printcom Druck+Kommunikation GmbH
From receipt books and continuous forms to a leading austrian print service provider
printcom Druck + Kommunikation GmbH (no connection to Deutsche Post Printcom), Vienna, can boast a company development with a remarkable history. Founded 1910 under the name Paragon, the company started out printing Austria’s first receipt books. The name was changed to Moore GesmbH in 1978, and in 1996 a merger with companies Carl Ueberreuter and Berger created a new company with a payroll of 250 staff. This company acquired J.C. König & Ebhardt AG in 1998 and the continuous printing division of the Austrian State Printing Company (OeSD) in 1999. Today’s printcom GmbH was finally created by a merger with VSD (Versand Service Druck – previously the National Form Printing Company). printcom is now a full service provider of mailing and business communication services (invoice printing, reminders, account statements etc.), supplying “everything even remotely connected with printing”. A claim that in recent years has put heavy pressure on processing operations for print data streams.
Printcom can today boast a client base of around 10,000 customers, the majority of whom – also accounting for the majority of sales – are unconnected with public administration organizations. Business outside Austria has also expanded considerably, with 17% of 2004’s 21 million euros in sales generated from Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary.
printcom provides an extensive range of services, ranging from management of a customer’s complete print output with all warehousing, production of forms, onepiece mailers (no-envelope pressure-seal mailers), bottle caps, and metal closures, printing entrance tickets, system tickets, transportation tickets, self-stick notes, labels, cash till blocks, calendars and largeformat banners, plus high-end printing on demand with variable data and personalized mailings, right down to Internet ordering of printed material such as brochures and catalogs. The Vienna-based full service provider also specializes in all election-related printed material for both national and international clients.
Output Management Infrastructure Seeks Supplier…
By the end of 2002, the high-end print division was booming. The company invested heavily in extended printer infrastructure, e.g. a new Kodak (Scitex) Versamark with print output of 120,000 full-color personalized pages per hour. This resulted in major orders – and an array of new challenges. In particular, the wide variety of data stream types supplied by customers made the company aware that a new output management system was urgently needed. In some cases, preformatted documents had to be enhanced with raw data and formatted before they could be processed for printing, and additional information such as OMR marks for inserting systems were added. The mailings also had to be sorted before printing to optimize postage. In addition, a solution was needed to the challenges of transferring the output thus created to the different printing system, and generating and transferring all the information necessary for the production and posting processes. Since printcom guarantees 100 percent production and postage of business communication orders, postproduction processes had to be set up and controlled for cases of spoilage caused by, say, torn sheets or envelopes and recorded by an automated tracking process.
The company began to tackle these tasks by researching on the Internet and hunting for conversion providers. At this stage, engineer Gernot Winter, Production IT Manager with responsibility for application development, workflow and IT infrastructure in the production division, came across Compart’s website. He discovered that as specialists in conversion of data streams, they offered a broad range of fully convertible input and output formats on a variety of platforms.
…and Finds the Solution in Böblingen
Winter and his colleague Christian Hegedüs wasted no time in contacting Compart and arranging a visit to Böblingen to check out the benefits of the solution. “I was looking for a solution that offered maximum flexibility and versatility, and that’s just what I found,” explains Winter. “As a computer-based printing company dealing with such a wide range of tasks, it was obvious that we needed a provider capable of adapting as fast as we could to keep pace with our customers’ constantly changing demands. After initial discussions and tests, I was convinced that I could rely on Compart’s rapid response times, swift implementation of customer suggestions and readiness to undertake new developments, plus their wide-ranging expertise.”
Processing “Ready” Print Data Streams
The challenge facing printcom involved more than the extensive variety of data formats for print data streams, such as AFP, PDF, PCL, PostScript, Xerox Metacode, IPDS and IJPDS, or raster formats such as TIFF and JPEG. These data streams are generally produced by a printer driver for machines that are not used in actual production printing. For instance, if a PCL data stream generated for an HP desktop printer needs to be printed on continuous forms printers which supports IPDS or IJPDS, the data streams must be converted to these formats.
In addition, the company needed a tool capable of adding changes to the data streams, e.g. barcodes or OMR marks for inserting systems, and of separating components within a data stream to, say, sort mailings by zip code. Gernot Winter discovered that Compart’s DocBridge Mill included all these functions while also offering ultra-high throughput speed – and his decision was made.
He also found that DocBridge Mill enabled him to deal with postproduction tasks. Postproduction, including insertion, does not always take place on the same equipment as the original production, and may require a different input data stream than the main production. Gernot Winter needed a product that was able to process data rapidly and generate checklists and evaluations.
Formatting: New Area of Operations
But incompatible formats or lack of addons to print data streams were not the only challenges. In addition, the Viennese company not only receives ready-to-print data streams as described above from its customers, but may also be handed raw data from customers’ applications. After all, if a service provider already handles the entire printing process right down to delivering mail ready sorted for postage, the customer can benefit still further from outsourcing the entire process of document creation. This decision requires specialist expertise, appropriate software tools, and alignment of each job to the printing system used in each case.
Customers may supply data with or without formatting details, depending on their preferences and infrastructure:
- If the raw data is supplied without formatting details, the customer generally provides layout instructions in written or diagram form and leaves their software implementation up to the print service provider. Raw data is generally supplied in the form of csv (= comma separated values) or text files, although XML format is increasingly popular.
- Data which includes formatting details is generally supplied to the printer as W3C-compatible HTML or XSLFO files, or occasionally in the form of database reports together with the data, but sometimes even as Word serial letters.
In each case, the customer retains control over formatting the print-ready data streams and can introduce changes more easily, while the print service provider can adapt the output more easily to the technology options at his disposal and send it to the desired machine in the format required. This option demands higher levels of qualification on the part of both printer and customer, and considerably higher computer performance for the formatting process.
Realizing that products such as Apache FOP were designed for smaller print runs, printcom decided on the Compart product DOPE/compose , which is capable of both formatting large print runs at relatively high speeds for production, and also generating an array of different data streams such as AFP, PDF, PCL, IJPDS or PostScript.