For more than 25 years, Press Group has been providing exceptional commercial printing and mailing services to their client base. Located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Company offers a wide variety of print related offerings involving prepress, binding, finishing as well as personalization and letter shop services. They also have expertise in color correcting, file manipulation, laminating, shrink-wrapping, stitching, postal efficiencies, laser printing and ink-jet services. Press Group prints and develops a broad scope of communication materials for its clients, including handbooks, manuals, direct mail, magazines, books, newsletters, corporate image brochures, product catalogs, calendars and more.

Clients know Press Group for their strong work ethic, attention to detail and dedication to each project. Press Group has a proven track record of delivering superior on-time performance where the value they provide their clients exceeds the cost of the projects.

Solimar Systems interviewed Steve Pond, Production Supervisor at Press Group to discuss how implementing Solimar® Print Director™ Enterprise (SPDE) has allowed them to streamline production workflows, lower labor costs and reduce the turnaround time of customer projects.

The Challenge

As part of a strategic market expansion effort, Press Group recently entered the on-demand book printing market to further broaden their scope of offerings. However, they discovered that their current workflow was not as efficient as they wanted.

Press Group identified four objectives they sought to implement to improve the workflow of their new book printing business:

“Before the Solimar system arrived, we were manually importing and moving PDF files,” said Pond. “A lot of excessive labor hours were involved in this slow and costly process. To become competitive in the market, our production operations needed to become more efficient. Solimar helped us get there by automating processes that were previously manual, slow and had potential for human error.”

The Solution

Press Group researched a variety of solution options to help manage their on-demand book printing workflows. After a thorough analysis, they selected the Solimar® Print Director™ Enterprise (SPDE) system as the most complete offering for their needs. SPDE is designed with a series of unique and integrated modules that work together to provide Press Group sophisticated print control and job management. The power of SPDE lies in its ability to interface with virtually any host or printer. Its processing control, conversion routines, and job management capabilities allow a very high degree of control over printing environments.

“The SPDE system was the best software solution for our situation, ” said Pond. “We felt that the overall SPDE price point represented a very good value.”

SPDE allows Press Group to perform multiple conversion routines on virtually any print file. By supporting combinations of inputs, outputs, and conversions, SPDE gives Press Group a powerful print manager that transparently connects host systems with production printers. As the requirements grow at Press Group, software modules may be easily added to meet their needs.

“The SPDE product feature set was very flexible due to the product’s modular architecture. We appreciated the modular design because we were only required to buy the component pieces that were needed today, but SPDE still allows us to expand in the future when our requirements evolve.”

The Results
Since implementing Solimar’s SPDE system, the output process has become automated and efficient. “Using SPDE, our new workflow is streamlined,” said Pond. “We have set up hot folders that automatically load into the SPDE system. With this ability we are able to efficiently manage our print on demand book production.”

“SPDE has allowed us to significantly reduce our operating expenses,” said Pond. “Labor and business process costs have been reduced by more than $82,000 per year.”

Other tangible benefits include a reduction in reprint costs, a reduced turnaround time for customer projects and a significant reduction in warehousing costs. “Our reprint costs have been cut by $23,000 per year, our customer project turnaround time has been cut in half and our warehousing expenses have been reduced by 50%,” said Pond.

Press Group’s overall experience with Solimar’s technical support has been professional and positive. “The Solimar support we have received has been great,” stated Pond. “They were very knowledgeable and thorough through our implementation process. They helped us get started quickly so we could ramp up and begin producing our books in no time.”