How Ricoh printing solutions drive growth for Prima Printing

Ricoh Australia will provide several colour print solutions to Australia and New Zealand's largest manufacturer of personalised consumer imaging products, Prima Printing.

Prima Printing selected eight Ricoh Pro C9210 Graphic Arts Edition production colour print solutions, with the aim of expanding its business and elevating the customer experience.

Prima Printing had deployed Ricoh products in the past, but it wanted to make sure it was selecting the right solutions for the current climate. It ran an extensive valuation period to ensure the products met Prima Printing's standards.

"We commenced our relationship with Ricoh in 2017, when we installed two colour platforms," says Prima Printing general manager Amnon Judah.

"These devices became some of the highest throughput Ricoh sheet devices in the world. During this period, Ricoh technology provided market leading return on investment, robust infrastructure and consistent high quality across multiple substrates.

Ongoing growth in Prima Printing's business required the purchase of an additional three Ricoh Pro C9210 Graphic Arts Edition platform solutions.

At the same time, the company installed a high capacity sheet feeder from BDT in Germany to feed large volumes of 1020mm banner sheets.  This will enable the company to manufacture hundreds of thousands of personalised covers.

"Prima is a major manufacturing facility, and part of the District Photo global manufacturing conglomerate. We needed to be ready to support their expectations.  A fleet of eight Ricoh Pro C9210 Graphic Arts Edition platforms can produce as many as seven million duplex sheets per month in peak periods," says Ricoh Australia's commercial and industrial print country manager Simon Lane.

"At the same time, we know our platforms are effective and efficient, because they have a broad substrate range, reliably print consistently high quality colour and can integrate with key software platforms to minimise manual intervention.

Prima Printing states that the entire manufacturing process is controlled by a bespoke ERP solution that integrates with customers' eCommerce sites, then batches, imposes and routes it to the Ricoh fleet based on job profiles and availability.

"Our customers are incredibly demanding with the product quality, speed to market and price offering," says Judah.

"In order to consistently achieve above market growth they need to win across all three parameters. We can now help our customers achieve this by leveraging our scale and the power of the new Ricoh fleet to print exceptional photobooks, calendars, cards, desk art and photos.

"In addition, the combination of the technology and Ricoh's service and support resulted in taking much less time to bring the machines online.  We also benefit from significant advantages in electricity consumption and pressroom productivity.

The Pro C9210 Graphic Arts Edition platforms will print sheet sizes of up to 330x1260mm and on media thickness of as much as 600um, enabling Prima to produce a broad array of commercial print work beyond consumer imaging products, should the company decide to expand its range of offerings.