Griffin Press – owned by parent company PMP – is making a giant investment in digital printing, committing to a $3.2m per year deal for the next seven years with HP Inc, for three digital presses and associated finishing equipment.
Peter George, CEO of PMP says the deal is expected to be initially ‘cost-neutral’ as the costs of the lease and consumables will be partially recovered by operational cost savings.
Under the terms of the deal HP will lease the equipment to Griffin, provide consumables, and be responsible for productivity.
It is set to position PMP-owned Griffin as the 'largest digital book printer in Australasia' when the presses are installed in July. The company will transition out of offset book printing.
The press specifications include a mono webfed HP Pagewide T410, a sheetfed HP Indigo 10000 and a sheetfed HP Indigo 7800. The deal also includes a Scodix Ultra Pro digital embellishment system.
Peter George says, “With the rapidly increasing trend for short-run printing of books on demand the ability to create an integrated digital workflow has become critical."
“The seven year lease and services agreement will provide Griffin world class digital printing capability that will assist us in retaining customers and winning new contracts by providing the service the book publishing industry needs.
“Our printing offer to the publishing industry will include in-line digital multi-colour cover printing along with full digital embellishment solutions to best meet publisher’s short run demand.”
George says the conversion of traditional printing processes to digital will attract operational cost savings up to $1m per annum.
While signalling the end of offset book printing at Griffin the installation of an end to end digital solution gives Griffin a significant competitive advantage over overseas book printers, who will be unable to get anywhere near Griffin’s turnaround time for the local market.
Currie Group is HP's channel partner, and Currie chief executive Rob Dunnett says, “We are delighted to partner such a significant investment for a company of Griffin Press’ heritage and stature in the Australian market. This is an exciting step forward for them and we’re looking forward to continuing this journey as they expand their services into digital.”
Spokesperson for PMP Ian Greenshields says the digital presses will ensure Griffin has ‘no press down-time’ and will make a big difference to productivity and costs due to the ‘end-to-end’ nature of the machine where books will roll out completely finished and embellished.
The HP Indigo digital presses are currently being installed at the Salisbury South facility of PMP's Griffin Press and the PWP T410 is scheduled for installation in the second half of 2016.
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