As the offset printing arena became more and more difficult to compete in, Content Critical Solutions of Moonachie, New Jersey, began to search for solutions to help it streamline, gain efficiencies, and reduce waste.

“Customers now no longer have to put half a million mastheads on our shelves; they can pay for what they use in the running rates of the job,” says John Slaney, chief technology officer for Content Critical Solutions. “That was a major ROI factor. Phase two of this acquisition has been enhancing the document itself with the addition of color. We’re reaching out for new applications that utilize color and expanding the boundaries of the services we can provide.”

 

The masthead integration reduced the average production and printing time of jobs by about 80 percent. Printing projects that used to take five days for completion can now be hammered out in less than eight hours.

 

Another vital component in Content Critical Solutions’ tool belt has been the addition of a PRISMA print workflow and output management system for the TransPromo environment. “We’re leveraging PRISMA and integrating it with our front end to our customers and integrating some of the functionality into the back end, creating a component solution that utilizes best-of-breed programs or processes supporting the efforts from behind the scenes,” Slaney says.

 

Adding the new press was a watershed moment for Content Critical Solutions, which serves the financial, insurance, retail, government, and utility verticals with transactional printing and processing services. On the transactional end, Content Critical Solutions converts back end mainframe systems into viewable documents. In addition to its content management, compliance messaging, and reporting solutions, Content Critical Solutions offers ancillary services ranging from customer retention programs, web marketing portals, inventory management, and digital document archiving.

 

Content Critical Solutions took a pragmatic approach to its inkjet ramping up process, printing black-only at first. This gave the company time to become more comfortable with the ColorStream 3500 inkjet press — how to fine-tune color and learn more about what paper stocks could be used.

 

“We met with a number of vendors to learn more about the different papers and systems that could help us leverage this technology and ease some of our pain,” Slaney explains. “Within seven months, we had converted 90 percent of our mastheads and we were operating fully.”

 

One of the unintended consequences of the efficiency gains was the need to make related gear as fruitful on the production front.

Fred Van Alstyne, chief operating officer, notes the company made upgrades in inserting, quality control, and camera systems — moves intended to match the efficiency of the ColorStream 3500 inkjet press.

One of the biggest workflow changes was the switch to roll-to-roll production, with offline / nearline finishing. “It has made a dramatic change in the way we handle paper within our organization,” Van Alstyne says. “It has dramatically increased uptime on the printer and has given us many channels in which we can take our output and feed it directly into the inserter or other offline systems.”

 

Paper compatibility proved to be an eye-opening experience for Content Critical Solutions. Van Alstyne points out that certain stocks were not conducive to the ColorStream inkjet press, and credits paper vendors with providing a wealth of information in this regard. Since the initial ramping-up period, several new inkjet-friendly stocks have been introduced in the marketplace.

 

As sciences go, Slaney adds, it can be a bit inexact. “We’ve had situations where we were buying a stock from one mill that had a certain treatment to it, and that treatment wouldn’t be in place with the same stock from another mill,” he says. “It affected our scanning equipment all the way down the line. So [paper] does require a lot of testing and validation.

 

“Today, you can see the increase in the quality of images coming off our inkjet press. Plus, the color gamut has expanded.”

 

Van Alstyne sees opportunities for his firm with prospects in the in-plant space, as he anticipates most of these shops shedding their own internal printing operations. He would like to see Content Critical Solutions become a major supplier under the guise of customer communication management services.

 

“We will drive the white paper factory to the next level,” Van Alstyne concludes. “We will be looking to start to capture the envelope side as well, driving toward that in the near future.”