The technology in question was the Agfa Dotrix, a 63cm-wide roll-to-roll UV-cured digital inkjet press. Single-pass inkjet presses were big news at this year’s Drupa with announcements of impending launches from the likes of Screen, Fujifilm, HP and Kodak; it’s no exaggeration when managing director Richard Gardner claims the Dotrix was already four or five years ahead of its time when he bought one.
Gardner didn’t go into the venture totally blind; he was looking for a more efficient way of printing adhesive window decals for financial services than the screen process historically used. We were running some jobs in 27 colours to get high quality, he says. Screen print was a real headache in production, including optimising the layout on the material, and some jobs took up to six months to prepare.
Gardner was no stranger to digital print, having made the move into wide-format for specialist fabric printing 12 years ago, but before Dotrix, he never thought it would deliver the quality to supplant screen. He was convinced that it provided a better solution than screen printing, and the firm became the second or third site in the world to install one, moving most of its production on to the machine.
Central to the success of the Dotrix is the range of materials that it can print on to, especially plastics, and in particular polyethylene (PE). Not only does the Dotrix use UV-cured inks, it also employs a process called ‘corona treatment’ to make the substrates more receptive to ink, opening the door to materials that would have otherwise been impossible to use.
Historically, digital print has tended to require specialist stocks that push prices up compared with conventional processes, but in the case of the window decals, the switch to digital halved Gardners’ consumables costs. It transformed my business. It meant I could get rid of the screen machines and develop digital print without moving, he says.
In addition to the financial services job, the firm sought out extra work to keep the Dotrix busy. Gardner says the machine’s 900m2 per hour throughput is far higher than the firm’s wide-format digital kit, so is more akin to a litho press. It’s very hungry; you need business to fill it, he says.
Fortunately, the firm found a niche supplying store-specific point-of-sale using the Dotrix, which relies on digital print’s variable-data capabilities to produce the jobs in collated order, customised for each store and printed as soon as the data and artwork are supplied.
Switching to digital enabled the job to be produced in full colour and slashed turnaround time; it is now completed in less than half the time it once took just to collate the store kits. Following its win with one retail client, Gardners sold the service to a number of other major firms, including one with 1,500 stores.
Experimentation to overcome unique production hurdles is key to the Gardners story, as is using any newfound expertise to grow business.
Lessons learned from the experience with UV-cured inkjet and surface treatment to handle tricky substrates were applied to wide-format print. This has led to the firm building itself another niche market in outdoor advertising, and in particular printing on to polyethylene (PE), which is a growth market as customers seek to reduce their environmental impact and cut costs.
We were first asked four years ago to start printing directly on PE scaffolding shrouds, he says. We were the first company in the world to do so. Previously, the print was over-laminated onto the PE. We took the experience of pre-treating materials gained with the Dotrix and applied it to grand format.
Now the firm produces 80% of its 3,000,000m2 annual throughput on PE, and plans for that figure to reach 90% by the end of 2008. The case that Gardner lays out in favour of PE is both ecological and economical. Recycling PE is very straightforward. It has a value as it is a material that can be reused in many ways, he says. PVC is a mixed product, normally with a polyester scrim and has a very limited use, traffic cones being the main one. There are normally additional costs associated with recycling PVC.
Economically PE is 20% cheaper by weight than PVC, and twice as strong, so less is needed for a given strength, giving dramatic materials cost savings. Despite the advantages, though, working with PE has not been plain sailing for the firm. The first hurdle it had to overcome was getting a supply. The materials are only available in some parts of the world, so we’ve had to gain procurement and sourcing expertise, he says.
Having sourced the substrate, Gardner faced printing problems, including the need to use corona pre-treatment. After experimenting with pre-treated substrates the firm found it needed to treat immediately prior to printing, and so invested £150,000 to develop a pre-treatment unit that could be fitted to its Nur UV-cured roll-to-roll wide-format printers. The prototype worked and the investment has paid off.
Gardner has found an ideal market that is difficult for his competitors to break into. They would need to jump through the same hoops to develop expertise in sourcing and handling materials and develop customised print technology to match. The move to PE was well timed, coinciding with a sea change in outdoor advertising as major poster site owners moved away from multi-sheet paste-up formats to one-piece PE posters. Wet strength poster paper can’t be recycled; it’s difficult before it’s been pasted and impossible afterwards, hence the switch to PE, he says. There are other benefits, too. The guys putting up the posters can put up in one day what would have taken three, the substrate can be recycled and there’s no landfill tax.
Gardner’s background was in industrial design, and he has taken an engineer’s approach in striving for maximum efficiency. The firm’s factory is as lean as possible. Some 90% of work is on contract and uses templated pre-defined formats for manufacturing, which starts with an online artwork delivery and approval system where clients can access work.
Automated push
From there, the work moves through an automated pre-press workflow based on Enfocus PitStop and Switch before being output on the firm’s fleet of printers, which includes two Inca Columbias in addition to the HP, Nur and the Dotrix, which was augmented by a second machine this summer. The automation extends to post-press, where Gardners has recently invested in a custom-made machine for automatically welding and eyeletting banners.
His background has given him expertise in intellectual property and the patents. I automatically patent my ideas, he says. A lot of things are very simple, in fact the simpler they are, the more important it is to patent them.
Taking a bet on a print technology is something that can’t be patented, but that entrepreneurial approach has been a boon. The Dotrix was the biggest gamble of my 33 years in business, but we got so much information that has been of use in the rest of the factory, says Gardner. In addition to the production and financial benefits that have come from the investment it’s given Gardners an edge when it comes to marketing itself as an innovative firm. It’s a shop window; we have several customers because of the Dotrix.
Sectors Point-of-sale, outdoor advertising, speciality products
Turnover £12m
Staff 100
Issue Growing the company while retaining profitable niche markets
Solution Adoption and development of new technology and smart sourcing of substrates
INSPECTION LESSONS NEW TECHNOLOGY
• Being an early adopter of new technology is hard work and risky, but the advantage can be a huge head start over rivals and useful in-house problem solving and market development skills
• Look at your production processes and assess whether they are suitable for market sectors you don’t currently serve
• Protect your innovation with patents. The simpler an idea the more likely someone else can either stumble on the same solution or copy your idea
• Develop products that are difficult for other firms to copy through the use of novel technology by patent protection
• Standardise and automate internal processes from job submission through pre-press to printing and finishing to maximise efficiency
• Look further afield than regular suppliers for materials that offer economic and environmental advantages over standard substrates
