Once every four years the Global Print Industry comes together to show off the latest and greatest technologies that the industry has to offer. Earlier this year industry experts worldwide converged on Düsseldorf, collectively displaying more than 1,600 exhibits over the ten-day event. Undoubtedly the innovations on display at the show will shape the Print Industry in the years to come.
President and Founder of Insource Corp, Tim Wakefield, made his way to drupa, and sat down with me to describe the show, the changes he has experienced firsthand in the print industry over the last five decades, and offer insights into how the technologies on display at the show will further shape the industry in the years to come.
The following is a transcript of my interview with Tim.
Q: Tim, thank you for sitting with me today. Tell me, when did you start in the mailing industry?
1985
Q: That was with Mailing Innovations? When you got there, was the company solely focused on mailing? Or were there any other subsections of the Print Industry you were involved with?
Basically. There was one product line, Scriptomatic, which was addressing machines. That’s what we sold.
Q: So it was only addressing equipment?
It was addressing, that’s what we did. We did not do any inserting when I started, it was strictly addressing.
Not long after, the Owner of the company went to a tradeshow and saw PFE, the manufacturer of inserting equipment. We took on the PFE line, we had inserting and addressing, that’s what we did, nothing beyond it.
Our marketplace was anyone doing external print communications. Those companies would have a mail list that they would send to all the time, and we would provide them with the addressing equipment and the inserting equipment they needed to go through that process.
Eventually PFE grew to where they could do variable page sets using OMR for variable inserting. That allowed us to move into different markets, such as utility services. At the time Hydro companies utilized our equipment because they required variable multiple pages, and we were the primary company that could make variable multiple sets a reality.
Q: At the time that Mailing Innovations was sold, were those the only technologies that you dealt with? Or were you diversifying into other aspects of the Print Industry?
Because we were dealing with addressing, we were looking for something that could potentially run faster. We ended up working with a German Manufacturer, RENA, but we also started offering inkjet systems to the market.
Later, while still with Mailing Innovations, I attended a tradeshow and saw the Kirk-Rudy tabber. The product blew me away and before long we were representing Kirk-Rudy. The product line Kirk-Rudy offered included a full line of Print Finishing equipment, and that’s how we got into the Print Finishing and the Lettershop side of things.
Q: Eventually Mailing Innovations was sold, and a few years later you founded Insource Corp. At the time of founding in 2005 were you strictly in the Mailing and Print Finishing sides of the Print Industry or did you diversify into other areas immediately?
At the very beginning I needed to be an exclusive distributor for a leading manufacturer and that was Kirk-Rudy, so our focus as a company was Mailing. At that point there was me, and there was Doug (Doug Ferguson, Insource Corp’s current Director of Service). We ended up diversifying into Vision Systems, Office Solutions, Labeling, Packaging and Apparel Printing at later dates.
Q: When and why did you end up diversifying the company into these subsections of the Print Industry?
There were opportunities for our customers to get better at what they were doing.
My thought was that a lot of companies will approach their business by selling a product and trying to convince their customers to buy that product. In the early days of Mailing Innovations, that’s what we did with Scriptomatic. We went in and we found a way to sell that product.
Since then, my philosophies have significantly changed. I look at it from the perspective of what does the customer need to be better, not what do we need to sell to stay in business? With our renewed philosophy we started to expand into different subsections of the Print Industry.
We did it solely to help enhance our customer environment.
Q: So, it was customer driven, not manufacturer driven?
That’s right.
Q: A lot of our manufacturers have started to diversify their technology offerings, for example Ricoh has a separate branch, Ricoh DTG, which deals primarily with apparel printing. Were you seeing many new offerings from existing manufacturers at drupa?
Generally speaking, most companies stay in their zone of operation. RISO is a good example of that, they have a machine that connects to their printers that automatically folds the print and inserts it into an envelope. That attachment was built by a third-party who wanted to integrate the RISO printer into their application.
From a different approach, a business like W+D is a massive organization and they’ve got at least ten different manufacturing partners that they’ve acquired and are bringing together. They’re able to expand their capabilities on the inserting side, the envelope converting side, the camera system side and more. The individual divisions of that company didn’t expand, but by acquiring new divisions with new areas of focus they’ve been able to expand their product offerings overall.
Q: So you’re not seeing diversification of existing companies, instead you’re seeing new companies fill the gaps or existing companies joining forces to fill market shares?
A lot of the time what companies are doing is that they’re not diversifying, they’re enhancing. J-Wei is a perfect example of that, at drupa they were showing roll-to-roll laser finishing, it’s a new offering but in an environment that they already existed in.
These manufacturers are the best in the world at what they do, and they’re always enhancing what they do. Typically, they’re not diverting funds into researching new applications, they’re refining their existing ones. When they start offering something entirely new to the company, it’s usually, but not always, a collaboration or acquisition.
Q: If I’m not mistaken, at drupa, RISO was showing off a new printer designed for printing directly on to fully formed packaging. Where do you see Packaging inside of the larger Print Industry?
Packaging is showing a lot of growth. To go back one though, I don’t believe RISO was manufacturing their own print engine in the past, it was Toshiba Tec. Recently RISO has gone out and acquired the part of Toshiba’s company that was responsible for building that print engine.
Now that they own that engine they have the ability to expand the capabilities of that engine, allowing for new innovations such as the RISO Integlide which you mentioned. The exciting thing about that package printing machine is that it’s full colour, can print on fully formed boxes, and can print either vertically or horizontally at high speeds. We’re very excited to see that launch next year.
Q: Did drupa give any indication of what might be next ten to twenty years from now?
When it comes to print, we have to look at what is getting printed. It used to be a porous substrate like paper that ink could absorb into and dry, or lie on top of and be dried into place. Now we’re looking at printing on everything, it could be glass, or something highly porous like a napkin where inks would typically bleed before drying. Either way we have to be able to print extremely high quality on all of these substrates. So the print industry is looking for ways to provide the highest quality of print on ANYTHING.
The paper side of it that used to drive the market, newspapers, magazines and the like. We’ve seen volumes in those areas decline dramatically and, in some cases, disappear. Printing on paper will never be gone, but like direct mail we’ll likely see the volumes continue to dip as organizations look at the ease of digital outlets like e-mails, but we know in many cases that e-mail gets deleted before it gets looked at, or may be stopped by firewalls before delivery, so there is still a need for direct mail.
We’re going to see ups and downs in that market when it comes to digital options versus print. On the print side of that, quality is going to be extremely important, that and speed. Manufacturers are going to look to combine the highest quality of print, on the widest number of substrates, with the fastest speeds possible.
Q: What are the challenges the industry faces over that same time frame?
Operating the existing and legacy technologies, knowledgeable labour is becoming harder and harder to find. A Pressman who can spend their career running a six- or eight-coloured press, looking at the print colour quality, mixing the inks, they’re very hard to come by. That Pressman who is now in their late fifties to early seventies, when they move on what do you do? Can you find another who is as skilled?
Instead, we look to take a digital file and we send it to a printer which will print at that same high quality as the Pressman used to do. That’s why the digital side of print is growing as much as it is, because it’s becoming more and more difficult to find the skilled labourer.
Q: As those highly skilled workers retire they are being replaced by, not unskilled labour, but by digitally-trained operators, we’re starting to see diversification in the equipment they run. A Pressman may have spent their entire career on one machine, while someone running digital equipment might be asked to run multiple machines at the same time. Are there foreseeable issues in production that a company might find trying to operate with less staff?
Print Finishing is something that is required for any print that you’re doing. If you’re printing something that turns into a booklet, cardstock that turns into a flyer, whatever it is, it needs to be finished. In a lot of cases, what is being printed is then cut and folded.
Typically, when you run digital print-lines these days, it’s fairly easy to take that work and print multiple up on a page. If, for example, you’re running a folder at a reasonable number of 10,000 an hour, you’ll have one person on the front-end loading the machine at 10,000 an hour, and you’ve got someone on the back-end unloading at 10,000 an hour. However, the folder is capable of running at 40,000 an hour.
You can’t run at that speed though because you can’t keep up at the back-end. Someone must take that product, square them, make them into a controllable document set, band them, and put them into a box or onto a skid. If you want to go faster, you need to add more operators. At times you can see three operators working off the back of one folder, and that labour is both hard to find and expensive.
Enter Palamides. One of our manufacturing partners that specializes in end of line automation with products such as their Alpha, Delta and Gamma models.
If you install a Palamides machine off the back of your folder, when it comes off the Palamides will automatically stack the product to the exact height that you want. It will jog the pieces so that everything is square, band the product, and exit it on to a conveyor. Now instead of 10,000 pieces an hour to manage, that operator has 50 banded stacks of 200 pieces to handle, allowing for a severely reduced workflow for the operator.
There are even options for robotics to get involved to box the product or to stack it onto a skid. This allows the operator to control multiple end-of-line finishing machines, or they can be redeployed to other areas that require a human touch.
Q: So as it becomes more difficult to find skilled labour, this type of technology can help ease that pain?
It’s not a matter of eliminating labour.
It’s a matter of redeploying labour into areas where they’re required. If you’re in a position where you can take two people off a production line, reducing that line from three to one person over the course of one eight-hour shift you’re now saving sixteen hours of labour on that application in one day. This can significantly lower the production costs for your business.
Over five days, that’s 80 hours of labour, over a year that’s over 173 DAYS of labour saved. That is a lot of money saved on labour against this one application. Allowing that labour to be redeployed to other production lines that require the human touch.
In an industry that is struggling to find talented labour, these innovations aren’t looking to put your staff out of work. They’re looking for ways to maximize the productivity of that employee so that the company can maximize profit.
Q: To come full circle on this, drupa is the biggest coming together of the Print Industry worldwide. From your start at Mailing Innovations to where you are now with Insource Corp you’ve gone from one manufacturing partner to roughly fifty. Does drupa allow you to network new opportunities to support your customers?
Absolutely. Though if I’m honest, when I thought about drupa this year, I brushed it off and said ‘I don’t have time.’
The more I thought about it, I realized that what I truly didn’t have time for was to travel to the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, England, Australia, China and more to visit all these partners this year. Drupa was the perfect opportunity to meet with a majority of our manufacturing partners, and that became my primary objective, meeting face to face with them.
There are obviously other products to look at as well. At this event, did anything jump out at me that was within the scope of our business? Yes, and I’m happy with what I found, and happier still to have found it through Palamides who we already represent.
Drupa took up 17 buildings this year, each of which is massive in size. The show opened at 10am and finished at 5pm meeting with manufacturing partners through the day and evenings I didn’t have much time to explore. I was fortunate to be allowed access into the grounds 8:30am on the days that I was there and that provided me with 90 minutes per day to look around and see what was new.
I got to see a tremendous amount of competing equipment to the product lines we carry now, and I’m very happy with where we are now. As for the products we have access to and the manufacturing partners that we work with, I’m confident that they are the best in the world at what they do.
Did I see everything? No. It wouldn’t have been possible in only eight hours per day.
But researching new product opportunities to support our customers is not a once every four-year activity like drupa is. We are always doing the research needed to make sure we are offering the best possible solutions to help enhance the business offerings of our customers.
