After 35 Years of Tradition, a Printer Successfully Integrates Traditional and Digital Printing Grafika GracerProduction Printing – Case Study

Canon complements modern printing fleet with comparable quality digital printing

Production Printing - Case Study

Overview The beginnings of Grafika Gracer from Celje reach back to 1976, when Milan Gracer, printer and owner, began offering graphic services and offset printing. In 1989, he established the company that currently employs 25 people and gener-ates EUR 2 million in revenue. Their main products include magazines and cata-logues as well as books and forms. Their services are available to customers across Slovenia and the company is considered to be the third largest printer in the region.

Situation The company has encountered digital printing in the past. However, since the new technol-ogy could not offer the quality of traditional offset printing, they were not satisfied with the results. They were looking for a device that would provide quality and reliability in regular production, and that would not have a lot of downtime due to maintenance.

Miran Gracer, General Manager, Grafika Gracer: “If you want to succeed in this busi-ness, you need to keep up with the latest technologies. Even though I never trusted digital printing as the technology took too long to develop, decreasing volumes of orders convinced us to try it out. This was the only available option, if we wanted to reduce the price of our final product, since offset printing was no longer competitive. The small size of the Slovenian market made this decision inevitable.”

When the company was re-evaluating digital printing, they were looking for the highest quality. “I already owned a bad digital printer and I had plenty of bad experiences with it, so I was looking for the best solution this time

around,” said Gracer. The company evaluated a number of devices from different manufac-tures, but was not satisfied with any of them.

Solution Canon’s partner MDS IT d.d. gave Grafika Gracer an opportunity to visit a company in Graz that uses the Canon imagePRESS digital press for printing their own catalogues. To evaluate the true value of digital printing, they've brought along several files with grey gradients, which are very demanding to print even when using offset printing. They were impressed by the results of test prints and their decision was easier to make.

“The Canon imagePRESS provided great quality when printing color gradients and was able to handle different structures of paper, so we had no second thoughts. At the beginning of 2011 we used theCanon imagePRESS C7000VP to success-fully replace our existing digital printer. As aresult of this new technology the digital volume increased by 650%, from 10.000 to 75.000prints. We were very satisfied with thedelivery and istallation performed by MDS IT,” explained Gracer.

”I can tell all potential buyers who visit us to evaluate the Canon imagePRESS C7000VP digital press that we are very satisfied with our choice. Print quality, technology and services are suitable. I can recommend it to those that need a finisher device as well as to those that are only setting out on the journey to digital printing.”

”Depending on volume of requested delivery and cost we decide case by case whether to use offset or digital print for the job.It is very important that on Canon we can use 99% of all regular types of paper for offset printing.”

digital printing. Even though digital printers lower the costs of material and operational costs, the customers expect lower prices for digital prints. The competition has done its work, so the company cannot emphasize major differences in costs.

Their calculations show that their investment in the digital printer will recoup in two and a half years, if the market indicators remain stable.

Long-term partnership The company has emphasized their satisfaction with MDS IT, a long-term partner that offers excellent service and short response times, and wishes to continue their partnership in the future. To maintain it, Grafika Gracer agreed to serve as MDS IT demonstration center for Canon’s digital printing solutions.

“Every print solution vendor strives to collaborate with a partner like Grafika Gracer. Not only they fully understand the conditions that drive them to dynamically adjust to the demand of the market, they are actively promoting digital print production and Canon’s technologies,” explained Matjaz Bavdek, director of MDS IT.

“I can tell all potential buyers who visit us to evaluate the Canon imagePRESS C7000VP digital press that we are very satisfied with our choice. Print quality, technology and services are suitable. I can recommend it to those that need a finisher device as well as to those that are only setting out on the journey to digital printing.”

Benefits Canon imagePRESS C7000VP enabled the company to save time and improve the printing preparation process. They are now able to serve more customers as they were able to offer new services and products. They were able to shift much of their existing print workloads to the digital printer, particularly for runs of less than 300 copies. However, the switch to digital printing does not mean that the company abandoned their existing offering. Instead, they’ve upgraded it. Their digital press is used to print catalogues, business cards and leaflets, while the finisher unit enables them to also print brochures and booklets.

“The printing preparation process is the same for both digital as well as offset printing and we use the same software. Depending on volume of requested delivery and cost we decide case by case whether to use offset or digital print for the job. It is very important that we can use 99% of all regular types of paper for offset printing,” said Miran Gracer Jr., Marketing Manager, Grafika Gracer.

Digital printer speeded up the production and the company is satisfied with the quality of output. An important advantage of digital printing is repeatability. The device enabled them to expand their product line and print low-volume orders, which are not possible with traditional printing or are avoided by printing service providers.

Their customers noticed the improvement in print quality and are very satisfied with it. They are aware that there is no longer any difference between traditional offset and

Production Printing - Case Study

”At our print shop we are proud of our modern device fleet. In terms of quality,the products we print on Canon’s digitalprinter are comparable to the output of the best offset presses.”

Miran Gracer, direktor, Grafika Gracer

Canon Europe Ltd

3 The Square Stockley Park Uxbridge Middlesex United Kingdom UB11 1ET Tel: +44 208 588 8000 Fax: +44 208 588 8001

www.canon-europe.com

Canon Adria d.o.o.

Dunajska cesta 128a 1000 Ljubljana Slovenia Tel.: +386 1 530 87 10 Fax: +386 1 530 87 45

www.canon.si