Swedish print service provider (PSP) Parajett produces personalised direct mail applications for organisations at the cutting edge of IT, as well as fulfilling transactional printing and billing requirements for customers including the government, financial houses and utility firms.
At the heart of Parajett’s successful growth in these markets is an end-to-end, fully automated digital printing workflow. The company’s continuous investment in Canon’s print technologies and software solutions to drive this expansion has helped Parajett establish itself as a leader in transactional and direct mail in the region.
Digital print technology is the key to Parajett's business. While Parajett’s production line includes a fleet of offset web presses that handle most of the company’s two billion A4 pages-per-year print volume, it is Canon’s technology and supporting software that are vital to its variable data printing (VDP) offering. “The digital output helps us meet all the demands of our ‘one-stop-shop’ mail piece production, from handling data and processing orders to printing and posting,” explains Per-Anders Olsson, Vice-CEO, Parajett.
Canon-supplied GMC Inspire software is used for design and creation of the company’s variable data files, ensuring documents have the correct input and data feeds for the personalisation and versioning of direct mail pieces. “The PRISMAproduction workflow system is the heartbeat of the company,” adds Olsson. “It provides integrated control for both digital and offset print production, making ours a truly hybrid print factory.”
Challenge
In 2011, Parajett turned to Canon to provide a digital cut-sheet press for smaller volume direct mail jobs and reprints that were uneconomical on the company’s other production lines. This press had to seamlessly integrate into its existing PRISMAproduction workflow, which included Océ VarioStream and Océ DemandStream technologies and featured an Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS) workflow extension for flexible switching between transactional and direct mail applications.
The Solution
Parajett selected a Canon imagePRESS C6010VPS, and within a month of its installation it was producing more than 300,000 pages per month.
The imagePRESS’s versatility is an invaluable asset for the business,” says Olsson. “It’s great for smaller jobs – such as special applications for direct mail like postcards – as it can cost-effectively produce superior quality applications in very short runs. It is also ideal for back-up and post-press operations and there is minimal downtime. Meanwhile the PRISMAproduction software enables us to switch between jobs and applications at the click of a button. We were so impressed with the high performance and reliability of the machine that we invested in another one. We’re now running nearly 1 million A4 pages-per-month across the two devices.
Parajett also updated its equipment portfolio with an Océ VarioPrint 6160, which Olsson says was a natural progression: “The VarioPrint 6160 model is the next step up. Its production speeds are staggering – we’re now pushing out over 1.5 million A4 monochrome pages through it a month! We can also offer our customers a white paper solution for consolidated but impactful customer communications.”
The white paper solution is an important component of the company’s service offering, especially in the Swedish market, according to Olsson. “The cost of postage in Sweden is very high, and we needed to help customers address this. This had to be done while keeping our production costs down and saving our customers money. Because of our end-to-end digital workflow, we’re able to use a white paper solution to minimise the amount of documents that our customers need to send to their customers. There has been a great response all round to the efficient way we’re using print, making it work harder and increasing its value.”
Achievements
In 2014, Parajett acquired print service provider Andvord Grafisk AS in Oslo so it could produce directly in the Norwegian capital. This acquisition is helping drive an impressive turnover that has nearly doubled from €27 million in 2012 to €47 million in 2014.
That investment is testament to both the capabilities of digital printing technology and how far we’ve come in recent years. Canon solutions and support have been a real catalyst for this growth,
concludes Olsson. “We have meticulously put our end-to-end business model together, which is important for these markets, and we’re very excited for what the future holds.”
