Vendors Listening At Last?

Here is one in-plant production manager's take on recent technology introductions and how they address trends in the in-plant market.

By Heath Cajandig

In this industry, vendors are continuously trying to gear up the hype machine to tout a new vision for the future. Over time, it is hard not to be skeptical of any claim.

Every now and then, though, a product actually does come along that perfectly sums up the current and future state of the industry. This past January, one of these products arrived: The Xerox DocuTech 100 series copier/printer. For Xerox it helps solidify a digital future for the company; for Heidelberg, it might have ended it.

What started with the success of the light production models from Canon and Ricoh is now being extended by Xerox. With consensus from the major vendors, they are confirming what many in-plant personnel already know: Off the glass copying is very important to in-plants.

Over a decade ago, Xerox ushered in the digital revolution with the DocuTech 135 and followed it up with the pure-printer versions known as the 61xx series. The problem: Getting files to the printers.

Most 61xx series printers are fed by a slower scanning DigiPath station that provides a paper portal to get jobs to the print engine. This scanning solution, designed as a transitional step to pure digital, ended up being an Achilles heel for hard copy input. As a result, in a retro-twist, the new DocuTech engine is arguably the best copier ever made.

The DocuTech 100/120 scans paper at 120 image per minute. Because it actually has dual-scan heads, it can read both sides of the paper at once. This makes it the fastest digital copier made.

Furthermore, the fact that this new machine is a fantastic copier is nothing short of a confession from "the Document Company" that the modern in-plant is still strongly fed by paper originals.

We need a fast, easy, and efficient way to get documents through the production workflow. Some strides have been made, but it is hard to believe that these same vendors think they can automate the entire printing spectrum via JDF when they have failed to deliver an effective solution for a small portion of it.

Focus On Complex Documents

Production printing faces increasingly more challenges when it comes to maintaining volume each year. In the in-plant world, volume is diminishing from the top and bottom end.

At the top, applications such as human resource manuals, schedules, reports and other documents are being pushed to the Web and other online mediums. At the bottom, laser printers and digital copiers continue to erode volume where they can. As a result, today's production work is more complex, shorter in run length, and needed in less time than ever before.

Need proof? The print engines of the future are designed to be run about three hours a day—even less if you don't plan on reaching the duty cycle of the machine. The value of today's in-plant is not its ability to produce massive amounts of paper, it is the ability to create a sophisticated document with coated stocks, multiple stocks, color, finishing and other features. If a large portion of your printing and copying is on plain white paper, your work is vulnerable and at risk.

Light Production Ideal For In-plants

For the past few years, Ricoh, Canon and others have aggressively attacked the market with machines that offer speed, quality, functionality and reliability. In a world of shrinking run lengths and shorter turnaround time, these solutions have proven to be very effective.

When ganged up, these machines in the 75 to 105 ppm range offer very fast turnaround, high quality and excellent off-the-glass capabilities. Including a great price-to-value ratio, machines like these have successfully knocked out many underutilized DocuTech engines. As a result, Xerox will be using its new DocuTech engine to do what its competition has done for years: replace heavy-duty DocuTech installations with more reliable machines that have fewer components.

The real loser in all of this is Heidelberg. The most prestigious name in printing is struggling in the only real growth area in printing. After years and years of development, the excellent Digimaster 9110/150 was the first machine that could take on the DocuTech monopoly in the high-end market. Unfortunately, this market changed quickly. Rapid advances in the evolution of mid-volume machines and the movement of many large-volume jobs to an online viewing format squeezed the traditional high-end market from both sides.

Making things worse, Heidelberg faced another serious challenge on the color front as its NexPress went head to head with the Xerox iGen3. Faced with, among many other factors, a new DocuTech engine that offers all the digital capability and better copying for half the price and competition from the iGen3, Heidelberg has sold both product lines to Eastman Kodak and decided to focus on what it knows best: sheetfed offset presses.

Kodak, for its part, faces minimal risk as the structure of this deal allows it to acquire the divisions with no up-front cost and a sale price that will be determined in the coming years by the sales performance of these products. In developing the NexPress and Digimaster machines, a strong portfolio of patents and technical expertise has been accumulated. This in itself could prove to be valuable for Kodak in the future.

Today's in-plant has a range of scalable machines that offer quality, speed and capability at a price that was unheard of years ago. Some vendors may be more successful than others in this new market, but the real winner should be the customer.