Fuji Xerox  awards  printing - digital 
In a world where companies are pushing boundaries to communicate to potential customers and win business, a New Zealand company has proved “doing a good job” is the key to success. You won’t find them in the yellow pages and they never advertise. They don’t even have a sign on the outside of their premises.

Lunacy? Not if you’re DPOD (Digital Print On Demand) – New Zealand’s digital printing success story, having experienced huge growth year-on-year since the late 1990s.

Formed in 1997, DPOD was a trendsetter, dedicated to digital colour print. The market was slow to embrace digital colour printing initially but the timing was perfect when Andrew Nalder arrived 18 months later to take over as Managing Director and build on what was a superb technical base.

It was appropriate that Nalder heralded from Xerox because DPOD had been built on the promise of high quality and fast turnarounds made possible by the original Xerox DocuColor.

With the fledgling company under pressure and struggling with the rapid increase of volumes, Nalder ushered in a new philosophy: secure the best possible equipment and focus on doing a great job for the customer.

“It’s not rocket science, but you have to be singular in your focus,” Nalder said. “We ditched all self promotion, worked hard on quality and relied on word-of-mouth – and then award wins – to prove our credentials.

“In just eight years our annual turnover has increased 20 fold from our inception and we are one of the country’s largest colour digital print companies.”

DPOD is now operating in Wellington and has become New Zealand’s most awarded digital printer, with 9 Gold medals and 10 Highly Commended awards from Pride In Print, the nationwide print industry awards.

This year one of their entries in the digital category was nominated for the Supreme Award, creating more word-of-mouth and further endorsing the strategy of focusing on quality.

“I’d rather buy equipment than people,” Nalder said, “and I would rather have the best people working the latest gear.”

The historic relationship with Fuji Xerox continues today with DPOD.com operating a fleet of Fuji Xerox product including the DocuColor 2060 and the recently launched DocuColor 8000.

“One of the reasons we like Fuji Xerox product is because their ink is not fragile and they also print better on self adhesives than anyone else,” Nalder said.

The DC2060 raised the bar for digital colour image quality and productivity - 60 colour pages per minute at 600 dpi resolution – and is optimised for just-in-time colour printing, personalised printing and printing for e-commerce and Internet delivery.

Recently DPOD took the initiative to invest in the new flagship of the Fuji Xerox Production Colour series, the DocuColor 8000
Productivity and speed, at 80 ppm, are the key qualities of the DocuColor 8000, which Nalder believes is faster than anything else on lightweight stock.

In conjunction with a Creo Spire colour server, the DC8000 enables DPOD to handle faster turnarounds, higher quality and complex mixed-media and variable-information jobs.

The machine focuses on users’ need to be more productive and more profitable and supports a wide range of high-value applications and environments, including print-on-demand, web-to-print, unified offset and digital printing and book printing.

The DC8000’s target market includes catalogues, brochures, manuals, presentations, newsletters and variable information. This is ideally suited to DPOD’s varied style of businesses.

The need for cutting edge equipment is supported by DPOD’s thirst to continually be first to market with web-based applications and to that end DPOD spends considerable time and money on web-based research.

“When you’re doing upwards of seven hundred jobs a month you have to have procedures to handle it,” Nalder said. “We’ve designed a web based system ourselves that copes with a high volume of jobs quickly and efficiently.

“We are constantly striving to improve our service, with the introduction of internet ordering and job tracking, quoting and job retrieval. We can also create custom web-sites for e-ordering and costing of recurring work.”
Nalder believes DPOD.com has sold new concepts to customers more readily because the company’s reputation and experience is so compelling.

“We believe we’ve been around the longest in digital colour print and there’s a degree of trust that we know what we’re doing. We want to continue innovating because people’s understanding and acceptance of digital printing is expanding all the time.

“Within four or five years over half of our workload will be generated by web applications; files will be generated on-line, not just up-loaded.”
With technology evolving so rapidly DPOD.com relies on partners like Fuji Xerox to keep abreast of the latest advancements.

“We appreciate Fuji Xerox keeping us in touch with what people are doing in the global marketplace and strongly believe Fuji Xerox should be the conduit to networking globally and building relationships.

“We’ve been able to meet several interesting overseas people through Fuji Xerox’s Premier Partner Program and, as long as the major focus of the program continues to be on their customers and how they’re innovating, we’ll continue to benefit.”

The strength of the relationship is also apparent in the day-to-day operating of the equipment on site. DPOD is a demanding user with the business operating 24 hours at times. Even though the machines “take a fair old hammering”, there is very little downtime due to breakdowns.

“Fuji Xerox provides outstanding service and technical support,” he said.

“But they also allow us to do more in-house servicing than the typical user because we’ve been taught to do it and nine times out of ten we can fix any problems ourselves.

And if they can’t, a Fuji Xerox specialist is at the door. The front door with no name.