This explains why Anthony Mills, chief information officer at Arna Marketing Group, describes the company as “an IT solutions provider that happens to print.”

Printing, however, is anything but an afterthought, and the company’s choice of printing systems reflects its commitment to giving its customers the best results that printed communications can deliver.

Hegna emphasizes that the print-supported IT solutions from Arna Marketing Group are neither generic nor one-off. Everything is customized, and all projects are designed with long-term execution in mind. The success of this approach is one factor in Arna Marketing Group’s fivefold growth in revenue over the last seven years, notes Mills.

A visit to the company’s 65,000-square-foot plant, currently undergoing a 40,000-square-foot expansion, reveals a networked printing factory in which production is almost entirely digital. Nearly all of the printed output contains variable data. The goal, according to Hegna, is to move as much work as possible to on-demand production (POD) with two-dimensional (2D) barcodes added for traceability. This combination of POD and 2D, he explains, will help to shrink inventory, eliminate waste, and provide the accurate printing and mailing that customers insist on.

Hegna says high-volume inkjet represents the future of hard-copy output for Arna Marketing Group because of its speed, economy, and consistent print quality. The technology took center stage at the company in 2017 with the installation of a VarioPrint i300 sheetfed color inkjet press. The VarioPrint i300, a B3-format (13.9" x 19.7") sheetfed press with a monthly duty cycle of 10 million impressions, ran close to that volume (9 million impressions) in its first month of operation. Despite being pushed nearly to the limit during its initial rollout, the press logged uptime of more than 90 percent.

So impressive was the performance that a second VarioPrint i300 inkjet press was installed. Also added were a pair of ColorStream 3900Z monochrome continuous feed inkjet presses. All of the devices were supplied by Canon Solutions America, which also provides the VarioPrint i-series inkjet presses and imagePRESS toner presses that the company continues to use. Arna Marketing Group has chosen Canon Solutions America as its sole source of digital printing equipment and has implemented more than a dozen of its technologies in recent years.

With the help of its VarioPrint i300 inkjet presses, the company intends to phase out its use of preprinted shells for jobs containing variable data. Printing the static portion of a shell on an offset press and digitally overprinting the dynamic content can take days — a time frame that Arna Marketing Group has cut down to hours with all-in-one production on the VarioPrint i300 inkjet press. The duplexing press, which can print up to 3,800 B3 sheets per hour at 600 x 600 dpi, was designed from the ground up for exactly the kind of white-paper-in production that Arna Marketing Group aspires to: full-color and variable data in a single pass, dry and ready for finishing. The VarioPrint i300 inkjet press is rich in features for uninterrupted, high-quality production. Paper from decks holding a maximum of 9,200 sheets is interwoven and registered for printing on both sides under the gaze of a camera-based sheet monitoring system that detects and ejects defective prints. Sheets also are scanned to spot jet-outs — nozzle failures that can be compensated for by automatically jetting additional ink from adjacent nozzles.

Canon Solutions America’s iQuarius water-based pigment inks work in concert with a precoating technology called ColorGrip to help improve results on uncoated papers. The ColorGrip fluid goes down first, creating a matrix onto which the CMYK iQuarius inks are sprayed in droplets of varying sizes. By controlling dot gain and expediting drying, ColorGrip produces an apparent visual resolution of 1,200 dpi and lets Arna Marketing Group print with standard offset stocks. Canon Solutions America says that more than 200 media — including coated, uncoated, treated, and specialty stocks — are certified for use with the VarioPrint i300 inkjet press.

A four-element drying system gently removes water from the printed sheets to dry them without deforming them. During operation, sensors installed throughout the press look for excessive power consumption and other anomalies that red-flag parts needing repair or replacement. This predictive maintenance is one of the things that enables the VarioPrint i300 inkjet press to achieve a 95 percent availability rate.

While these technical fine points may not be of direct concern to Arna Marketing Group’s clientele, they matter because they have everything to do with delivering the level of service the company has pledged to provide. Hegna notes that its health care organizations and other customers are required to communicate comprehensively and accurately in print with the populations they serve. This means supporting them with technologies that let Arna Marketing Group plan and execute their print-based campaigns without error or delay.

Technically speaking, the company has come a long way from its first attempts to produce what Hegna remembers as “a dynamic letter with a little color” — URLs in blue along with black type in one pass, printed on the kind of digital equipment then available. Today, with the help of Canon Solutions America, Arna Marketing Group has the capability it needs to explore the many meanings of “yes” in the close and long-lasting relationships it has with its customers.