notes.

Rudi Sporr is confident that with a solid establishment of digital printing capabilities, his company's path for the future is set and they are excellently equipped to take on any competition.

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SACHS-DRUCK
Darmstadt, Germany

“Although the Spire color server is a new product and we are still exploring its potential, it is already clear that the server’s capabilities show us the possibilities for the future of high-end, production-level, digital printing.”
— Andreas Mayer, Managing Director

Established in 1881, SACHS-DRUCK, a digital and offset printing shop in Darmstadt, Germany, has undergone many changes to meet the demands of its customers. In 2000, current owner and managing director, Mr. Andreas Mayer, decided to take the initiative of creating a digital service unit within the larger company structure. Today, the digital printing unit is an integral part of the organization.

SACHS-DRUCK’s purchase of a XEROX DocuColor digital color press, driven by a CREO Spire color server, has propelled the company further into the rapidly growing on-demand, personalized, color printing market. This high-quality, high performance system for the printing of on-demand color documents rapidly resulted in very fast processing, for higher productivity and faster turnaround. Whereas until now, the average monthly print run at SACHS-DRUCK has been approximately 10,000 prints in B&W and 60,000 in color, with the purchase of the DocuColor 2060 and Spire color server, the company expects to reach a run rate of 100,000 color prints per month.

Printing a wide variety of color products, including flyers, brochures and direct mailings, variable information printing is now essential to the company. It is here that the power and flexibility of the Spire color server add unique value. According to Mr. Mayer, “We have great plans for our digital printing unit, and in order to achieve them, we need the highest productivity, flexibility and quality available for producing variable information documents. We are now successfully printing a variety of variable information documents; this is a vast improvement over anything we’ve had in the past.”

The Spire server’s ease of use greatly impressed both the company’s management and its employees. The user-friendly interface enables a very short learning curve for the operators, who do not need special skills in order to operate the machine. Its full automation has helped as well, cutting processing time by approximately 25%.

Mr. Mayer is particularly pleased by the image and color quality achieved using the DocuColor 2060 digital printer and Spire color server. “The results look similar to offset in terms of printing quality. And we are now able to control our color gradation the same way we do with offset.” He also noted the superior screening quality achieved by the system.

The management of SACHS-DRUCK is aiming to make digital printing deliver 50 percent of the company’s net sales in 2002. With the high productivity and unique features of the CREO Spire color server, driving the XEROX DocuColor 2060, this goal is increasingly attainable.

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Vicindo Inter-Mailing
Kontich, Belgium

“The CREO Spire is very fast. It handles jobs that are bigger and more complicated, at the same speed at which we used to do smaller, simpler jobs. It allows us to keep up with our customers’ increasingly complex demands and still meet their tight deadlines.”
— Philippe Massin, General Manager

Vicindo Inter-Mailing, one of the largest full service direct mail houses in Kontich, was formed in December 2001 through the merger of Inter-Mailing and Ketels. With many decades of collective experience in printing and mailing services, and a staff of about 200, the firm’s business is today based almost entirely on production and mailing of complex personalized documents.

A key reason Vicindo Inter-Mailing dominates this field is that the firm constantly invests in new technologies. In 2000, Inter-Mailing was the first European company to install the DocuColor 100 with the CREO Spire colour server, taking a giant step forward in its colour variable printing capabilities. Then, in September 2002, Vicindo Inter-Mailing moved up to two DocuColor 2060, also driven by a Spire colour server. “We needed a strong application that could support a lot of variable information work,” said Philippe Massin, general manager at Vicindo Inter-Mailing. “Xerox advised us that the Spire was the best solution for our needs, and we have indeed found that it is very fast and very reliable. We use the Spire every day, and we hardly think about it. We just rely on it to work without any problems.”

Magazine publishers form the backbone of Vicindo Inter-Mailing’s customer base. In addition to printing address labels and mailing the weekly and monthly magazines, the firm also produces personalised subscription renewal reminders that are mailed with the magazines. “This is a big part of our printing work,” noted Mr. Massin. “The renewal letters are text based, but they also include about four full-colour variable images, including the title of the magazine, the latest covers, and a picture of the gift the customer will receive if he renews the subscription. We print all the letters for all the various magazines in a single run. Overall, we handle about 100,000 such letters each month.”

The typical turnaround time for preparing and printing a run of 3,000 - 8,000 A3 duplex pages with variable text and images is about 36 hours from the time the addresses arrive at Vicindo Inter-Mailing until the finished letters are ready for mailing. While the company was able to achieve the same turnaround with the DocuColor 100, the new CREO Spire/DocuColor 2060 system allows them to handle a larger number of jobs in a single week, with the same number of operators.

Asked what he likes most about the Spire, Mr. Massin is quick to mention its ease of use. “The interface is very good. It’s very easy to learn for every application. You can change all the parameters on the RIP, which means we can send the job from the Mac without too much concern about how it will be printed. The printer operator takes care of all the parameters, such as orientation, paper size, colours, etc. A major productivity benefit is that we can do multiple jobs and actions, such as RIP, print, and adjust parameters, all at the same time.”

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Kingswood-Steele
London, UK

“The combination of XEROX DocuColor digital presses and CREO Spire colour servers deliver the stability, speed and quality I need to provide a reliable, fast turnaround digital print service.”
— Andy Steele, Managing Director

Kingswood-Steele is a multi-discipline creative and digital production facility based in the heart of the city of London that provides a broad range of print-on-demand services.

With an annual turnover of £850,000, Kingswood-Steele provides a rapid response, print-on-demand service producing a range of printed materials including reports, newsletters, invitations, flyers and business cards. Their clients include some of the largest blue chip companies, city firms and local government authorities. With a XEROX DocuColor 6060 and DocuColor 5252 both driven by CREO Spire colour servers, Kingswood-Steele’s tight-knit team uses its knowledge of repro and colour management to produce high quality digital print. This cutting edge technology ensures their customers communicate effectively with their target audience. “Key to our success is our ability to produce high quality print, fast. The reliability of our digital presses is crucial – when we have only one hour to produce a set of reports for a customer’s important meeting – we can’t afford to be let down by the technology,” says Managing Director, Andy Steele. Kingswood-Steele switched to using Spire colour servers from a competitive front end RIP over a year ago, and has never regretted the change. “We used to be wary of the old server as it was temperamental and would often crash. In contrast, we find the Spire very user-friendly and stable. We are also pleased with both XEROX DocuColor devices as they give us the versatility we require. Additionally, if we send document files for output via our network to one of our partner printing companies around the world, we know that the quality will be consistent,” continues Andy Steele. Document personalisation is a significant growth area with customers now recognising the benefits of its application for marketing materials. With a newly established mailing facility, Kingswood-Steele is enhancing the experience of the shortrun personalised direct mail market for its customers.

“We use CREO’s DARWIN software on the Spire colour servers to handle the personalisation of data,” says Andy Steele. “Customer’s needs are evolving and we find ourselves using it more and more, especially for pre-paid response forms on their promotional mail-outs. We anticipate that personalisation will become a very important part of our product offering and believe that, in combination with our new mailing house, located just around the corner, we have a complete solution for our clients.” Kingswood-Steele has been helping customers achieve their marketing objectives in and around central London for over a decade. With in-house digital print, scanning, design and typesetting combined with a full range of finishing services and convenient location, the company is able to keep production and delivery times to an absolute minimum.

“Fast turnaround combined with quality are our main objectives. Our creative team regularly designs brochures to publicise how good digital printing is compared to litho. For personalised, short-run requirements, the digital route can’t be beaten for cost-effectiveness,” concludes Andy Steele.

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Miami Systems Corporation
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

"It is critical for us to have a reliable color server that runs at the printer's rated speed. The CREO Spire can do that and fulfill our VIPP needs at the same time. This has improved our productivity and streamlined our workflow."
— Rick Martin, National Sales Manager

Established in 1926 as a form manufacturing company in Cincinnati Ohio, Miami Systems Corporation has come a long way, and today has offices across the eastern United States. With over 1000 employees and a constantly increasing bottom line, Miami Systems is today, a one-stop shop offering graphic design, variable data processing, digital and offset printing, and fulfillment. The company serves customers in telecom, finance, publishing, and retail.

Miami Systems introduced digital color print into its list of product offerings in 1992 with a XEROX DocuColor 40. After realizing the enormous potential of digital color printing, Miami Systems consulted with Xerox about how to implement the latest XEROX color technology into their plant. Both companies agreed that the XEROX VIPP workflow would be the optimal solution.

With a number of XEROX DocuTech and DocuPrint devices located on multiple sites, Miami Systems wanted a color server that would fully support the VIPP workflow while providing the color quality they needed. The CREO Spire color server answered both these requirements. After testing some files at the local XEROX distribution center, Miami systems purchased two DocuColor 6060 Digital Color Presses and Spire CXP6000 color servers.

"It is critical for us to have a reliable color server that runs at the printer's rated speed," explains Rick Martin, National Sales Manager for Miami Systems. "We've discovered that the CREO Spire can do that and fulfill our VIPP needs at the same time. We're able to utilize the Spire's native imposition capabilities while running VIPP. This has improved our productivity and streamlined our workflow." "The Spire color server seamlessly processes our VIPP code day after day," states Programming Manager, Kevin Ernst. "It is the only solution that supports our need for booklet making on variable print jobs."

Miami Systems has grown its business more than tenfold since introducing the CREO Spire CXP6000 color server and DocuColor 6060s at the end of 2003. Due to the quality and value of the products provided by Miami Systems, their customers are willing to pay premium rates for the services provided. Miami Systems' business today exceeds US$100 million in annual sales.

"The implementation of the Xerox and Creo color digital print technology has boosted our business incredibly, adding to both revenues and profitability. We see this business as one that will continue to develop and expand, both within our existing customer base as well as extending to new customers," says Rick Martin. "We are proud that we can continue to provide our customers with cutting-edge technology and products that help them grow their market share."

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Modus Media International, Inc.
Apeldoorn, The Netherlands

“Our experience with the CREO Spire color server driving the XEROX DocuColor 2060 digital press has been excellent. The color VI work that we are doing for Sony has brought to us many customers seeking to duplicate this success.”
— Jan Wiersma, System Administrator

Recognized by Business Week as one of the "Top 20 Leading Private Info-Tech Companies," Modus Media International (MMI) in the Netherlands focuses on Supply Chain Management of technology related products and services for its clients and their end-users. MMI Apeldoorn offers its clients a variety of integrated services: reproduction of software on CD, DVD, diskette or tape; on-demand printing, kitting of software packages; distribution and warehousing. Established in 1992, MMI Apeldoorn has grown to include more than 400 employees, and counts among its clients some of the leading international high-tech companies such as Sony.

The company is currently using XEROX DocuColor 2060 and DocuColor 70 digital color presses driven by Creo color servers, in addition to three Docutechs for their digital printing on-demand. MMI Apeldoorn’s purchase of the DocuColor 2060 followed a Xerox recommendation that the Spire color server was the ideal driver for their color variable information (VI) printing, based on XEROX VIPP.

As part of their fulfillment services, MMI creates customized "Welcome-Packs" for customers who have purchased a SONY digital camera or camcorder. These packs consist of a personalized letter in the buyer’s language of choice and a full color brochure of the appropriate accessories to the SONY camera or camcorder that was purchased. By printing a personalized pack Sony drives the sales of these accessories. Although originally purchased at the bequest of Sony, the demand for color VI printing has mushroomed and the company now finds that more and more clients are requesting it from them. With the Spire’s fast RIP, MMI is able to effectively produce both short and long-run variable jobs quickly.

“The DocuColor 2060 - Spire system is really easy to use,” Says Jan Wiersma, System Administrator of MMI Apeldoorn. “From day one, we did not need a trained operator to run the machine as we could show our staff how to use it in less than one hour.”

The DocuColor 2060 has also been effective in taking over some of the workload on the both the DocuColor 70 and the DocuTechs. Explains Wiersma, “Previously, we needed to outsource the color covers of our manuals to offset printers. Now, not only is the color and image quality of the covers produced by the DocuColor 2060 driven by the Spire excellent, but we are also assured that the paper size, margins and image position are exactly as we want, unlike our previous outsourced workflow.” Not only has productivity increased but the company has also managed to significantly reduce their stock of preprinted covers. With the Spire’s ability to change RTP job parameters without having to reRIP, their flexibility has also been enhanced as they can adjust the content on their covers with ease.

Overall, MMI Apeldoorn is delighted with the production capabilities of their DocuColor 2060, driven by the Spire. Summing up the company’s future goals, Wiersma states: “We hope that as cost per page for color decreases and quality and speed of production increase, to persuade more customers to go for color printing on-demand, particularly within the variable data printing arena.”

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Monk’s Copy Shop, Inc.
Columbus, Ohio

“The Spire has given us a lot more freedom to go after new business, irrespective of the source file type, because it has cut RIP time on some types of files from 4-5 hours to 20 minutes. Overall, the full DocuColor 2045 and Spire solution has enabled us to increase our color sales by 30-40%.”
— Larry Kendall, Director of Digital Imaging

Monk's Copy Shop, Inc., a leading supplier of digital printing services, produces manuals, training materials, software documentation, and other types of printed materials from hardcopy and digital originals. A large portion of its business consists of floorset instruction books, book covers, and financial reports. Since beginning more than 30 years ago as a one-person, one-machine copy shop, Monk’s has primarily utilized XEROX equipment, migrating to digital printing in the early 1990s. Today, Monk’s operates two shops staffed by 25 people, with multiple XEROX DocuColor printers driven by CREO PODS front-ends. In early 2001, prompted by the ever-growing color printing demands of its customers, Monk’s added a DocuColor 2045 with a CREO Spire digital color server.

After one year of operation, the DocuColor 2045 Spire solution has had a measurable impact on Monk’s business, opening up new revenue streams by broadening the applications they can print and boosting color printing sales from existing and new customers. Larry Kendall, director of digital imaging, says the speed, flexibility and reliability of the Spire Color Server with the DocuColor printers enables them to provide color printing services that were simply unattainable with their other equipment.

“One of our most challenging and important jobs is floorset instruction books for a large retail clothing customer. They used to be very textual, with the absolute minimum of images. But, explaining in words how to arrange merchandise was not ideal. Now, we print books that are almost exclusively images, leaving no room for misinterpretation.” Every few weeks, in the space of two and a half days, Monk’s turns around an average of 120,000 color impressions and completes production on the books. While the team works around the clock and uses multiple machines, the new Spire provides the critical additional rapid processing power that makes the job possible. Also important to Monk’s is the added flexibility the Spire gives them to stop and restart jobs and make changes in job specifications even at the last minute.

In addition to the Spire, Monk’s runs SX3000 and SX3000T front-ends with DocuColor 40 printers. “CREO PODS front-ends are simply better than anything else out there,” said Mr. Kendall. “I am very, very happy with what they have done and I haven’t seen anyone doing anything better or more robust. The Spire is a much more powerful server than we’ve seen before, and it’s a lot faster.” Mr. Kendall also noted that in terms of its user interface, the Spire is also more user-friendly, which means less training for operators and much less day to day involvement on his part.

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New Benefits Inc.
Dallas, Texas

“When we switched to the Spire color server and the DARWIN Desktop, our work process improvement was dramatic. The CREO technology guarantees speed of delivery, variability of output and high image and color quality, enabling us to perform essential functions such as mail pre-sorts, which we hadn’t been able to do before.”
— Marti Powles, Director of Systems Development

New Benefits, Inc., a company specializing in non-insured ancillary healthcare programs, is rapidly expanding in the fulfillment technology arena. During the past decade, the company has provided low-cost, high-value comprehensive benefit plans to a wide array of individuals and groups.

In 1996, New Benefits purchased a XEROX DocuColor 40 with the intention of printing high resolution, four-color membership cards. However, the process proved to be inefficient and involved a significant number of workarounds. Fortunately, Xerox realized the complexity of New Benefits’ variable information jobs and recommended the CREO PODS Spire and the DocuColor 2045 printer. Together, Creo and Xerox helped New Benefits design a flexible, variable information work process based on the DARWIN Desktop. Today, New Benefits provides high-quality, four color, private label membership cards, complete with fulfillment inserts and packaging and posting with a turn around time of three to five days. The end result is an efficient and cost-effective fulfillment system that virtually eliminates obsolescence and labor factors traditionally inherent in this process.

Marti Powles, director of Systems Development at New Benefits says, “Farid Derisavifard of Xerox and the Creo team helped to develop a card layout with very few limitations. If the product doesn’t fit in the standard design, DARWIN is flexible enough to allow us to do pretty much anything to meet our needs.” New Benefits staff responded with enthusiasm to the new equipment. The simplified user interface and the ease with which the equipment and the software can be applied have quickly made the Spire and Darwin a favorite with our workforce,” says Powles. “Moreover,” she continues, “the Spire’s unique imposition capability helped the company cut back significantly on paper wastage and click charges.”

Not only did productivity increase and expenses decrease, but the changeover also resulted in the company expanding its business into a new market – fulfillment services. Powles explains, “Once the Spire was up and running, some of our clients’ clients, especially insurance companies, were so impressed with the quality of our work that they turned to us for their printing too. We weren’t looking to get into fulfillment services – the market came to us.”

“Because our unique process and state-of-the-art equipment is ideal for companies in the market for high quality, short-run or print-on-demand membership kits, we’ve begun offering our fulfillment services directly to that niche market,” states Terry Tullo, president of New Benefits.

Summing up the company’s success, Powles says, “When we originally purchased our equipment, nobody, including Xerox, believed we had the necessary volume in membership kits to make it a worthwhile investment. Today, with our DocuColor 2045, driven by the Spire color server, our capacity is 120,000 cards per week. We’re definitely on our way.”

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Sir Speedy
East Hanover, New Jersey

“With the SPIRE and the DocuColor 2045 we can now approach virtually any level of sophistication in color printing, without limits. It opens up new markets that previously we just couldn’t get into.”
— Michael Lewin, Partner

The East Hanover, NJ, branch of the Sir Speedy chain of business printing centers serves a wide variety of local businesses, including hospitals, publishing houses, non-profit organizations, manufacturers and professional services. Digital color jobs account for about 50 percent of business, and the company is investing to boost their work in this burgeoning field. The latest acquisition is a DocuColor 2045 digital color press, driven by the CREO SPIRE color server. They use CREO’s DARWIN Desktop authoring tool for variable information jobs.

To their color digital capabilities, the key factors Sir Speedy East Hanover considered included print quality and the potential for variable information. “We were impressed with the SPIRE and DocuColor’s ability to accurately handle PMS colors, which is very important to us,” said Michael Lewin, a partner at Sir Speedy East Hanover. “Also, we liked the fast RIP times and the potential to easily work with DARWIN for variable information. Other solutions didn’t give us all these advantages.”

In seven months of working with the SPIRE and DocuColor, Sir Speedy East Hanover has been using the solution mainly for high-profile marketing collateral. Commented Mr. Lewin: “We are doing full color jobs that we just could not get before. The speed of the SPIRE RIP, along with the color accuracy, really enables us to work with the high-end users, such as ad agencies for Fortune 500 companies. We can now do bleeds and two sided jobs. It’s a virtual press.”

Mr. Lewin reports that his customers are as pleased with the new solution as he is. “They don’t have to go on press, they don’t need color matches, their images are in no way compromised, and they get what they want, when they want it.”

Using the SPIRE and DocuColor system, Sir Speedy East Hanover can handle a typical 4-color process job that would normally take one week in a commercial print shop, in less than half the time. “That’s a tremendous convenience for the client. It’s truly on demand.” These added capabilities have translated into real business growth: “We have increased our color digital printing work by 50 percent – and that’s despite September 11, which really hit business hard,” said Mr. Lewin. Moving forward, Sir Speedy East Hanover is positioning itself to become a leader in variable information printing using DARWIN, with the SPIRE and the DocuColor. “VI allows us to easily differentiate ourselves from everyone else in the market.

Marketing departments and ad houses want the best – and now we can provide that,” said Mr. Lewin. “I predict that VI will substantially increase our business. It’s going to have a significant impact on our growth.”

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Pente Corporation
Toronto, Canada

“Pente’s utilization of CREO print on-demand variable information functionality has dramatically increased both the quantity and quality of sales at Liberty Health.”
— Bob Pente, President

Leading the variable information revolution in the insurance industry are Liberty Health of Toronto, Canada and the Pente Corporation. Liberty Health, part of the Fortune 500 Liberty Mutual Group, provides health benefit management services to over 750 thousand Canadians. Pente is one of Canada’s largest independent communications companies, specializing in direct marketing, advertising, and graphic design.

Pente and Liberty Health realized that they had to provide targeted health plan information packs to meet the needs of their Call Center customers and to succeed in an increasingly competitive market.

CREO state-of-the-art print on-demand system, comprising the SPIRE color server and the DARWIN Desktop Variable Information authoring tool provided an innovative, cost-effective solution to Liberty Health’s predicament.

The DARWIN Desktop tool was selected because Pente, as an advertising agency, felt most comfortable using a Macintosh-based software program. According to Bob Pente, president of the Pente Corporation, “The DARWIN Desktop was easy to learn and use, far less cryptic than some other products we looked at. The image and color quality of the printed output was very impressive, and convinced us to make this the product of choice for our project.”

Customized information packs were printed on the XEROX DocuColor 2060 digital color press, driven by the SPIRE color server, providing each caller with an individualized health plan, suited to his or her needs and budget.

The results were conclusive – the lead-to application ratio utilizing CREO variable print on-demand was 54% higher than traditional fulfillment. Although the higher cost was higher than before, the increase in the premium level generated by each successful application far outweighed the higher cost.

“For us,” concludes David Savournin, Vice President of Insurance Marketing, “Print on-demand with the variable information functionality has proven to be an effective way to attract and maintain customers. We plan to evangelize on-demand printing to all our clients, as a major tool to help them increase both the quantity and quality of their business.”

Efficient delivery of information, targeted to the needs of the individual, has transformed Liberty Health’s work process. Through the optimization of on-demand variable information printing, not only is the entire system more streamlined than ever before, but the print process has become an integral part of the collaborative customer building, revenue-producing equation.

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Ocean Colour
Shoreham-by-Sea, UK

“The XEROX hardware is great. Combined with the clever Spire technology there is nothing else on the market today that can deliver this volume of high quality variable colour print.”
— Martin Strevens, Managing Director

Ocean Colour was founded 11 years ago to supply the prepress requirements of its parent company, the L&S Printing Group. In the mid 1990s, Ocean Colour recognized the opportunities that digital printing offered and transformed itself into a specialist supplier of both repro and digital print to a wide range of prestigious customers – including the UK’s top pension consultancies.

“When we first became involved with digital printing, the machines we used were the best available at the time. But, frankly, because of our background in repro and our knowledge of colour, we did not consider that the results and speed reached a standard that we could really be happy with,” said Martin Strevens, Managing Director at Ocean Colour. “We knew we needed a clever software front end solution that could deliver high-quality colour and high-speed variable printing. After seeing a demo of CREO’s Spire color server at drupa 2000, we knew we now had a front-end solution that would be able to do the job we needed it to. Within fifteen months of taking delivery, we went from 100% repro supply to 50/50 repro and digital print.”

Ocean Colour uses two Xerox DocuColor 2060s each driven by a CREO Spire color server to produce a wide range of digital printing, including variable newsletters, reports and information for members of company pension schemes. Traditionally, Pension company monthly reports have been visually dull and impersonal – mainly due to the shear volume of print and the historical lack of a viable variable colour print solution.

“The traditional method involves litho printing the background document with all the generic information before sending it off to a laser bureau for adding in the individual names, addresses and variable text,” continued Mr. Strevens. “Today, using the XEROX DocuColor and Spire solution, we can do all this in one pass and also deliver much more interesting personalised documents.”

Because of the print-heavy nature of pension reporting, Ocean Colour regularly produces run lengths of 5,500 and averages a total of 70 – 80 thousand pages per month. It is therefore vital that its digital print solution is reliable as well as being able to consistently produce high quality print.

Ocean Colour is eager to expand the digital printing side of its business to new market sectors and is excited about future prospects. “We have already won new business on the back of our XEROX/CREO technology and we are eager to move into other areas where variable printing would be relevant.” noted Mr. Strevens.

Asked to name his five favourite features of the Spire color server, Mr. Strevens quickly reeled off its Variable Print Specification “because it’s so clever”; Gallop, which allows the pages to start printing whilst still processing files “gets the jobs flying through”; imposition “professional capability”; and spot colours “because its important to match the customer’s perception of how colours should look, especially when they are corporate colours.”

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Mail Marketing International
Bristol, UK

“The main advantage of using the DocuColor and SPIRE system is that you can print the whole job using one process which includes the background colour, graphics and the variable information.”
— Nigel Gay,Technical Director

Mail Marketing International, is one of Europe’s leading independent mailing and print specialists. Through a combination of technology and over 50 years of experience, Mail Marketing International provides some of today’s most innovative and creative direct mail solutions to brand leaders world-wide. As part of its continual investment in the latest digital and print technology, personalization remains its core business.

Nigel Gay, Technical Director at Mail Marketing International commented: “Today we are able to offer sophisticated colour communication using a wealth of information tailored to the recipient. That’s very different to the early ‘80s when we started off mono printing the variable data using a XEROX 8700!”

Due to its groundbreaking techniques in direct mail, Mail Marketing International has continually received industry recognition for its ability to produce mailings that achieve the greatest impact possible. Printing in colour is a key part of this.

“A successful direct mail campaign relies on many factors, but ensuring the data is accurate and correctly formatted is a key part. Equally as important is the printing process. In order to meet our client needs, we invested some time ago in the XEROX DocuColor 2060 and CREO SPIRE colour server, which has allowed us to increase the speed at we can process variable information, through support of CREO Variable Print Specification (VPS) and the SPIRE’s efficient system architecture” said Mr. Gay.

Mail Marketing International has the ability to personalise up to three million A4 images per day. One-colour personalised long runs can be produced using Muller Martini and Oce laser printers. The XEROX printer and SPIRE colour server come into their own for short runs or where full variable colour is required.

“We are currently producing a very complex questionnaire with variable information. Recipients are requested to enter information using a one character or digit per box format. The background document is coloured with each page carrying a varying number of boxes. The only way we could process this type of job is using our colour printer in conjunction with the SPIRE,” concluded Mr. Gay.

When asked to name five key benefits of the SPIRE colour server, Mr. Gay is quick to list its ability to handle variable data at high speeds “this is our core business and it needs to be done accurately and fast”; its interface “very user-friendly”; its colour capability “can customize to suit individual clients”; its automation tools “the ‘virtual printer’ tool allows us to store the settings used for each client and store them for future use”; and its overall reliability and speed “that’s the bottom line.”

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Aichfelder Druck GmbH
Judenburg, Austria

"You quickly see that the Spire digital colour server is designed for professional production printing and includes all of the Creo PODS printing expertise. The server enables our employees to get the maximum quality from the Xerox iGen3 Digital Production Press.”
— Bernd Payer, managing partner

In 2005, Aichfelder Druck GesmbH broke into digital printing on a grand scale and went so far as to found its own company, 2smart – intelligent printing GmbH, to market its digital printing services. Aichfelder Druck, which runs a Xerox iGen3 110 Digital Production Press controlled by a Spire digital colour server from the Creo Print on Demand Solutions (PODS) Group, focuses on providing its customers with both speed and opportunities for new applications, such as personalised images.

Bernd Payer, managing partner of Aichfelder Druck (also known as 1a druck), feels that now is the ideal time to enter digital production printing. "My customers are far more interested in digital printing than they were before, and the quality and technical performance of digital are in line," he says. Nowadays we are producing jobs with such high image quality that I myself cannot tell at first whether they were produced by digital printing or offset. This image quality is an absolute must for a printing company, as the customer always makes the comparison with offset printing."

Digital printing has even brought back former 1a druck customers. For example, a publishing house now commissions books with more than 400 pages from 2smart – intelligent printing GmbH in print runs of only 250 copies. If the company offered only offset printing, this project would never have come back to the shop.

Payer is especially pleased with the Spire colour server’s stability, high performance, and comprehensive range of functions. “In comparison with competitive servers, you quickly see that the Spire colour server is designed for professional production printing and includes all of the Creo PODS prepress expertise,” he says enthusiastically.

According to Payer, the company’s iGen3 press is operated by prepress staff, who find in the server the features that they are familiar with from prepress. “The Spire colour server enables our employees to get the maximum quality from the iGen3 press and to match the results of offset printing,” he asserts.

The Spire colour server contains tools to optimize workflow. Aichfelder Druck, which is also known as 1a druck, primarily utilises the virtual printers, which enable all orders to be dealt with completely automatically as soon as specifications have been defined. “We also take advantage of the fact that the Spire colour server can, in hybrid production environments, accept data from the Agfa Apogee workflow management system,” Payer adds.

Prayer finds the Spire colour server to be an excellent VDP processor, especially with its seamless integration with the Darwin VI authoring tool. He is proud above all of his digital printing company’s ability to deliver personalised printed products to his customers. “Personalisation costs money,” he explains, “but this is easily justified by the significantly higher response rates, and it provides a good return for the customer.”

He finds the Spire colour server to be an excellent variable data printing processor, especially with its seamless integration with the Darwin VI authoring tool by Creo PODS. Says Payer, “The user-friendliness and freedom of design that Darwin provides is particularly profitable for us.

Personalisation of images is a further example of how we can expand our product range with digital printing, and be able to offer our customers individual solutions.”

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