Being one of the industry’s hares could mean winning the business race, but it could also leave you watching balefully as the slow-but-steady tortoise sees the benefits of deliberating. Taking the first leap can be a winning move; misplaced bravado can be a handicap.

Early adopting seems to come naturally to many of Australia’s printers. Of the 100 votes to a ProPrint online poll in July 2010, more than two-thirds of respondents believed the benefits of taking the lead with technology outweighed the risks.

A handful wanted to be the star pupil for suppliers: 16% said special attention from suppliers was the key reason to become an early adopter. But more than half, unsurprisingly, said the best reason to be first with technology was to get a head start on competitors.

When it comes to potentially disruptive technology in today’s printing industry, you can’t go past inkjet. It has fully emerged from years of infancy to become a production-level process of tomorrow. Australian companies have been quick to jump aboard, although notably, via a mix of different manufacturers.

HP’s inkjet webs have found favour with Griffin Press and Blue Star. At Computershare, the choice was to go for one of the earliest commercialised models, the InfoPrint 5000. For Salmat, the decision was Océ (more on that later). Rival transactional producer SEMA recently signed for an Impika machine through reseller Fuji Xerox Australia, though it is unclear how this decision will fit when Xerox starts to push its own proprietary inkjet platform globally in the near future (see Star Product, p58).

The first major inkjet announcement in this country came from Sydney-based, SOS Print & Media, which bought the first Kodak Prosper 1000, a B&W web machine. The Prosper platform, based on Kodak’s Stream head technology, had been one of the most hyped technology launches of recent years. It is being held up as a beacon of hope for the ailing imaging giant.

Unfortunately for Kodak, the reality hasn’t always lived up to the hype. The first Prosper user was expected to be Italian direct mail firm Rotomail. You’d struggle to find a better example of a true early adopter. The Italian firm was due to become the first company in the world to invest in a multimillion-dollar device based on cutting-edge, and relatively untested, technology.

The Milan-based company intended to purchase the full-colour Prosper 5000XL model. Rotomail’s managing director had even been appearing at international Kodak events to help the vendor plug the Prosper range in the lead-up to its launch at Ipex 2010. Then, in October 2010, came the news Kodak must have dreaded: Rotomail made a complete U-turn and opted to instead install a T300, the inkjet web from Kodak’s rival, HP.

Risky business

The world of the early adopter can be an uncertain place.

In terms of new technology, Memjet has been getting the industry’s attention. This digital process is like inkjet on steroids, using 70,000 nozzles to churn out full-colour pages in a single pass. It is homegrown technology, developed by Silverbrook Research in Balmain, Sydney.

It’s quick. Tech blog Engadget said: “There’s something otherworldly about just how fast this thing spits out pages.”

Who said things moved slower in Queensland? It’s not the case at Sunshine Coast-based Mailezy, which became the first company in Australia to invest in a full-colour envelope printer based on Memjet head array, made by Neopost and supplied by GBC. It puts the 10-year-old business at the technological forefront.

Managing director Nathan Koina is unequivocal about the advantages of being first in your local market. “Being an early adopter of technology means that Mailezy can position itself as a company that invests in leading-edge technology and, as a result, can offer tangible print solutions to our clients.”

Using Memjet thermal inkjet technology, the Neopost AS-950C machine can print envelopes, postcards, mailers and more in true digital full-process colour. At three times the speed and a third of the cost of toner-based printing, Neopost views the AS-950C as taking a quantum leap ahead of toner technology.

Koina says: “As a boutique mail house, the majority of our jobs are 50,000 or less, and the Neopost Memjet machine offers great flexibility to our business and ultimately our clients. So far it has been producing some impressive results as far as envelope print quality.”

Koina is adamant about what being an early adopter is not about – media exposure, launch events for industry peers, nor a tantalising sticker price.

Calculated gamble

The more typical example of an early adopter would be a companies that buys the first of a new model, rather than a whole new technology. As a gamble, this tack remains far less risk, though the pay-off can still be significant.

Last year signified a big 12 months for Melbourne package printer Litho Superpak. It started with a move to a customised facility in Brunswick, and culminated in a new six-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster CX 102 press, the first in Australia.

General manager Avi Rubinstein runs the 26-year-old family-owned carton business with his father and business founder, Ari. He views the CX 102 as a natural progression. As a Heidelberg house, Litho Superpak knew where to turn for its next machine.

“Once we knew we were building a new factory where we could fit a CX, we spoke to Heidelberg again in mid-2009. We’d recently bought a CD, which was a fantastic machine, but didn’t have inline UV coating. We weren’t interested in printing with UV inks but simply wanted the option of secondary UV coating on top of our aqueous. We were running the CD in conjunction with an offline UV coater. But inline UV gave us one pass, which meant additional productivity, reducing makeready time and wastage. From the quality perspective, we were getting a far better gloss and smoothness.

“At that stage, we were just looking for a CD with extended delivery, including three extra drying towers and the UV coater. But once we placed the order, Heidelberg came to us and offered an upgrade to a CX, which would offer enhancements in terms of speed as well as quality. It was a no-brainer at our end,” says Rubinstein.

Litho Superpak was also first in the country to buy a Heidelberg ECO 105 folder-gluer. Rubinstein sees an advantage to being first with a CX for a varied clientele across foods, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods. “It gives us the opportunity to show that we’re at the forefront.”

But he hastens to add that being the first kid on the block to own the new bike is about far more than pride of ownership. Litho Superpak has already attracted new customers because of the added speed, quality and bottom-line offered by the CX 102.

Being an early adopter in the printing industry can also bring the added cost of the ancillary equipment. A leap into digital, for instance, brings into focus the need for an overhaul in the bindery. This was not an issue for Litho Superpak.

Some 80% of the company’s output is repeat work in packaging, so it uses plates formerly used with the CD presses on its new CX 102. The transformation has been seamless, he reports.

Another side of new technology is, of course, getting your head around the way it works. On training, Rubinstein says: “It’s still a learning curve – our operators are still learning the slightly different handling skills on different substrates. But we really saw to it that our guys were up to speed before we made the decision.”

Jetting ahead

High-volume fulfilment powerhouse Salmat has a culture of early adoption. This can be traced in part back to HPA, which it acquired in 2007. HPA took a punt on the Fuji Xerox ‘Sugi’ FX980 machine. Before inkjet took over the market, this high-volume colour toner platform was pitched as the leading choice for high-volume transactional and transpromo work.

More recently, Salmat broke new ground as the first customer for the Océ Jetstream 2200. The inkjet equipment arrived last year and has been successfully commissioned in Victoria and NSW, says Salmat’s head of external affairs, Josh Faulks.

Thorough research and preparation are essential to being a technology trendsetter, he says. “These investments have been made on the back of years of research and development into the future of high-volume variable-data printing, the ability of various formatting and composition engines to cope with high-speed colour, and potential to add significant value to documents our clients rely on to drive cash flow or provide statements of account.

He brings up another perk of being first to take the plunge. “When new technology is not completely developed at release, an early adopter has an opportunity to influence development. This is particularly important as the user of technology, rather than the manufacturer. As a user, we understand the operational environment and its requirements more that the manufacturer,” says Faulks.

A unique use of digital printing technology is the Espresso Book Machine (EBM): sometimes dubbed the ‘paperback vending machine’. The device uses an electronic file to produce the book at the location it is sold, copy-by-copy, as and when it is needed, removing the requirement to batch-print, transport and store unordered copies. This is the ‘print run of one’, although micro-runs into the hundreds are common.

The machine is manufactured by US company On Demand and has a strategic partnership with Lightning Source, the world’s largest POD book printer. It was named by Time magazine as one of its inventions of the year.

Fits and starts

But the EBM has had an unsteady history in Australia, with all the false starts that can be a trademark of early adoption In 2008, Angus & Robertson installed the first the first EBM into its Bourke Street outlet in Melbourne. There was a loudly hailed plan to roll out of 50 machines at various outlets.

It never proceeded. The original machine was returned.

Since then, another forward-thinking operation has stepped into the breach as the country’s only EBM user. The University of Melbourne’s Custom Book Centre (CBC) introduced the EBM last year, currently thought to be the only one in the southern hemisphere.

The EBM has proved a hit at the book centre, says the CBC’s executive officer, Simon Strong. “We bought our EBM to allow us to manufacture books in-house. This was to offer products not otherwise available but also in quantities that would suit our customers.”

The EBM is used for single or very short runs of obscure material with a high educational value but low marketability, such as prints from its digital repository of theses, for which there are many requests. Online submission for printing manuscripts on a 48-hour turnaround is on the horizon.

“The machine arrived in early 2010 and performed to expectations, principally because we appreciated teething troubles were inevitable and engaged staff that were up to the task,” says Strong.

He is also frank about the challenges. “When the new technology enables a new, rather than enhanced service offering, the advantages can be more challenging to communicate to customers. This process is rarely straightforward, and the more novel the new service is, the more challenging it is to communicate.”

Strong says pre-release testing influenced CBC, not on whether to buy the EBM, but when to buy. He says an earlier version “had not performed to expectations”. Availability of consumables, particularly lubricants and adhesives, was weighed by the centre before the buy order was placed.

This can be the real test for an early adopter. The support systems around a new piece of technology may not be as well developed as a commercial enterprise demands. Speaking off the record, most Australian firms who have invested in high-volume production inkjet have told ProPrint of teething issue, particularly around paper and uptime.

Support is crucial in an industry where excess downtime can kill a business. It is an especially tricky issue in a country as geographically disparate as Australia. Printers tell ProPrint that the location of a vendor’s head office – and hence the proximity of engineers – can be a deciding factor in which brand to choose.

This is particularly apparent as you leave the Sydney-Melbourne corridor. Carolyn Cagney, managing director of Five Star Print in Adelaide, can be classed as an early adopter. Her company recently become just the second in the state to run Kodak’s NexPress SX. The business also runs an HP Indigo 5500 and Konica Minolta Bizhub c5500, with plans to link all digital devices into a Da Vinci MIS via Kodak Prinergy.

Cagney wants more support for early cabs off the rank in smaller states, where there are more limited turnovers. It’s no coincidence that Five Star was the second customer in South Australia to opt for the Kodak machine.

“The NexPress was purchased not only to offer competition to South Australia’s first NexPress site, Finsbury Green, but to double the install base and hopefully convince Kodak to train a local engineer.”

Return to vendor: early adopting mishap

Not all pioneering installations are matches made in heaven. A standout example is the story, almost legend, of a high-profile Melbourne pre-press bureau, which in the mid-1990s chalked up the first Australian installation of a well-known toner-driven digital production press that had made a hit at Ipex 1993.

The deal was greeted with much fanfare, vendor hype, releases to the trade media, an industry night, and good vibes about go-ahead thinking attributed to the customer.

For the vendor, the European developed 320mm-format, four-colour digital machine represented a logical expansion from its traditional reprographics base and a new revenue stream to bolster plateauing sales of imagesetters, film and analogue plates.

The strategy of the purchaser was to leverage its considerable acumen in file preparation and move into digital print. Film work was waning and the first signs were evident that the newer computer-to-plate processing would not much longer be the sole preserve of trade bureaus, but would soon become an integral part of print service providers’ packages.

To be among the very first in Australia to invest in a digital production printing platform, with its promise of short runs and variable imaging, seemed a brilliant solution. But the theory did not quite match the practice.

Was it a case of not researching the market before buying? Or were there technological problems or limitations with early generations of the device itself? No one in the industry at the time could ever find out for sure, and not much has been said since, so we’d hedge our bets and say it was probably a bit of both.

Whatever the cause, within months the nifty new machine was returned to the vendor with a “thanks, but no thanks” – and regrets all round.

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