Like any savvy business professional, Jeff Birmingham understands that to be successful, your company has to keep evolving. As president of Houston, Texas-based Alliance Printing and Graphics: Print Evolved (Alliance), Birmingham continually enhances his shop’s offerings. Throughout the company’s 30-year history, Birmingham has expanded on the shop’s original offset capabilities to become a full-service shop: adding digital flexography for label production, digital storefront technology for online ordering, digital printing for short-run and on-demand work, and, most recently — with the installation of the ColorStream 3700 continuous feed inkjet press — fast turnaround, high-volume, high-quality output.

Earlier this year, Alliance signed a five-year contract with one of the world’s largest manufacturers of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning products to produce its manuals and warranty parts booklets.

 

The multi-billion enterprise, which is headquartered in Japan, is consolidating its U.S. operations into a 4 million-square-foot facility just outside of Houston, with a projected growth rate of 70 percent.

 

While the company was already a customer of Alliance, the five-year contract “was a game-changer for us,” Birmingham says. “[It allows] us to move forward in a way that fits our customer’s needs and also ours.”

 

Birmingham knew that to be able to produce the volume the new contract dictates — the manufacturer turns out 15,000 air conditioning units daily, all of which need warranty and instruction manuals — his company would need a digital printing production workhorse that could deliver high-quality output, fast turnaround, and be cost effective. While Alliance already had digital presses in-house, including a cutsheet Canon imagePRESS C10000VP color digital press (the company purchased a second one when it bought the ColorStream 3700), they are used for short-run, on-demand high-quality multicolor jobs.

 

“Once I started learning about inkjet,” Birmingham says, “it was the obvious solution. If we hadn’t moved to inkjet, we would be running our other equipment 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With the ColorStream [inkjet press] and our roll-to-roll, we are taking care of it in eight hours a shift, five days a week, with one operator.”

 

Birmingham says that while there are a lot of good presses on the market, the ColorStream inkjet press’ unique capability to economically output both color and monochrome was the deal maker.

 

The decision to purchase the ColorStream inkjet press, along with a PRISMAproduction server print workflow and output management system and a second imagePRESS C10000VP, followed the same journey as all of Alliance’s recent technology and equipment purchases.

 

“We find out what our customer needs, and have them buy into the solution, and become a partner of theirs,” Birmingham explains.

 

Which is why Birmingham found Canon Solutions America to be the perfect ally. “They bought into what we were trying to do and helped us find a solution,” Birmingham says. “They are in it with you 100 percent. They have your back. I knew they weren’t going to let me fail.”

 

He specifically points to his relationship with Canon Solutions America printing sales consultant Frank P. Tummino, who “still calls me with new business ideas for the inkjet. In today’s world, we think we’ve gotten away from relationship selling, but you have to believe in the person and in the company. That’s always how I’ve done business.”

 

Although Birmingham anticipated many of the benefits the ColorStream inkjet press delivers (“There are no plates, no setup — so turn time is so much faster,” he says), he was surprised at just how much uptime it gave the shop, as well as how easy it is to run.

Another unexpected benefit: Alliance is able to add color to some of its clients’ monochrome newsletters and booklets. “We are coming out competitive with [monochrome], even when adding color,” Birmingham says.

 

“That was a bonus we didn’t know we were going to have,” he adds. “When we were buying the press, and saw how cost effective it was, we realized this was a possibility. We ended up doing some preselling to our customers on the idea. True to form, Canon [Solutions America] came up with pricing structures for us.”

 

The benefits that the ColorStream 3700 inkjet press provides naturally extend to Alliance’s entire customer base. “Being able to produce collateral on inkjet, […] our customers don’t have to keep a lot of inventory tied up,” he explains. “More and more, our customers want just-in-time inventory.”

 

Alliance uses the ColorStream inkjet press and the imagePRESS series in tandem to produce booklets for many of its products, running the cover on the imagePRESS series and the inside pages on the ColorStream inkjet press. The imagePRESS series is outfitted with booklet making capabilities and a range of inline feeding and finishing accessories, letting the print further expand applications it offers to the market.

 

“The PRISMAproduction server ties it all together,” Birmingham says. “It’s a great platform to use to share files. Plus, its scheduling capabilities allows us to prioritize our work and run all our devices from it. We probably only use one-twentieth of its capabilities right now, but plan to add more functionality as needed. The goal is to have it manage our whole print shop.”

 

Birmingham says that inkjet is the wave of the future. “Inkjet is where printing is evolving toward,” he says. “I’m just glad we got into it fairly early.

 

“We added the tagline ‘Print Evolved’ around three years ago,” he adds. “We are trying to live it now.”