| Digital Printer, December 2009 | |
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PHD MAIL GOES TRANSPROMO PHD Mail in Burton-on-Trent is a heartening success story for digital in the recession. Its monthly turnover has doubled since the |
summer and it saw its best month ever in September, taking £470,000. Business development director Kevin Dunn says the company is likely to hit £5.5 million by its year end next August. New mailing equipment, including a Pitney Bowes Olympus 2 sorter, has allowed it to aggregate several smaller jobs, allowing PHD to offer mail sorting services to companies whose run lengths wouldn’t have previously qualified for Royal Mail discounts. PHD Mail was set up in 1990 and handled direct mail until 1998. Mr Dunn started in late 1998 and was part of the move away from direct mail to transactional billing. ‘Direct mail was too cut-throat – people would move for £1 per thousand difference,’ he said. Today the main print work is billing, statements, final demands and the like, with additional online services to clients that including web hosting and e-billing. ‘Web hosting allows archive retrieval of invoices and statements, so customers can send them to their customers as e-mail attachments instead of posting copy invoices. It’s a lot quicker and easier than manual retrieval,’ said Mr Dunn. A pair of £55,000 Kodak 1860 high speed scanners are used for document entry. ‘Our market is short run, but daily,’ Mr Dunn explained. ‘We may do 4000 envelopes, or some customers send us 150 bills. These runs are too small for the likes of RR Donnelley or Communisis. ‘A lot of the printing is white paper – about 60%. But we do also print on pre-printed letterheads or bill – it’s still cheaper to do that than white paper colour.’ The combination of the higher quality of the new machines with the new GMC software has allowed PHD to start offering transpromo, where promotional messages are printed alongside the billing and statement information. So far this is still being introduced to clients, but 12 of them are using it already. The type of work ranges from simple promotions to complex multiple ads for different geographical regions, says Mr Dunn. ‘We have a telecoms client that ads a message that says ‘you have x points this month and here’s how to redeem them.’ Another client has an ad panel that changes from month to month. Another idea is to base the message on what a client has bought recently – if they buy a hammer, it may show screwdrivers for instance. ‘We’ve got the software for processing the data. Since we’ve bought the GMC PrintNet we’ve shown customers that we can drop an ad in and change it on the fly two days before going to print. They like it and are getting the marketing guys onto it. GMC has been very helpful to us, especially in the early days.’ This is all monochrome work. The company has also put in a 45 page per minute Ricoh 1767 colour printer, but this is a light production machine that it wanted mainly for development work. Mr Dunn doesn’t think full colour transpromo will attract his client base, mainly on cost grounds. ‘We don’t think we will be able to get people to pay the sort of extra money that colour will cost. We can do mono transpromo for £15 per thousand, but colour would be £45, so it’s harder to sell.’ Belt and braces There are 54 employees, 80% working in production with the rest including five IT developers, four data processors and the rest being office and accounts staff. Production runs in two shifts, six days per week. This highlights a particular benefit of the new InfoPrints, Mr Dunn says: unlike the old Xerox models they can be switched off at night. ‘We reckoned that the InfoPrints would save £7000 pa on electricity bills alone,’ he said. ‘They should also be easier to maintain.’ He says that serious consideration was given to buying new Xeroxes, with the big Continua agency offering ‘a really good proposal.’ But in the end InfoPrint won the deal because of PHD’s favourable experience with the earlier sheet and reel fed models. ‘We already had InfoPrints and the company always looked after us well’ he said. On the finishing side, the past three months has seen the company install a Pitney Bowes Olympus II MT multi tier mail sorting machine with 128 sorting pockets, alongside an existing Kern 2500 Multichannel envelope inserting line with eight stations. Mr Dunn is particularly pleased with the Olympus: ‘It’s a fantastic machine, one of the best investments we’ve made. Because we do short runs, some clients fall below the minimum of 4000 needed for mailsort. So we can combine jobs to get above this, and then pass the savings on to the clients. It’s helped us to win more business.’ Some mailing systems incorporate inkjet addressing heads, but we don’t need those, Mr Dunn says. ‘All sheets go into window envelopes so the addresses show through. We used to have inkjets for direct mail but I sold them all. I’ll never go back to direct mail!’ What’s an InfoPrint 2235? GMC PrintNet T Designer |
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