The printing is easy. It’s the bits around the printing that are challenging, according to Jens Rauschen, CEO of German company Meinders & Elstermann, which operates a printing arm under the Meo Media name. “We are really good at offset printing,” he says. “We produce beautiful brochures. But we are a mid sized company, the meat in the sandwich between the big companies on one hand and the small nimble companies on the other.”
This was not a comfortable place to be — the problem is that there are many other printers in Germany that can also print beautiful brochures he explains. It’s a market that is in slow decline in terms of print runs at least, but that decline is not outpacing the rate at which competitors are closing. He adds: “We are never going to be the only brochure printer in Germany. We might focus on being the best brochure printer in Germany, but that is expensive and it’s never going to work.”
Meo Media might print beautiful brochures, but that is no longer the route to long term prosperity.
It is also highly seasonal. The company had enough capacity to cope with its peaks, but this meant that for three or more month a year, it had to work hard to fill the presses.
Meinders & Elstermann is close to Osnabruck in northern Germany. The business has been around for 140 years building up a collection of local newspapers, a digital marketing operation and commercial printing business. Eight years ago, Rauschen was asked to join to head the print arm. He says he had a background in retail, in marketing and guiding start up businesses but had zero experience of print. At the time he was 52, not the ideal age to have to learn a new business he admits. Instead he applied experience gained elsewhere to change Meo, starting by considering what its core services were. Yes it prints brochures but these now had to be considered in a wider context. “What we deliver is communication for different sectors with different information,” he says. “And as a printer we are very good at delivering what is needed where it is needed and on time.” That is the crux of what the business now does.
There is a small design business, an online print offering trading as Flyer Heaven, digital and offset printing and it is taking its first steps into packaging. There is also a logistics operation with print management and call off stock.
It means that Meo Media is closer perhaps to how Amazon operates than the print company it used to be. It is not a comparison that holds says Rauschen. “We deliver what the customer wants from us rather than deliver what we have like Amazon does.”
Earlier this year, the company became the first German user of Heidelberg’s Jetfire 50 inkjet press and the beta site for Prinect Touch Free, the next generation of the established production workflow software. This is not the first time that the company has trialled Heidelberg technology. Rauschen says he agreed to be the beta site for the P-Stacker, Heidelberg’s robotic arm for loading pallets with folded sections. “I ordered two more on the day it arrived,” he says. “We don’t need to have people doing the hard physical work if we don’t have to,” he explains. It had also been a pioneer of Zaikio’s link between the paper ordering function at the printer and the paper provider, in this case Sappi.
When Rauschen joined the business it had boasted three XL presses, the oldest at that time being a two-year-old eight-colour. It also runs a ten-unit long perfector where there is coating before the perfecting drum and at the delivery. The press uses coatings that the company has formulated itself to overcome the limitations of commercially available aqueous seals, especially on perfecting presses.
The company was in the habit of buying new, not simply for the commercial advantage, but because it helped with the balance sheet at group level he says.
At the time there was just one site, acquisition of a digital print business and then Up Packaging, a small carton printer have added the second and third factories in the group. The digital plant was deemed necessary because print runs were falling sharper than advances in litho technology could realistically cope. It was equipped with Canon toner presses and Indigo.
Then Meo saw the Jetfire 50 at Drupa and took the plunge. “We have five Canons. We know that Canon will sell you the machine, but we need the whole environment around the press and we found that in discussion with Heidelberg,” Rauschen says. “We meet Heidelberg and discuss everything about our business several times a year because we have to be aware of what they are doing and thinking two or three years ahead so that we can save up to have the amount needed.”
In this case the environment around the press has included Prinect Touch Free, the workflow that is intended to provide the link between digital and offset worlds.
Meo is a dedicated and realistic user of Prinect. The application runs the business including the management of the warehouse which is not something that Heidelberg planned for it to be able to do. “Prinect is not the best application in every case, but it’s the best at doing everything and relies on a single database.
“We need to think about the best way to produce what the customer wants. There are fewer brochures each time than before and more and more orders that suit digital printing. We have to find a way where we can give the system any information and it decides what to do, especially if a machine breaks down and we have to find another way to create the job. The Autoscheduler function on Prinect Touch Free is intended to handle this, creating new workflows on the fly to enable production to continue without missing deadlines.
“Prinect Touch Free is the answer. Because it is the bridge between the technologies, we can let the system decide how best to produce a job. We used to have to make those decisions with people but we don’t have those people any more.”
It is early days. Prinect Touch Free only arrived in March and was not turned on for a month. Heidelberg expects Meo to run Touch Free as a beta test for six months before it becomes a commercial release.
However, as Rauschen points out, printing is the easy part. It is the finishing and after that the logistics that sets the business apart and where it builds its future. In a promotional video the viewer is guided through production of a 1,000pp catalogue over the course of a week through plate making, printing, folding, binding on its Kolbus 600 and finally packaging a single copy into a box, securing this with straps and attaching a delivery label. “We get more money from putting it in the box and applying the label than from printing,” he says, echoing the experience of thousands of other printers around the world.
There has been investment on the mailing side in the form of a Winkler + Dunnebier enclosing line supported by whatever hand bench work is necessary.
This shift has led also to growth in packaging. Up Packaging has an XL press, Easymatrix platen and Bobst folder gluer. Like the digital print business it acquired, this remains on a separate site, so avoiding cultural confusion in how they operate.
The development of a logistics business makes the printer a part of the customer journey. One of those customers is one of the major suppliers of agricultural machinery with 430,000 possible customers across Europe. If the printer could access the knowledge about which farms operate which machines, it would be possible to create individualised marketing pieces using that data and the Jetfire 50. Another customer sells door handles and Meo’s task is to delivery the handles along with the instruction manuals and promotional literature it has printed. It doesn’t matter that the print is inkjet or litho, what matters is that it’s there on time and in the right place. This is a long way from sending out boxes of brochures.
“Every job we do has a different workflow. The software decides how it is to be printed, but that’s not the important part. It’s about getting the finishing and logistics right,” says Rauschen. It is the sort of work that calls on both digital and litho printing. The company does a lot of hybrid printing, applying a degree of personalisation over a job that has been litho printed. All this needs to be tracked and managed.
“This is the main change in our industry and we can only do this with Heidelberg. Canon will sell you a machine, but we need the whole environment around it — they don’t have the XL for the litho printing. We have to think about the right way to produce what the customer wants. If you only have a large litho machine, you have to provide what the machine produces.”
Meo’s offset press operators look down on the toner presses as little more than office copiers, though they have been impressed with the inkjet press, says Rauschen. In a short while it has become an integral part of the offer. Likewise Prinect Touch Free is ideal for managing the complexity of a business that has shifted a long way from being a straightforward producer of brochures. “Every job we do has a different workflow,” he says. “We have to be like a Swiss Army penknife for our customers.”
