Insights

The End (of Overprinting Shells and Forms) Is Near!

Reduce or eliminate costs associated with buying, storing, managing and overprinting offset shells and forms with full-color single-pass inkjet printing

Part 1: The Business Need

By Bob Raus, RISO Inc.

Every good CFO understands that work-in-process (WIP) and finished goods inventory is stagnant capital and an expense to be minimized. Business giants such as Sam Walton, Jack Welch and Michael Dell are famous for increasing inventory turns per year and maximizing cash-flows. When it comes to the financial burden of work-in-process, is preprinted document inventory any different than car parts, television sets, appliances and computers? Ask any CPA and the answer will be “no.” In fact, if Wal-Mart, General Electric and Dell could instantly manufacture a product for you and personalize it with the specific features you want with zero WIP and finished goods inventory, they’d do it in a heartbeat. 

The good news: Unlike these manufacturers, commercial printers and in-plant print shops can do this today with single-pass full-color digital inkjet printers.

Up until the mid-1990s, document production and fulfillment operations were characterized by football-field sized warehouses filled with a myriad of static marketing materials, product manuals, financial prospectuses, envelopes and more. Print buyer performance was measured exclusively on obtaining the lowest cost per printed piece and offset print runs of 20,000 items or more were routinely bought to effectively amortize offset set-up and make-ready costs. These large quantities could not be used immediately resulting in millions of dollars of inventory being stored in warehouses like the one in the photo shown in this blog. Often there was no single location large enough to hold the entire print run requiring large operations to store shipments of preprinted documents in several warehouse locations – effectively multiplying inventory management costs and resulting in lost and damaged pieces. Finally, when the information became outdated, inaccurate and unusable, obsolete document inventories were sent to landfills by the tractor-trailer load. 

The development of high-speed monochrome roll-feed and cut-sheet electrophotographic printers brought about “the age of overprinting shells and forms.” At first it was limited to addressing and then adding often awkward salutations and variable data to statements, letters and bills (remember “DEAR JOHN SMITH” in all caps?). Eventually, improved data quality, content management systems, advanced composition, and legacy printstream reengineering products made documents overprinted with variable data in black toner a mainstay of print/mail and fulfillment operations. The ability to overprint customized data (by product) and personalized messages (by recipient) onto preprinted color shells resulted in everything from letterheads to product data sheets and branding campaigns being produced by overprinting data onto one of several common shells. The result was a major step in the right direction: larger print run lengths for fewer shells and overall reduced inventory management costs. Of course, the ultimate vision is to eliminate inventories altogether.  While this may be unachievable in reality, the pursuit of zero (preprinted document) inventories is just as valid and financially rewarding for a commercial printer as it is for Toyota. 

Today’s commercial print and corporate in-plant executives have many full-color high-speed inkjet printing platforms to choose from. From multi-million dollar roll-fed inkjet presses by well-known names such as Kodak, Océ, InfoPrint and HP, to RISO high-speed sheet-feed printers starting under $35,000, there are options for every size print operation. 

Next time: The print quality debate.

Also, watch this two minute YouTube video to see ComColor print a 136 page, native AFP transpromo application from Solimar Systems onto four different stocks in less than one minute. With robust full-width array Piezo-electric inkjet printing technology and a realistic duty-cycle of 500,000 pages per month, RISO’s ComColor cut-sheet inkjet printers offer fast, affordable, environmentally friendly digital color at speeds up to 150 pages per minute and full-color running costs as low as 2-3 cents per page. Visit www.newinkjet.com for more information.

For nearly 25 years, Bob Raus has led go-to-market and product management teams at Xerox, Océ, EFI, Presstek, and RISO. Raus prides himself on framing business opportunities from the customer-in, vs. product-out perspective to understand business challenges and deliver technology solutions that drive customer success. Raus is the manager of product marketing for RISO Inc.