Thrivent Thriving With Third Inkjet Press

Brett Birnschein is sold on inkjet.

“Adding inkjet really allowed us to start transforming our shop,” says the manager of Printing and Inserting Services at Thrivent.

That transformation started three years ago when the Appleton, Wisconsin-based in-plant installed a pair of Xerox Baltoro inkjet presses and went from printing mostly transactional materials to producing direct mail and marketing collateral for the nonprofit financial services organization. Since then, the 15-employee in-plant has amped up its inkjet power by replacing two Xerox Nuvera 314s with a continuous-feed Screen Truepress Jet520NX inkjet press.

“It’s going to allow us to do more work in color than what we’ve had … the capacity for in the past,” Birnschein says — for half the cost of toner, he adds.

The new 492-fpm press was installed in the space vacated by the Nuveras, in an “L” configuration with the two engines turned 90°. Nearby, the shop installed a new EMT RFX roll-to-cut-stack line, with a DP22 Pro dynamic processor, to unwind printed rolls, and provide dynamic perforation, slitting, cutting, and merging.

The new EMT finishing line handles unwinding, dynamic perforation, slitting, cutting, and merging. With it are (from left) Char Hackmaster, Paul Resop, Nathan Brown, and Lee Pilgrim. | Credit: Thrivent

This was the in-plant’s first experience with rolls, and the shop had to purchase an Easy Lift Roll-Hauler Model RH4000 to move them. Using rolls has brought “significant” savings over cut sheet paper, Birnschein says.

Inkjet Summit’s Impact

Though he started his inkjet quest last year looking only at cut-sheet printers, attending the 2024 Inkjet Summit sent him in a new direction.

“That’s what really opened my eyes to the possibilities of roll printing,” he recalls. Though he didn’t think his shop had enough volume to justify a continuous-feed press, he talked with Screen representatives there and learned more. He then visited several commercial and in-plant inkjet users in a year-long research effort, eventually narrowing down his choices to two presses.

“Ultimately we went with [Screen] just because I think I felt the most comfortable working with their team,” Birnschein says. “They did a lot to help educate myself and my team on roll printing since we were brand new to it.”

He credits the Inkjet Summit for introducing him to Screen and educating him on inkjet.

“That was a huge help,” he says. “Just connecting with other in-plant operators there who had roll printing.”

From Transactional to Marketing

Thrivent’s Printing and Inserting Services operation produces a massive volume of transactional work: 61 million impressions per year. Each month, the shop prints about three million impressions of statements, contract pages, billing notices, and correspondence materials. But when quarterly financial statements are due, production surges, adding another six to seven million impressions to the workload every three months.

“So, the Screen obviously is going to take all of that quarterly work and a large share of that transactional work for us as well,” Birnschein says.

The speed and productivity of the inkjet presses is saving the in-plant a lot of labor hours, he adds. The shop used to run extra shifts during the quarterly spikes — two 10-hour shifts over 10-12 days. Not anymore.

“We just got through the October quarter end, and we were able to do that same volume of work with just one nine-hour shift in like eight days or nine days, roughly,” he reports.

Despite all that transactional volume, the Baltoros still had capacity to take on some of Thrivent’s marketing material, he says — work that was previously outsourced.

“Bringing the Screen in is giving us the opportunity to continue to expand in that market and bring more of those materials in,” Birnschein says. “So we do things like a full color 11x17" newsletter that gets folded into a self-mailer and sent out. Or color direct mail campaigns. We’ve been doing a ton of postcards, either 6x9" or 6 x11".

In the past, postcards were printed three-up on a 12x18" sheet, then brought to the guillotine cutter, he says.

“Now we’re going to print those on the 18" wide rolls in three 6” wide channels and we’ll take them to the EMT finishing line and it will slit that web into the three channels and then cross cut it into our 9" or 11" lengths and just come out the end as finished size cards for us,” he says.

‘Fantastic Print Quality’

Printing marketing materials on the Screen Truepress Jet520NX has not concerned Birnschein in the slightest.

“I think it’s fantastic print quality,” he says.

His team printed test files during the research phase, and they were very impressed.

“It had really nice, vibrant colors,” he says. “The thing that we all noticed right away was the blacks were super nice and rich. It was a deep black.”

One reason is the pigment ink used on the Screen Truepress Jet520NX. Birnschein preferred pigment ink over dye-based ink and tested pieces printed with each by getting them wet. Those printed on the Truepress were not effected, but the ink had run on pieces printed with dye ink.

“I didn’t want our clients to have a bad experience if they’re taking something out of the mailbox and it got wet in the rain or dropped in a puddle,” he says. “So that was a big kind of factor that swayed me.”

The in-plant isn’t all inkjet though. It runs a Xerox Iridesse 120 with white, silver, gold, and clear specialty toners, which it uses to great effect on custom presentation pieces. The in-plant has won several In-Print awards thanks to the embellishment features on its Iridesse. The shop also has a Xerox Versant 4100, two Lexmark ST9820 MICR check printers, an iJetColor NXT inkjet envelope printer, a 64" HP Latex 335 wide-format printer and a 44" Epson SureColor P9570 aqueous printer.

Beyond the three-week installation and training period for the Truepress Jet520NX, the in-plant also had to upgrade its HVAC system and generator, and add venting to exhaust the heat from the machine. All of those extra expenses could have raised eyebrows among upper management, but Birnschein says company leadership trusts him and knows he’s acting in Thrivent’s best interest.

“They’ve understood the value that we bring to Thrivant for a long time as an in-plant provider. But I did do a lot of homework. I researched this for a year and had worked with my team to put our business case together,” he says. “We’ve been able to show our leadership the value of the in-plant for Thrivant overall. So they were good with supporting it.”