Located in an industrial estate just a few minutes drive north west of Ballarat, Revolution Print, it seems, has been named to capture the radical change in strategy that has catapulted the company into a new era of customer service.

For the formerly named Kingprint, an iconic local family business, the change in moniker is itself a bit subversive. But then Ballarat, after all, is the home of Australia’s only armed revolt, the Eureka Stockade, where in the 1850s gold miners ran up a new flag and demanded the end of the miner’s tax.

Print customers are also demanding better conditions – print runs short enough to cut out waste and warehousing and an ordering service free of annoying phone and email traffic. While it was not quite a case of “down with the king and off with his head”, there has been a whiff of insurrection in the Ballarat air as the Kingprint shingles were lowered and a bold new logo, Revolution Print, emerged on the greenfields that used to be goldfields skirting the historic city.

Kingprint had been a print provider and part of the fabric of Ballarat since early last century, when it was known as Tulloch & King. During the 1950s and 1960s, it had become Alex King & Sons, with brothers George and Alex King as proprietors.

Taken over in 1978 by Eddie Schreenan, a printer employed by Kings, the name was condensed to Kings The Printer, with the new business later run by Eddie’s sons Daniel and Peter Schreenan. Daniel, an apprentice press operator in the late 1970s and Peter, who has a finance background, joined in the early 1990s.

In 2004, another brother, John, joined the company, fresh from a sales management role in graphic arts at Fuji Xerox in Melbourne.

“We had to bust out of being Ballarat-centric,” John Schreenan tells ProPrint, as we sit in a bright, friendly meeting room at Revolution Print, located among the clean lines of factories and warehouses dotting the industrial estate in Alfredton, a few kilometres from Ballarat. “So many of our customers are national clients now,” he adds.

But the transformation from the printing royalty of Ballarat to the barricades of change has been a heady one, as the company recently moved to shake up its customer-service culture with the introduction of web-to-print (W2P).

The first step, recounts Schreenan, was to expand the business to embrace “a digital strategy, which was clearly influenced by my time at Xerox”. With a Xerox A635 colour machine on the production floor, it was early adoption at its earliest, he emphasises, because digital printing – compared to today — was still a relatively unknown quantity in the mid-2000s — nationally, and especially in regional Australia.

The A635 generated six pages a minute and 35 in mono, but it was a start. “Gradually we just grew and grew because we had enough customers helping us, wanting what digital offered, going from one level to the next,” he says, and soon straight-run, on demand digital was snowballing. (Variable-data printing was introduced in 2008 but has never become a sizeable proportion of digital turnover, says Schreenan).

Today’s offerings are still Xerox but the iGen150, added 18 months ago, is light years ahead of that rudimentary A635. It has enabled Revolution Print to develop a strategy of printing orders of up to 1,000 A4s impressions digitally – on the iGen and on a Xerox Color 1000. Greater volumes are sent for litho printing, and that includes book runs of 2,000 up to 50,000. These are handled by a Shinohara A2 five-colour press and a Heidelberg Speedmaster two-colour (for PMS work).

But Schreenan says the offset-digital cutoff is not set in stone: “We have a next-day service, and if someone wanted 5,000 for the next day, we’d do that. We can do short runs of six-page A4s or anything that fits the longer 660mm-length sheet. We offer short-run presentation folders, and anything that used to be done on a long sheet that was too long for digital and had to go to an offset press.”

The company has further enhanced its options with the recent addition of a Horizon rotary die cutter and a Neopost scorer/perforator/folder. All in all, the bindery now offers perfect binding, PUR binding, laminating, high-speed folding and stitching.

“We’ve grown our business from existing clients by using new applications,” notes Schreenan. “We market to them regularly, especially to our trade customers, based on our ability to provide services we were not able to provide before, mostly utilising the larger sheet size.”

The W2P revolution

With an increasing slate of national accounts, the next leap forward was soon becoming evident. Schreenan wanted to turn the ordering model on its head – a revolution, if you will – and to do this he turned to business partner and online-management whizz Leon Wilson, who is Revolution Print’s co-director and online manager. Early attempts were made in 2007-08, and in 2011-12, a partnership with Online Print Solutions, now part of EFI, showed promise. “We used their base system and did most of the development ourselves, to suit our needs and our customers’ needs” says Schreenan.

Bringing print orders to customers’ keyboards has had a decisive impact on the business. From three-to-four per cent of orders in 2009, online ordering has jumped to more than 60 per cent today. “I think it can get to 75 per cent but there will always be those jobs that will be too complex to order online.”

Leon Wilson explains Revolution’s W2P architecture. There are three levels of customers. Firstly, there are the “walk-off-the-street Google hunters”, who will have their artwork ready and want to order and pay by credit card. These comprise some 15 per cent of online orders. Secondly, there are the trade clients “who have log-ins to the same products but are just buying at better rates”, comprising around 35 per cent.

Trade clients benefit from the ability to ‘re-skin’ their portals to customise them to their clients. For example, at HomeMakers, a customer of one of Revolution’s trade clients, staff when ordering print connect only with a HomeMakers interface, devoid of any branding from the trade printer or Revolution. There they can see instant pricing, and they can proof and submit their order – a true desktop-to-desktop workflow. Schreenan and Wilson are particularly excited by this elegant, triple-layered transparency.

Thirdly there are the corporate customers who can order via their own customised “cloud catalogues”, ready for their next order. These ‘catalogues’ can be changed by the customer at any time. Corporates comprise around 50 per cent of online business. And Schreenan is confident the corporates’ ratio of the online ordering pie will keep growing, as currently, it is limited only by Revolution Print’s ability to generate new ‘cloud catalogues’.

Clients can track their project from job lodgment, through artwork, prepress, print and despatch. Customers log in and place their order through the online system, which emails the job information to the production area. Information is then transferred semi-automatically to a DolphinWorxs Printworxs MIS, and a Printworxs job bag is created from pre-existing templates, using the MIS’s estimating, production and CRM. OPS provides client ordering, file uploading, estimating and approvals as well as backend preflighting.

“We use Freeflow Core to automate the imposition work,” adds Schreenan. “So we can literally receive a job online that can end up at the rip, imposed and ready for stock to be loaded.”

He is eager to see the W2P component fully integrate with the MIS component and hopes full integration between the EFI and DolphinWorxs will soon occur, as he is hesitant about discarding a perfectly fine DolphinWorxs MIS and investing in an EFI MIS, just for the sake of compatibility with the OPS WP2 component.

Clients logging into Revolution Print Online will only see their products, explains Wilson. For example, they might go to ‘stationery’ and see a thumbnail of stationery products they have included in their ‘catalogue’ and which they can order. They just need to click on the thumbnail, send it for proofing, select a quantity and submit the order.

Adds Schreenan: “In that process, we haven’t spoken and we haven’t emailed. It’s cut down the traffic of emails and phones into here, which has been a massive benefit for us. And because we place the artwork on the cloud for them, the artwork accuracy is better than ever too.”

The reduced need for manual handling has enabled Revolution Print to reduce labour, its costliest overhead. Staff numbers in pre-W2P days were around 20, then fell to 12, and are now at around 15, as online services expand.

A ‘radical’ rebrand

The image makeover from Kingprint to Revolution Print took “five or six months”, says Schreenan, and “Revolution” was not even in the mix that was thrown about in the early weeks of the rebranding process.

“It came in, late in the piece, through an off-the-cuff discussion with our ad agency,” he recounts. “We decided that we know we’re revolutionary in what we do. As soon as we saw the logo, especially the standalone ‘R’, we knew we were onto something. It was clean and it worked.”

The brand has been extended to the corporate ‘catalogues’, which are marketed as ‘Revolution Cloud’.

The future

Schreenan and Wilson recently acquired KVM Printing in the Murray River city of Echuca on the NSW border and plans to expand Revolution Print into a hub-and-spoke service with outlets in other Victorian centres , and say it is unlikely to be their final acquisition, Schreenen says, “Because we have the systems and automation in place, we plan to buy regional printers, keep minimal print services on those sites and hub the work back to here.”