Interview with Joseph Madlener at PrintManagement
The demand for short run books is rapidly increasing due to the attraction for personalization and more and more digital printers are diving into that market. Others are standing on the shore wondering if they can make money providing this service. One very model of a modern digital book printing company is swimming to success in this market. The company is PrintManagement in Ohio.
PrintManagement is a young company born in 1999. The business has been shaped into a full service print communication resource featuring highly skilled creative and marketing talent, state-of-the art production technology and a broad range of distribution and delivery capabilities.
We had a chance to catch up to a very busy guy, Joseph Madlener, Product Manager at PrintManagement and responsible for implementing new technology to talk to him about how he has organized a profitable, efficient and growing on demand book printing business.
Joe, tell us about PrintManagement?
Joe, your company offers ‘just-in-time’ production and delivery. Can you tell us what kind of challenges you faced in getting into digital and personalized books? How this is different from printing books on your offset presses?
One of the biggest challenges we faced when we first started producing digital books was to move our production of several hundred books a week to several thousand books a week within a 60 day timeframe.
As we started digging deeper into the workflow process we found that we needed a robust imposition tool to manage this new volume of books and very large PDF files.
In order to drastically increase the volume of books produced in very small numbers every day, what did you change?
Our custom application manages the sequencing of the books to Impostrip Book Stacker. Book Stacker groups various books together and imposes the files, then stores the files on our servers for our production staff to print.
What kind of productivity did you gain by adding Impostrip Book Stacker to your workflow?
In the beginning we were printing PDF files using a cut and stack feature. This process of producing books was not efficient and was causing us to lose about 50 hours of production time a week. By using Impostrip Book Stacker we were able to regain this lost production time.
Our new application and workflow allows us to process PDF files to Impostrip Book Stacker so they can be imposed and sequenced based on page numbers and north/south orientation. This process allows us to reduce paper waste and the amount of time required in our bindery department. Book Stacker is able to process and impose very large PDF files. This result was critical to our workflow.
With Impostrip Book Stacker we were able to produce 2100 different titles in a day.
Do you see your new workflow helping you expand business with your customers?
PrintManagement also develops customized web-to-print applications for customers. We are looking to leverage Impostrip Book Stacker to impose all of our web-to-print orders. Based on our current experience with Book Stacker we feel it would be the right tool for imposing all of our web-to-print orders.
Did you evaluate other solutions other then Book Stacker?
We looked at a couple other solutions but, the service and real partnership we received from your team while we were validating your software was key to our decision to purchase Impostrip Book Stacker. The software is working great with our application. Ultimate provides quality technical and customer service support. You guys get an A+!