POD Hits Silicon Valley
Santa Clara, California—It's 4:00 a.m. and Don DeHart, president
of DeHART's Printing Services Corporation, is up-and-at-'em and bound
for the 20,000 square foot printing facility in the heart of Silicon Valley
which prints non-stop, seven days a week.
DeHART's spends 90 percent of their time servicing information technology companies in the burgeoning print on demand (POD) market. Seven sales reps are supported by an equal number of customer service representatives, to assist DeHART's customers with the printing, packaging, and distribution of technical manuals, often transmitted via the Internet.
Look at DeHART's numbers: sales, employees, customers, and volume and the word growth— while appropriate— seems an embarrassing understatement. For three consecutive years, DeHART's has been consistently ranked among Silicon Valley's top ten printers by the San Jose & Silicon Valley Business Journal.
In 1990, Don took the helm of the family owned and run corporation with a vision of growth through diversifying its customer base.
Seven years later, annual sales have skyrocketed 800 percent from $1.5 million to $11 million; their work force has grown from 16 employees to 55; and DeHART's customer base has jumped from t hree major accounts to include Silicon Valley's cream of the bytes: Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Oracle, and Aspect Telecommunications.
"Back in 1990, we were looking at trends and the concept of just-in-time as it related to printing. There was a lot of physical waste. Costly printed materials sat in expensive, damp warehouses."
At that time, the industry began to forecast, and anticipate growth so that supply matched demand. The concept of print on demand was the hedge against printing waste and obsolescence. Today, on demand is challenging many of the grumblings about the limitations of print: long cycle times, high costs, little flexibility.
"We were among those looking to grow our business and be more effective," explained DeHart. "That's when we began looking to add capacity to our production facility."
"We'd worked solely in the cut-sheet environment, we'd just ordered our sixth Xerox DocuTech™ when we were introduced to the web-fed digital systems as a productive and cost-effective alternative. After some research, we saw that the IBM InfoPrint 4000™ married to the Roll Systems' BookMaster™ was the way to go."
The IBM print engine handles multiple file formats such as Adobe Post Script, HP PCL, TIFF, Portable Document format (PDF), and Advanced Function Presentation (AFP). At the same time Roll's BookMaster supports dual stream printer output and full book offset."
In August 1996, after IBM and Roll Systems' equipment was installed, DeHART's launched a series of rigorous quality assurance and paper tests to determine what worked best for their customers' printing needs and expectations.
When the first tests were completed, Don recalls being "immediately impressed" with the productivity of the roll fed system.
"Our new system, printing at 464 pages a minute, was four times faster than our equivalent technology without compromising quality. And, with lower operator involvement, it's less expensive to operate," explained DeHart.
"The IBM InfoPrint 4000 with Roll Systems' BookMaster gives us a three-fold operation—an unwinder plus a cutter, trimmer, stacker—that cuts the web into sheets, offsets them into books and delivers them to a stacker where they can be easily removed as they are printed."
Other benefits DeHart cited are the reliability of the rolls of paper. "In a cut-sheet environment, an individual piece of paper has to travel on a bed of air or through an air fed or friction system. However, roll fed paper travels continuously, and the jams occur less frequently."
With this latest investment, DeHART's became one of the US' print on demand trailblazers.
For Roll Systems of Burlington, Massachusetts, the DeHART's investment marked Roll's 2000th installation.
Already DeHART's is poised for a future upgrade of the IBM/Roll complement with a new Roll Systems technology known as EdgeWise™ that allows unconverted, plain-edged paper to be used in continuous printers.
"We'll be able to buy paper as needed directly from the manufacturer—not the converter— and put it straight into the printer," explained DeHart. "That shortcut can save us up to three weeks which means our customers receive their products when they want them... on time!"
If DeHART's growth continues at the same steady clip, they'll become a $25-$30 million business in a few years. Don tempers the enthusiasm of such a prospect by reflecting that "growth comes with a lot of management challenges, but if we give our customers what they want, they'll come back for more."
DeHart says the corporate motto is not customer satisfaction but customer delight.
As a customer of IBM and Roll, DeHart is delighted with this investment.
"IBM and Roll have formed a strong partnership. They worked together to meet our primary objective: to better meet our customers' requirements by expanding into previously uncharted markets. Above all, both IBM and Roll made us feel as if we were their only customer."
By Francesca Vanegas, printed in "Document Processing Technology," August 1997
