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Highlights from GRAPHEXPO 2000 and CONVERTING EXPO 2000
Chicago September 26, 2000
Williamson Printing Claims PIA Awards
There were many stars at the 50th annual Premier Print Awards gala on Sunday night, but clearly Williamson Printing Corp., Dallas, Tex., was shining the brightest at this year's event. The annual program is sponsored by the Printing Industries of America.
Williamson Printing claimed seven Best of Category (Benny) awards and two out of three "They Said It Couldn't Be Done" prizes, capturing a total of 146 awards. This high number, in turn, enabled Williamson to take home the Sponsors' Gold Award for overall achievement.
Lewis Award winner
In addition, Williamson Printing's chairman and chief executive, Jerry B. Williamson, received the Lewis Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award, widely recognized as the highest honor awarded to an individual in the graphic arts industry. The prize, jointly sponsored by PIA and Graphic Arts Monthly, was presented by Kevin D. Thomas, publisher of the magazine.
As expected, Jerry Williamson accepted the lifetime achievement with true deadpan Texan wit. "I don't deserve it, but I'll accept it anyway because I don't want to make the judges look bad," quipped Williamson.
Meanwhile, Jerry's brother, Jesse Williamson, trekked to the stage seven times to accept the Benny statuettes.
Williamson Printing earned Benny awards in the categories of Environmentally Sound Materials; Magazine Inserts; Newsletters (four or more colors); Print/Graphic Arts Self Promotion: Other graphic arts firms; Process Improvement Pieces; Special Innovation-Printing; and Web Press Printing (four or more colors, coated paper).
Receiving special Sponsors' Awards were Peake Printers, Inc., Cheverly, Md., claiming the Silver award, with 62 winning entries, and Hemlock Printers Ltd., Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, winning the Bronze, with 48 winning entries.
In the annual awards program, called the industry's largest, oldest, and most prestigious worldwide graphic arts competition, PIA received more than 5,300 entries, submitted in 79 categories by 744 companies in 14 countries.
Judges award 82 Benny prizes. Also, 254 entries received the second-highest honor, the Award of Recognition, recognizing finalists in each category, and 1,620 entries received the Certificate of Merit. Thirty-two entries won the Best of Division award.
Indigo, Go, Go, Go Chicago,
HP to make $100 million investment in the digital press manufacturer and OEM Indigo's digital color products.
The big news for Indigo is the announcement by Hewlett-Packard (HP) to make a $100 million equity investment in the provider of digital color printing systems and HP's agreement to OEM Indigo's digital color products.
It's all part of a strategic alliance to co-develop high-end, digital color printing systems. At a press conference Monday morning, Indigo chairman and chief executive Benny Landa said, "Everything that can become digital will become digital." He applauded the alliance with HP, the market leader in ink-jet and laser printing, saying, "This is the most fantastic thing that ever happened to our company."
The alliance is expected to produce what Landa calls a "paradigm shift" embracing the highest quality and reasonable user costs.
Burgeoning market
HP president and chief executive Carly Fiorina says, "Our research shows that, today, more than 96% of printed pages are produced by commercial printers. It's a market that has yet to reap the full benefits of the digital era. This alliance will harness the collective power of HP's printing and imaging franchise, the technology expertise of HP Labs, and Indigo's leadership in offset-quality digital printing."
Under the terms of the agreement, HP and Indigo will collaborate to develop and bring to market future digital color printing solutions.
New high-speed presses
In other news, Indigo introduced a new generation of ultra high-speed Digital Offset Color presses, both sheetfed and web-fed, to the North American printing market.
Five new Series 2 seven-color presses are spotlighted at Graph Expo 2000: the UltraStream 2000, UltraStream 4000, Publisher 4000, Publisher 8000, and WebStream 200.
Part of an overall exhibit that spotlights Indigo's family of digital printing products, the Series 2 presses include two sheetfed models for commercial printing, two web presses for commercial printing, publishing and direct-mail applications, and three web presses for label printing.
Indigo Publisher 8000 beta
Other announcements concerned Lifetouch, Inc. (Eden Prairie, Minn.) as the North American field-test site for the recently launched Indigo Publisher 8000, the world's highest-performance digital color printing press. The four-engine web-fed press can produce 8,000 A3 full-color pages per hour (272 letter-size pages per minute). It can print on even the lightest-weight paper stocks.
Digital photofinishing
Also launched at Graph Expo are the photo industry's broadest and most powerful range of digital photofinishing products. The Photo-e-Print family of photographic quality digital printers uses Indigo's proprietary ElectroInk process, offering extremely high speed and low cost per print to the photofinishing market. The range includes products for retail and professional photographic labs as well as centralized wholesale photofinishing operations.
MAN Roland Displays New Wares, Cites Strong Earnings
New presses expand the manufacturer's line of high-end heavy metal
MAN Roland is displaying a variety of new equipment at its 18,500-sq-ft exhibit, including the new Roland 200S 20x29" sheetfed press, which is operating in a configuration with the new Kama TS 74 diecutting press. Additionally, the display includes a six-color Roland 300 with coater; six-color Roland 700 with coater and AirGlide delivery; Pecom-ServerNet network platform; Baumann paper handling and Wohlenberg cutting equipment; and Wohlenberg City 4000 perfect binding system.
The totally redesigned Roland 200S, being demonstrated for the first time in North America, is rated at 13,000 sph. The machine can print up to four colors, although it is frequently called upon for one- and two-color jobs such as high-quality catalog/sell sheets by commercial printers and forms printing by in-plant printing departments. A two-color model also is available.
In addition, MAN Roland is introducing the Kama TS 74 and TS 102 automatic diecutting presses, a new and exclusive addition to MAN Roland North America's line of postpress equipment. Designed for short-run diecutting, the machines operate in parallel with the press and offer automated feeding, punching, and delivery in a unit that is engineered for fast set-up and operation, durability, and quality. During the show, a new Kama TS 74 diecutting press is demonstrating its flexibility by diecutting, channel scoring, and perforating jobs printed on the Roland 200S, including a selection of circus figures. The combination is priced at about $800,000, versus that of about $3 million for a full-size, 40" system.
Strong earnings, orders
"Drupa 2000 in May was a very successful show for MAN Roland," says Helgi Schmidt-Liermann, chief executive of MAN Roland Inc., "and we're expecting Graph Expo to be a continuation of this success. We're at full capacity at all of our facilities. We've announced a number of partnerships, which include Agfa, Dataflow Systems, Polaroid, and printCafe. In North America, we've had growth in all segments across the board, exceeding 10%. Our upcoming year promises to be fantastic."
The company says it is posting exceptionally strong earnings: as in the preceding fiscal year, double-digit numbers for 1999/2000 were achieved in new orders, sales, and earnings. New orders increased by 17%, to 2.09 billion euro from 1.79 billion euro, while sales of 1.85 billion euro meant a 10% increase over last year's sales of 1.68 billion euro.
Orders increased by 25% to more than 1.25 billion euro from 1.00 billion euro, meaning that all production facilities will be operating at full capacity well into the year 2001.
MAN Roland is anticipating further increases in new orders and sales compared to the same period last year. For sales, this means a healthy increase of more than 13%, or more than 100 million euro, to a total of about 900 million euro.
Digeno Web-Based B2B e-Procurement Portal Launched Chicago
Backed financially by R.R. Donnelley, the new firm is targeting the small sheetfed printer as its main customer
Digeno, Inc., a new Internet-based business-to-business e-procurement portal backed by investor R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, was formally launched Monday.
Targeting the small sheetfed printer ($1 million to $40 million in annual sales) and print buyer, Digeno aims to provide the industry's most complete, end-to-end e-commerce transaction and management solution, designed to simplify the complexity of the print procurement and supply chain management process.
"Our goal as a company is not to add clutter to the already heavily populated business-to-business e-procurement marketplace, but to bring closure to it," says Blasko Ristic, Digeno's vice president and general manager.
Transaction-based pricing
Says Digeno chief financial officer Ron Trubiana, the company's transaction-based pricing model is set at $9.95 for buyers and $19.95 for printers on all transactions up to $10,000. "Our pricing has to be as inexpensive as possible for this type of service to work best," he states.
Best-of-breed technology
Company officials say that Digeno brings its Internet tool to the small printer and the latter's customers by incorporating "best-of-breed" technology from companies such as BroadVision (personalization), Adexa (supply chain management), Click2Learn, and Exodus.
Based on an open-architecture XML strategy, Digeno offers ease of integration into existing legacy systems for both printers and print buyers, including Ariba, CommerceOne, SAP, and Oracle Systems. The company also provides complete user training as well as around-the-clock service and on-line support.
Making investments
The investment by Donnelley to prepare the new company for launch is estimated to be between $7.5 million to $10 million. Additional monies are expected from Donnelley, currently the sole owner of the firm, as well as from other investors.
Whirlwind beginnings
The new company, which held a pre-Graph Expo press conference during the first week of September, was led by Terry A. Tevis, who had previously worked for Donnelley and most recently Printing Arts America. It was announced Monday at Graph Expo that Tevis had since left Digeno.
"Digeno is a service company, not a technology company," Tevis stated in early September prior to his pursuit of other ventures. "We made a heavy investment in technology to make the Digeno service printer- and print buyer-friendly. That's the differentiating factor for success. We had a kind of 'stealth' launch over the past few months. Roughly 70 to 90 users--printers and print buyers--have successfully put 400 to 500 discrete jobs through the system, representing nearly $18 million in procured jobs, almost all of which have been awarded."
Noosh Announces New Tools to be Released Chicago
Offerings are designed to increase efficiency and reduce costs to printers, even if their clients don't use noosh.com
Noosh, Inc. announced Sunday the addition of three new tools-Noosh Direct, Sales Force E-Commerce, and Data Exchange-designed to increase efficiency and reduce costs to printers, even if their customers are not members of the noosh.com service. The new tools will be released in the first quarter of next year, according to Dave Hannebrink, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Noosh.
"This additional functionality further broadens the usefulness of our enterprise solution to printers' customers, so that these organizations in their entirety can more effectively collaborate with each other," says Hannebrink.
Maintaining brand identity
Noosh Direct provides an end-to-end collaborative on-line print buying process for print suppliers to offer an e-commerce solution from their own Web sites and under their brands to maintain their own identities. According to company officials, print buyers can go to the printer's Web site to enter specifications, request estimates, and initiate orders on line.
Contact and sales management
Sales Force E-Commerce is a contact and sales management system for sales and customer service representatives, estimators, and others inside an organization to collaborate with each other, as well as their entire customer base. With this tool, printers can manage all customer contact data, job specifications, files, order entries, and schedule information in a single on-line database. Dynamic cross-enterprise information sharing enables a printer's sales force to execute noosh.com's selling function more effectively, say company officials.
Seamless data exchange
Data Exchange uses the new PrintTalk standard for a seamless data exchange with print management systems to permit direct communication between noosh.com and PrintTalk-enabled customers' back-end systems. The automatic data exchange eliminates duplicate keying of information. Noosh is a founding member of PrintTalk, formed earlier this year to implement and promote adoption of a freely distributed open standard to communicate data directly between e-commerce applications and business management systems.
Last month, Noosh announced a new direct mail module enabling buyers and suppliers to specify and manage all information regarding their projects, including data processing needs, insertion requirements, printed piece specifications, and mailing list details. The module allows appropriate information to be shared with members of the supply chain, including lettershop service suppliers who can be notified immediately of upstream modifications and product availability.
Expo Hall Full of DI Presses Shows a Technology Coming of Age Chicago
Directing imaging products are expected to be offered soon by most every press maker
Direct imaging (DI) presses, a novelty only a few years ago, have entered the industry mainstream so rapidly than within the next year or so, it is expected that every press manufacturer will have a direct imaging product of some kind.
"Direct imaging is a technology that has come of age," says Dennis Mason of Mason Consulting, who moderated a panel covering DI presses during this past Saturday's NPES Executive Outlook 2000 conference. Here, panelists reported that direct imaging technology, which images plates on press directly from computer data, is moving strongly into all size ranges of sheetfed presses.
15 press lines and growing
Presstek, Inc.'s Efrem Lieber notes that 15 direct imaging presses either have been commercialized, demonstrated at trade shows, or announced (Presstek developed the process used on many direct imaging presses and owns the trademark on "DI"). Some of these presses are seeing their North American or world premieres here at Graph Expo and Converting Expo 2000.
Lieber also reports that roughly 1,600 DI presses are installed worldwide today, and that this base is growing by 35 to 50 units monthly. Printers, he says, are discovering that "you can simply print more jobs per shift with DI, which is the key to profitability."
New machines on display
Terry Bradley of Komori America told conference attendees that they would see Komori's new Project D press for the first time at this show. Project D moves direct imaging into the 40" range, which Bradley said "is the most popular size for commercial printing."
Xerox is displaying a new DocuColor 400 DI-5 and 233 DI-4 offset presses using Presstek technology. The DocuColor 400, says Xerox executive David Tashji, offers versioning capabilities with a single color change, and runs at 12,000 sheets per hour. Tashji also says that another new Xerox product, DigiPath, will "cross the chasm between the office and the digital pressroom."
Rolling along
Heidelberg USA's product manager for direct imaging technology, Jörg Döhnhardt, predicts particular success for the technology among smaller shops. "We expect strong market growth over the next five years," he says, adding that "we've seen a lot of black-and-white work going to color," and that the long runs we once had are giving way to shorter runs. "Direct Imaging," he concludes, "fits perfectly into the digitization we see rolling through the print industry in general."
MetaCommunications Announces New Software and Upgrades Chicago
InUnity print procurement application released, as well as new versions of Job Manager, Virtual Ticket.
MetaCommunications's new InUnity 1.0 software is a turn-key XML-based communications server that enables graphic arts companies to exchange print procurement and content information. InUnity 1.0 facilitates the transfer of documents such as requests for quotes, orders, job tickets, and status documents without relying on third-party application service providers (ASP).
"InUnity 1.0 is the first product to offer companies the ability to exchange documents such as requests for quotes, job specifications, and status slips directly with their business partners. Direct transactions don't require an intermediary ASP, and consequently eliminate subscription and transaction fees," says Robert Long, vice president of MetaCommunications.
Job Manager, Virtual Ticket upgrades
The company also announced that it has upgraded its Job Manager software to version 3.0, a comprehensive upgrade to the highly successful 2.2 version, which has established itself as the electronic job tracking, costing, and billing standard for many of the largest and most prestigious graphic arts organizations in the world, says the company.
Finally, MetaCommunications upgraded its Virtual Ticket 3.0 offering from its 2.2 version. Virtual Ticket allows users to attach, manage, and view digital assets directly on customizable electronic job tickets, thereby affording the organization of traditional paperwork and digital files from the initial order process through archiving and beyond. Virtual Ticket 3.0 also adds full AppleScript support (Macintosh version only) to its existing built-in JavaScript engine. Users are able to utilize AppleScript to automate both internal and external functions in Virtual Ticket.
Source: www.eshowdaily.com
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