When a company grows 30% a year, you know it must be taking innovative measures. Innovation Printing is one such company. The $21 million Philadelphia print provider makes successful moves, such as implementing a web-based print-on-demand workflow and management solution. With Press-sense iWay™, the company established an automated workflow that streamlines the printing process from job ordering through to delivery. As a result, Innovation Printing is improving efficiencies that lead to significant cost cutting. In addition, the system provides customers with a user-friendly interface to place and manage its orders, which helps attract new customers and contributes to a significant growth phase of 30 percent a year.

Innovation Printing produces annual reports, brochures, banners, and variable data mailings, for example, for customers in the pharmaceutical, food, non-profit, financial, and technology fields. The company has been in business for 50 years and has changed its name over time from Printing and Lithography to Printing and Communications. With growth in digital printing, the company set up a separate business unit for digital print which includes dedicated resources in management, customer service, and equipment. Looking to offer customers a value-added service in the digital print arena, the company implemented iWay to provide customers with an online tool that automates price quoting, ordering, and job tracking. “Our customers are used to having the Amazon-type experience available to them. As a printer, we wanted to extend that experience to them,” explains Henry Wagner, Information Technologies Manager.

The company installed iWay in April 2006, and today about 14% of all the jobs go through the system. The system enables customers to create and order jobs that vary in complexity from simple to variable data mailings with personalized URLs (PURLs). “With iWay, we’re trying to take jobs that have been made difficult but should be simple and making them simple again,” states Wagner. Printing receives files as print-ready PDFs which it then outputs to a Xerox iGen3 digital printing press, a Heidelberg Quickmaster DI, or a Postershop-driven wide-format device. The automated PDF-based workflow speeds files through the printing process, reducing cycle times and saving on labor.

With its print-on-demand service, the company delivers jobs much faster. In a traditional printing cycle when the company received a job at 8:00 a.m., the printer might deliver proofs by 4:00 p.m. then see the approved proofs the next day, completing a 24-hour cycle. The online system has reduced that cycle to 2 hours.

Another benefit is that the system enhances customer loyalty. “It weds you closer to the client,” Wagner states. “The system provides clients with an easy-to-use solution that leads to savings in their own administrative overhead.” One pharmaceutical company is using the web-to-print system to make it easier for sales people in the field to order promotional material. The sales people are ordering preprinted material, such as brochures and product sheets, and promotional items, such as customized pens, labels, and post-it notes from their own corporate-branded website that the printer establishes and operates. Another pharmaceutical company works with Innovation to print its product information on demand. The print buyer wanted a fast turnaround for its sales sheets that contain frequently changing information. “Typically sales reps order 50 to 100 sheets that they then provide to medical offices,” reports Wagner. “Their goal was to provide timely information in a turnaround time that was going to be effective in the sales cycle. Through this system we’ve been able to get a four-week cycle down to a one-week.” Other key features to the iWay system, says Wagner, is owning a web-to-print solution as opposed to renting it. Innovation can then set a lower per-customer implementation cost. Also, because iWay is an open system, it easily interacts and integrates with other systems. For example, Innovation is now looking to expand its variable data solutions using XMPie and to integrate iWay with the EFI Hagen print management system.