Beaver Press has become a respected industry source of advice on mixing offset and digital printing for the best quality results. By drawing on the Fuji Xerox CMWS, it is able to produce innovative marketing pieces from a combination of market leading output devices to international print colour standards.
Over 40 years ago, Robert Francis started Beaver Press from scratch, with little money and a hand wound single-colour printing machine. The company survived and thrived through the good times and the bad, and currently employs 60 staff.
Robert cites the golden age of printing in the 1970s and 1980s as a highlight. “Being a printer back then was a licence to print money (and some tried)!”
David Francis (pictured), general manager of Beaver Press, remains philosophical about the current period of economic upheaval and industry uncertainty.
“Innovate or die,” he said. “When the chips are down you need to sell more. ROI has never been more important, and measurable results have never been easier to demonstrate in this brave new world of variable data and digital innovation.”
Beaver Press stakes its claim as being the first truly, fully integrated digital and offset print organisation in Sydney. Its factory sports an eight-colour and a ten- colour offset presses that work seamlessly with a Xerox iGen3, a back-up mid-range Xerox colour printer as well as two high impact monochrome systems, also from Fuji Xerox.
Customers are varied and include financial consultancies, pharmaceutical organisations, big banks, large print managers and small graphic design firms.
Its reputation as a truly integrated print organisation is of utmost importance to Beaver Press. The organisation upholds the scale of its versatility by using the best hardware and software available to it, to ensure that it can handle any job at optimum quality with digital or offset or a combination of the two depending on lead time and customer needs.
“A lot of supposedly integrated print providers hype up their colour management capabilities and hope their digital and offset work is not compared too closely,” said David Francis.
“That isn’t how we operate. We are driven by our customers’ needs for colour quality and cost effectiveness, and we see a best-of-breed integrated service as the way to honour both.”
The Xerox iGen3 became the centrepiece of Beaver Press’s digital arsenal in November 2008 and Fuji Xerox’s Colour Managed Workflow Solution (CMWS) was installed in January 2009. The CMWS combines colour matching software with multiple print devices to enable the production of print to international standards.
Fuji Xerox CMWS is driven by ORIS Press Matcher software, utilising the colour management technology of ORIS ColorTuner, for quality control of hard copy proofs.
“With CMWS we work entirely to ISO specifications and are confident of results irrespective of whether they come from a press or digital production system. This means we are actively protecting the brands of our customers and our customers’ customers through print quality and colour consistency,” said David Francis.
Customer service has been greatly enhanced since Beaver Press began using CMWS. “During long projects especially we are able to visually assure clients with progress updates. They are completely blown away when we provide them with full mock-up proofs that are an exact match with the final product. We can give them perfect bound mock-ups, imposed proofs and real mock-ups. Graphic designers love showing these to their clients,” said David Francis.
On one occasion, Beaver Press undertook an offset job that involved a particularly lengthy set-up. “The customer required the production of 88,000 32-page A5 saddle-stitch books, and while we were still preparing the plates, our client’s client was keen to see how the finished product would look. Using Fuji Xerox’s CMWS, we were able to produce a dummy via the iGen3 that was ‘chalk and chalk’ with the final version.”
The ORIS Press Matcher software has enabled Beaver Press to accurately meet even the most meticulous standards of colour matching. “The fashion industry is notoriously pedantic about colours and so we were under great pressure to get things right during the production of a swimwear catalogue. It was imperative the exact garment hues were replicated in the catalogue in both the printed and the website versions. CMWS made this accuracy a matter of formality.”
At its most innovatively integrated, Beaver Press is able to rely on CMWS to help combine digital and offset printing on a multi-page variable data DM piece that remains completely visually consistent the whole way through.
Explained David Francis, “We can use an offset press for the static part of the job: the fixed content. Then we are able to personalise the front and back covers drawing on the iGen3’s variable data capabilities. The trick is to ensure the outside cover pages match the rest of the booklet, which we can now achieve simply and seamlessly with the touch of a button.”
Feedback from colleagues and customers has been overwhelmingly positive. “Some very large print buyers have actually said to us, ‘thank god, you got the iGen3’ after some bad experiences with other digital brands that didn’t live up to their promises to deliver offset colour quality.”
As a result, Beaver Press is exploring new industries and expanding its customer base. With an advanced colour management system in place, David Francis and his team are able to assertively meet the needs of brand guardians such as advertising agencies and marketing companies, “We can be faithful to the integrity of brands by ensuring exact colour replication and the production of marketing materials that are beyond reproach.”
“It’s an easy sell to potential clients because we no longer need months to build up their trust. We can give them an on-the-spot practical demonstration on how both our offset and digital print systems print to ISO spec. We maintain these standards by using CMWS to fingerprint the iGen3 against our offset presses. There’s no way we could do this without it.”
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