According to BlueStar managing director Chris Mitchell (pictured), this is the result of a strategic review that the company has undergone since his appointment about seven months ago to consolidate its web, sheetfed and digital print capabilities into one site. This move will coincide with an investment of about $10 million in new equipment for the site in 2009.
BlueStar is also moving its direct mail facilities to a new address very near its Silverwater site to allow for planned growth in its DM business and to hasten the ongoing development of its DM technology base.
“We’ll be focusing the business around the ‘four legs of the chair’ – sheetfed and digital, direct mail, print management – and obviously carry on with the WebStar strategy,” Chris Mitchell told ProPrint. “You may be aware we made a small digital acquisition late last year in Canberra [PanPrint] to beef up our digital capability.
“This is really about continuing that focus in the digital and sheetfed area to bring all that capability into a single site. We see a lot of benefits in having all web, sheet and digital in the one location in Silverwater.
“We thought about how to bring these different capabilities together and it made sense to bring the great capabilities of McMillan together with Blue Star Print NSW. Obviously, the other thing we get out of this is, in line with our environmental push, is we’re going to get some real estate reduction as well. The new DM facility will have state-of-the-art low-emissions lighting, and so on.
“So this is quite a strategic move for us. Some of the equipment from McMillan will be coming cross and there will be some new digital and sheetfed equipment coming in too.”
Chris Mitchell declined to comment on how many redundancies there will be at the McMillan Print facility.
“There will obviously be some redundancies coming out of this, but there will be a lot [of staff] moving across to here, creating a sort of best-of-both Group over here. I prefer not to give exact numbers – we’re still working through that.”
According to Mitchell, customers should not see any noticeable difference in operations.
“We’ll be progressively migrating work across from one site to the other. It’s really about capacity, so as we move the DM capability into their new site that will free up some space here and we’ll move print capacity and new equipment across to here.
“We’re very confident this will really set us up for a big growth platform for Sydney, with all that capability in one location. Having all that web, sheet and digital capacity, there are lots of other benefits we can offer customers in terms of how we can use all that capability.”
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