Tell us about your business

Australia Post’s PostConnect service provides business customers with end-to-end data, insight and multi-channel communication solutions. We provide data to enrich their understanding of their target audience, and our printing and multi-channel capability means PostConnect can deliver a tailored message by mail, email or SMS. Personalising a piece of advertising gives businesses a far greater chance of reaching their target audience and the ability to do this seamlessly across both mail and digital channels is quite new.

What have you installed?

We have installed the Océ ColorStream 3700, which is the next generation of full-colour, continuous-feed inkjet printers, offering key advantages over the other full-colour inkjet printing equipment we examined.

How do they help your business?

PostConnect operates the only mailhouse in Australia that can vary the message right through to images on the envelope. If the customer believes their target audience is more likely to open an envelope with a picture of a palm tree versus a snowflake, we can print accord-ingly. Part of our personalisation capability comes from these Océ colour printers, which have been fully operational at our Melbourne and Sydney sites since last year.

When were they installed?

The printers were installed in July 2012.

What does the equipment do?

The technology allows a total white-paper-in, full-colour-out process and provides huge time and waste savings as well as advantages in scalability and flexibility as our needs grow.

Did you make any other installations?

In addition to the Océ presses, we have purchased a software system to drive the transactional printing division as well as installing a Pitney Bowes Rival inserting system.

How fast are the inkjet presses?

In addition to complementing our multi-channel customer offering, the new presses have boosted our production capacity, as each printer is capable of printing 100 metres of paper a minute, double-sided and in full colour.

What features on the presses do you like most?

One of the key features for us was that, when the operator needs to stop the presses, they stop immediately and can then be started again at exactly the same place without any quality deterioration and while maintaining full data/print integrity.

How does this help?

This process eliminates the paper run-on that is common with competitive equipment and can be anywhere from 20 to 200 metres of blank paper. This feature alone reduces waste involving thousands of dollars a year. Additionally time is saved as no wasted blank pages have to be handled in the later post processing steps.

Are there any other features you want to mention?

Another advantage was the Océ Headsafe feature, which allows us to switch between monochrome and full colour and back again in a matter of minutes. Unused print head nozzles can become clogged, resulting in delays to clean them, but with the Océ ColorStream 3700, this is avoided by capping the unused heads – as one might cap a fountain pen for instance – which eliminates the clogging.

What are the upgrade possibilities for the machine?

We can upgrade from the standard four printheads to six printheads if required in the future and can use a variety of inks from dye and pigment to premium, which extends our printing options.

Have they delivered the benefits you hoped for?

PostConnect is pleased with the benefits we have already seen from the presses, and the value they add to promotional mail.

Supplier’s response

With this investment Australia Post has joined the market with digital web-fed, full-colour inkjet print. They can provide a higher level of product and service to their clients based on the high-quality print, the more environmentally and economical technology, and the many operational benefits that come with the ColorStream 3000 series, a product that has become the most sold inkjet press globally over the last two years.

Herbert Kieleithner, Canon Australia

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