Case Study

Alliance Print & Design – PRESS MATCHER

PRESS MATCHER Helps Raise the Bar with Xerox Digital Presses

Sacramento, California: For over 60 years, the California State Employees Association (CSEA) Printing Services Department was the exclusive provider to CSEA’s union affiliates. But with growing affiliate independence and changes in the way Californians communicate with one another, they started to lose business to more flexible and productive printing companies.

The CSEA print shop now had to sustain itself on the free market or shut down operations. So, in 2008, CSEA affiliates and the Board of Directors approved a massive modernization project – including purchase of a five-color offset press and a Xerox iGen3, color managed by PRESS MATCHER. Rommel Hernandez, Plant Manager of the company says the name Alliance Print & Design better conveys their range of services and helped manage the transition. In a very short period of time, Alliance has been transformed into a modern commercial printing facility offering a wide range of services – digital, conventional and large format as well as finishing and fulfillment.

With new investment in up-to-the-minute equipment, California State Employees Association Printing Services has expanded its services to the general public and changed its name to Alliance Print & Design. The new name helps the print shop market its commercial printing services to outside customers.

“We have always been somewhat special as a lot of our work, even today, is political printing. We can now produce any kind of political material, from direct mail, postcards and door hangers to flyers or posters, with guaranteed quick turnaround. Our clients include political campaigns, unions, non-profit organizations, and the State of California. But we’re also working with a wide variety of large and small businesses, non-profits and even individuals. We’re not too big to do someone’s wedding invitations – we’re not too small to handle and ship hundreds of thousands of pieces. Turn-around time is almost always a key issue in the decision on whether a job will be printed digitally or conventionally. A few hundred business cards printed on one of our offset presses can take hours to dry. On the iGen3 they are printed and ready to be shipped in 30 minutes. Another key difference is that all of our employees are very dedicated craftspeople, and all are cross-trained. This high level of professionalism allows us to run the entire operation with just 13 employees,” says Hernandez.

Although most of the business still comes through four affiliates, the new digital press and its capabilities boosted the number of jobs coming from outside. “Two years ago, less than 5 percent of our business came from the outside,” says Hernandez. “Today, that figure is 20%, and it’s going to grow.” Currently, Alliance Print & Design is seeking a sales representative to grow the business, particularly with local and national corporations.

“Like all printers, we are seeing the size of jobs constantly diminishing. At the same time the demand for consistent quality is increasing. To be able to provide consistency most of our printing is being produced to GRACoL industry standards. Some people were surprised when we started looking for a digital high-volume production press last year with print volumes in general being at an all-time low. But we saw an opening. With print-on-demand becoming the rule, and the use of more and more variable data, there is no alternative to digital printing.

We looked at a number of different presses but we have had a long successful business partnership with Xerox and the iGen3 provided what we were looking for in cost-effectiveness and quality. One of the challenges however, was absolute color consistency on, and between, the digital and conventional presses. Digital quality had to be as close as possible to our offset press output since our clients want high quality printed materials and do not particularly care about the process.

“With our new equipment we’re proud to be the one-stop-shop for all of our customer’s needs -providing high quality, competitive prices, with a rapid turnaround.”
Rommel Hernandez | Plant Manager

Xerox introduced us to CGS ORIS and the PRESS MATCHER solution. We did a number of tests and found that it perfectly suited our needs. It was one of the key factors in our decision to purchase the iGen3. PRESS MATCHER allows us to produce consistent color in our digital department, closely matching the output of our conventional presses. As well as on the iGen3 we are using PRESS MATCHER for the Xerox DocuColor 250 equipped with an inline saddle stitch finisher. With PRESS MATCHER we can now run small jobs on it with the quality being identical to the larger equipment. We see personalized printing as a perfect fit to our finishing and mailing facilities and are currently considering an option to the FreeFlow Print Server that Xerox has recently introduced. With the Xerox Device Link Integrator we can use our PRESS MATCHER system to generate Device Link profiles and feed them into the FreeFlow Print Server to color manage data on-the fly; an ideal way to use the superior CGS ORIS color management for VDP jobs.”