Moving into a digital print environment with Ricoh is enabling FC Productions to change its business model  and exploit the advantages of new print technologies

Sydney-based short-run print specialist, FC Productions, a has gained an edge based on fast job turnarounds and excellent customer service, all supported by a digital print model based on the Ricoh Pro C901 colour production device.

For those familiar with offset printing, the cost, time and labour overheads need hardly be explained. Having started out as a 100 per cent offset printing business, FC Productions had full experience of those overheads. “When we were using offset machines we used to work 12, 14, sometimes 16 hours a day, seven days a week to meet demand,” says company owner and director Francis Chuah.

Even with those long hours, the company wasn’t able to turn jobs around quickly enough and profitability was suffering. It needed to find a new solution that would allow it to save time and money while maintaining the print quality its customers demanded.

FC Productions says it resolved many of its issues by moving away from offset printing altogether and installing a 100 per cent digital solution, with the Ricoh Pro C901 production device as the centrepiece. “The C901 is the machine we had to have,” Francis says. “We needed to have the quality, consistency, efficiency and versatility that the printer delivers.”

Key among the Ricoh Pro C901’s features and capabilities that were seen by Chuah as being so crucial to the business are its 90 pages per minute printing in colour and monochrome, regardless of stock and without any quality compromise, automatic collation for book production, the versatility to manage an enormous range of production print jobs; and the ability to match or even better the quality of offset printing.

“Now that we’ve moved from offset to digital with the Ricoh Pro C901 we need fewer staff,” Chuah says. “We only work five-day weeks and we close the office at 5:30 p.m. each day. Even with all that, our turnover is actually higher.”

Minutes
Underpinning those efficiency gains is the Ricoh Pro C901’s ease of setup and management. In place of the offset printer setup requirements, FC Productions is able to set up and initiate new print runs in a matter of minutes. Taken over the course of a single day, that single benefit is representative of several hours in time and labour.

Perhaps the most important benefit is that the company has been able to hold its prices essentially unchanged for the past three years, despite significant increases in the costs of paper and labour. “We have been able to do that primarily because we’re saving on labour,” Francis explains.

Chuah is quick to point out that the Ricoh Pro C901 is supporting an overall improvement in print quality. “The Ricoh machine’s printing looks and feels like offset, plus we have more control over colour and contrast, which is important because we don’t just get a customer’s file and print,” he says. “There are a great variety of settings on the machine itself and in the software, and by adjusting those we can get better results than offset in a lot of cases.”

These improvements have gained FC Productions a reputation with customers. “People now know us as high-quality, quick-turnaround printers,” says Francis. “Customers frequently ask us to finish full colour, fully printed and bound books in less than 24 hours, and because we can deliver that we are now getting customers from around the country.”

Being able to promise a fast turnaround on printing jobs is a major competitive advantage for FC Productions. Machines need to be running to keep these promises though, and Francis says Ricoh’s service personnel ensure downtime on the Ricoh Pro C901 is kept to an absolute minimum. He says, “Ricoh’s service leaves the others for dead. Our agreement is for one-hour response times for service calls and they have never failed – never. This is crucial to ensuring we meet our delivery times almost 100 per cent, and that’s one of the reasons our profitability with the Ricoh printer has increased.

“Just the other day we had a service call and Ricoh was here within 15 minutes. Without that response we would be struggling with the volume of work that we now have.”

FC Productions offers a full range of print services and prides itself on being able to handle everything from business cards to books. In the Ricoh Pro C901 the company has found a machine with the flexibility to print just about anything on a wide range of stocks.

“The Pro C901 doesn’t slow down either, even giving full duplex on stock up to 350 gsm – it just sings,” says Chuah. “We now have a more streamlined workflow, which is crucial to the business, which is a direct result of the printer’s versatility and the confidence we have in it.”

The reliable and consistently high quality output of the Ricoh Pro C901 has allowed for much easier job scheduling and also helped with the management of urgent jobs. Using the printer’s control panel, urgent jobs can be quickly inserted into the queue, eliminating the time-consuming set-up processes required in an offset print environment.

With the Ricoh Pro C901’s ability to manage multiple stock types simultaneously, print full colour and black & white in the one print job, and automatically collate pages for books, the combination of simplified workflow and printer versatility is an FC Productions mainstay.

Francis says, “Our turnaround times have been greatly improved, we’re more profitable, the backup and the support is top class and most importantly our customers are happy. Overall we’re glad to have decided on a Ricoh-centric business model.”