Ever dreamt of giving it all away and starting fresh in a different, livelier sector, perhaps in the hospitality or entertainment business? Brothers Andrew and Greg Cester did just that – but in reverse. They started out running a nightclub and somehow ended up operating one of the biggest trade printers in the country. It might seem like an unconventional entry into the printing industry, but Whirlwind is not your conventional shop.
Over the past 18 months or so, the Whirlwind team have been busying themselves with their most innovative rethink. They dub it ‘black box’ estimating. It ties online ordering to printing in search of that Holy Grail: full automation.
In 1998, the Cesters were running ‘The Storm Club’ in Dandenong. The link between the nightclub industry and the world of ink-on-paper might seem tenuous, but most companies need printed collateral and The Storm Club was no different. After buying an Apple Mac – which probably had specs not much better than the iPhone in your pocket but cost the princely sum of $25,000 – the nightclub owners were geared up to get into the reprographics game. They continued the nightclub’s meteorological theme with their new business: Whirlwind.
“We started designing our nightclub passes,” says Andrew Cester. “We came across people who were batching nightclub passes and we took that methodology and grew our own customers to the point that we started broking the print to other printers. Within a couple of years, we had grown into other commonly used stocks, like letterheads and brochures.”
Within just three years, they had established themselves in Melbourne and opened up an outpost in Sydney, which “grew quite fast”, says Andrew.
It was Greg Cester who moved up to Sydney to carve out a NSW outpost. From the get-go, the idea was to have an ‘agency’ look and feel to the sales office. This would be in keeping with the territory: Whirlwind has had three Sydney locations over the past decade, all around the hipster locales of Surry Hills and Darlinghurst.
From the exposed timber beams to the funky prints lining the walls, walking through Whirlwind’s Sydney office feels like entering a creative company. This was intentional, says Greg.
“We planted ourselves in Surry Hills and Darlinghurst where there are lots of designers and agencies… we wanted to create an atmosphere where if people came in, they felt their design client service was here.
“We also wanted to be different. We take that approach to everything we do. Over there is what the rest of the industry does, and when we make our plans, we take being different as a key element,” he adds.
North facing
While manufacturing remains firmly planted in Melbourne, this northern frontier is not on the fringes of the Whirlwind empire – it is central to the success story. “It has been a real win for us. Sydney is 40% of our sales now, even though it started five years after Melbourne and we don’t manufacture here,” says Greg.
It was around the same time Whirlwind was setting up shop in Sydney that it also changed its model, from a specialist printer serving the hospitality industry to a wholesaler working for graphic designers and other print shops. At the time, ‘trade’ or ‘hub’ printing was in its infancy.
Initially, Whirlwind was still acting as a middleman, with work supplied by five different printers. “But we couldn’t get the consistent quality,” says Andrew.
In 2002, not long after its Sydney foray, Whirlwind decided to enter manufacturing and bought its first press. “It was a five-colour Heidelberg CD 74, the second one in Australia after Worldwide,” says Andrew.
There’s nothing unusual about a printer remembering his first press, but Andrew has another reason to recall the spec: “The Aussie dollar was at 56c. We paid an absolute premium for it.”
The splurge paid off. Within two years the company had outgrown the site in Blackburn, and over the next four years the Cesters stitched together three neighbouring factories until they had no choice but to move to the current site, a 9000m2 plant in the Melbourne suburb of Knoxfield.
Over time, the company has continued to rethink its model. Following the switch from nightclub owners to print brokers, then the leap from print brokers to hub printers, the next evolution would be all about IT cleverness. Behind the scenes at Knoxfield is an array of software and systems that underpins everything Whirlwind does.
In-house and external developers have been working feverishly to create an automated estimating solution. The ‘how’ of this development is quite complicated – not to mention somewhat confidential – but the ‘why’ is obvious. The trade printing market has become brutally competitive since the time Whirlwind bought its first Speedmaster. The sector is peopled with good operators in virtually every state. Whirlwind now goes head to head with the likes of CMYKhub, IBS Cards, LEP Colour Printers and even the local arm of global giant Vistaprint. A saturated market drives prices down. But the kicker for trade suppliers is that their prices have to be low enough that their customers can add another margin when they on-sell.
This is what drives trade print operators toward cutting-edge automation. This approach is sometimes termed ‘lights out’ production, but Greg is quick to point out this might be overselling it. People still have a place in the printing workflow.
“No one is going to achieve lights out production. We are certainly not looking to achieve that. We are looking to reduce administration as much as possible.
“From an account management point of view, it enables us to look after more complex jobs that don’t go through the automated system. It shifts the work. In the printing industry, so many businesses are just surviving with a model that is tied up in administration, with no money to throw at creative and development work.”
The point Greg is keen to get across is that while the company is committed to automating processes where possible, it is not about to go down the Vistaprint route of phasing out client services and only offering a narrow range of standardised jobs. Catalogue products can be automated, but “we won’t be able to quote extremely complex jobs like booklets with a six-page cover plus spot UV on page 36 with a perf on page 80”, points out Greg.
“We do, however, expect to be able to automate 95-98% of the quotes we generate on a day-to-day basis.”
Automated estimation
Most pre-press, MIS and web-to-print vendors have off-the-shelf products that offer some of these functions. Then there are the print management companies, whose business models centre on clever ordering platforms, from the likes of the Noosh system, which is licensed by Ergo Asia, to the system Finsbury Green built to cater for its contract with the Victorian government. Andrew reckons Whirlwind’s new system puts it right at the forefront of the push toward automated estimating.
Creating these systems is not easy and not cheap. That’s why many SMEs put it in the too-hard basket. With a turnover of nearly $30 million, Whirlwind isn’t quite an SME, nor is it daunted at the prospect of implementing the kind of end-to-end automation usually left to the big boys.
It helps that Whirlwind thinks differently. Neither Andrew nor Greg are your typical print shop CEOs. They’re
both easily a decade under the average age. This youthful perspective might explain why the company isn’t fazed by the esoteric world of software design.
Father of three Andrew is a bit of a fitness nut. The mezzanine floor of the Knoxfield plant has been converted to staff gym, and on the day ProPrint visits, Andrew is in training for his first marathon. But his exercise of choice is the gruelling sport of ‘adventure races’ where ultra-fit participants run, swim, cycle or kayak over long distances.
Greg is not quite as exercise-mad as his brother, with a leaning toward Yoga and Eastern spirituality (which seems more at home in the inner eastern suburbs of Sydney than the outer eastern suburbs |of Melbourne). As ProPrint went to press, Greg’s wife was just weeks away from their third child.
Throughout Whirlwind’s history, both Andrew and Greg have sat in the CEO chair. They bring different skills: while Greg was chief executive, Andrew took on a manufacturing manager role, and is more hands on with the production run out of Melbourne. Greg, on the other hand, has gravitated toward more of the company’s marketing functions. However, their core strength is their relationship.
“Andrew and I get along like a house on fire,” says Greg. “While we are different, we both share similar values.”
The fact they originally came from outside the industry also gives them a different take, says Andrew. “The advantage we have is being able to step outside and question why you can’t do certain things in print. We look at things very simply: if someone else can do it, why can’t we? If someone else overseas is doing it, why can’t we? If someone else is providing that service, why can’t we?
“It is not about ink on paper – it is about how you service you customers and how you can advantage their business. It isn’t anything more than that,” says Andrew.
One of the demands from customers is, of course, price. This is what drove the development of gang printing – getting more out of each costly litho set-up. When the run lengths are low enough or the turnaround times are too tight for an offset run, the price question is now regularly answered with digital print. What is driving Whirlwind toward black box estimating is a need to give customers as much choice as possible.
“You can produce something digitally. You can produce it as a standalone offset product. You can gang print it. What didn’t exist was a system that could estimate across all sorts of output devices and production methods,” says Andrew.
Deciding how to move forward with an order is a matter of working backwards from the customer. Whether they want speed, quality or price should drive them toward a different production method.
The manual approach
Until recently, Whirlwind operated like a lot of trade printers and commercial houses. Customers have a price list and they would ring up to place an order. But this tried-and-tested system doesn’t offer automation benefits.
Whirlwind has thousands of customers Australia wide, with different pricing systems, so the manual process can be time-consuming. The idea is to combine a polished front-end ordering platform with a smart back-end estimating system. Both are assets in their own right, but the real benefits only start to appear when they are seamlessly stitched together.
Funnily enough, Whirlwind has had the front end established for some time.
“To our customers, we looked very automated. People said Whirlwind had a great web ordering system. We hated our web ordering system. We thought it was terrible. A web ordering system should allow you to order a job, tell you when you’ll receive it from the time you upload your artwork, give you options on price and products, give you the turnaround times, and deliver it when you ask for it to be delivered,” says Andrew.
To meet this end, the Whirlwind brains trust has been tinkering with the back-end so that ordering is as seamless and automated in reality as it looks from outside. Sounds simple; it’s not. For those printers who long saw estimators as a given, this black box estimating might seem a bit like black magic.
Andrew says: “That flyer can be produced on a digital machine for under $100, you can gang print it for $100 or you can print it by itself as a bespoke job for $400: here’s your best option. That’s what we are building.
“Our focus is to give our customers the choice. Is it price, is it speed, is it quality? Take your pick, and get your options. Other systems don’t quote that way. You have to enter in requests for three different quotes. Or an estimator has to sit in the background and quote it three times.”
Under the hood
So what real-world tasks are bundled up under this ‘black box’ umbrella?
“We are talking about online print management. Black box estimating is the term they use overseas. It’s the ability to quote across different output devices and pick the best option,” says Andrew.
He explains that the Whirlwind system incorporates a number of once disparate functions: data asset management, job tracking, preflighting and virtual proofing, all accessed via one web portal.
In fact, all these different functions are catered for by different off-the-shelf systems, in particular a Tharstern MIS and a Kodak Prinergy workflow.
“There’s estimating software, there’s an MIS, then there’s pre-press software from three different suppliers, then you’ve got Kodak’s Storefront web-to-print product, then there’s a payment gateway tool, then you have the custom development.”
Whirlwind does have in-house software development expertise, including a full-time business systems person and a full-time IT manager. But even so, it would take a lot more than that to build such sophisticated software from the ground up in-house. Much of this development is outsourced to New Zealand, not because of the exchange rate with the Kiwi dollar but because that’s where Tharstern’s licensed developers are based.
MIS users are limited in who they can use to tweak their systems. This is where cost comes in, says Andrew. “What people don’t understand when they get into buying an MIS is that there are legalities around MIS. If you want custom development, is the developer licensed to write into your MIS? Or are you locked into having all your development done by the MIS provider?”
Whirlwind learned the hard way about making sure to only ever use certified developers. After a year of working on one part of the project, it turned out the IT mechanics weren’t licensed to get under the bonnet of the system.
Andrew explains: “We were a year into the development and – this is embarrassing – the MIS provider came to us and said the people doing the development weren’t licensed to have information coming into our system. So we pretty much binned what was, at that time, about $90,000 worth of development.”
There have been other unexpected costs. For instance, Whirlwind was having trouble linking its Kodak Storefront ordering portal to its payment gateway, which was a distinct software package. There was a customer registration field when a user logged into the Whirlwind site, but because this wouldn’t plug into the payment system, when a user changed passwords on the front, it didn’t communicate this change to the payment system. This stopped them from being able to pay.
“So we said, we want to hide it, can you just colour it white so people can’t see that they can change their password. We’ll build a web portal at the front, they’ll log into that so when they change their password, they change it on the payment gateway. All we asked them to do was change the colour to hide it on the screen,” says Andrew.
It cost $7,000. And this was a small piece of development. It’s easy to see how a project like this can snowball in both cost and time.
In a separate exercise in trial and error, Whirlwind bought an online ordering module for the tidy sum of $100,000 through an expectation it would be improved over time and integrate easily. These advances never occurred. The off-the-shelf system stayed firmly on the shelf.
These examples serve to explain why few print companies have managed to build sophisticated IT systems. Only the brave should venture down this route. Greg says it is not just a problem faced by one such family company in Australia.
“Even the companies we have spoken to overseas, really good companies, have found [developing this kind of system] cost a lot more money than anyone anticipated: connecting it to the freight company, connecting it to the payment gateways, connecting it to Prinergy – it is challenging.”
But the potential windfall is huge. Greg and Andrew wanted a portal that would remove unnecessary admin from the back-end while offering a positive experience for customers. The new system delivers on these desires. While Greg stresses there remains much to be done before it is the all-singing, all-dancing ordering portal of their dreams, the site has already proved its worth.
“We were getting 100 orders a week via the old website. Within four months, that has grown to 380 orders,” says Greg.
The only teething issues now are around the user experience. The Cesters are extremely keen that customers will have a faultless ordering experience, and at time of writing, it was not quite there yet, says Greg.
“It will be amazing in three or four months’ time,” he says.
Factfile
Established: 1998
Based: Knoxfield, Melbourne and Surry Hills, Sydney
Sector: trade printing
Employees: 150
Business briefing
Whirlwind Print was established in Melbourne in 1998 by two brothers, Andrew and Greg Cester. They established a Sydney office in the early 2000s, run by Greg Cester.
Whirlwind was an early adopter of web-to-print technology, allowing customers to order print over the internet.
The team wanted to take their web-to-print approach to the next level. They have made significant investments in IT systems over recent years to build what Andrew Cester calls a ‘black-box estimating’ system.
They wanted to improve the efficiency of the back-end in order to make the ordering process more automated. This meant plugging the web-to-print storefront directly into the MIS and the workflow.
Whirlwind also want to make the front end portal more user friendly, a process that is ongoing.
By saving money through efficiencies in ordering standardised, simple products, the company can free up resources to give more attention to complex jobs that require the human touch.
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