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Dynamic digital print and copy provider achieves unrivalled flexibility and efficiency with a cluster printing solution from Canon
The TDC3 Story
Dinosaur Days
The Evolution Solution
"I wanted a total supplier, and Canon was able to offer that. All the pieces ? the iR105s, the iR C3200s and Balance ? work together perfectly. And it was Canon's commitment to the total project that convinced me to go with them. They were prepared to work with me to implement it and iron out any problems straight away."
? Bruce Peddlesden, Managing Director, TDC3
Why would a printer replace three very large digital devices that were still functioning with nine smaller units linked by the latest software? For Bruce Peddlesden ? managing director of The Digital Colour Copy Centre (TDC3), one of Australia's most successful digital printing ventures ? there are two answers to this question: efficiency and flexibility. The company's new solution from Canon ? built from six imageRUNNER iR105s, three iR C3200s and EFI Balance software ? has enabled TDC3 to eliminate some of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks from its workflow. What's more, TDC3 now can smoothly migrate any of these nine machines between different tasks, sites or clients in response to changing customer demands ? giving it a knockout advantage in this fast-moving market.
The TDC3 Story
Peddlesden started his first reprographics business back in 1988 when Canon released its first digital colour copier. "I realised there was a market for it, so I started off with one copier and one staff member," he said. In time, Peddlesden changed the company's name to On Demand, and grew it to the point where it was operating nationwide. The enterprise was so successful it was acquired by a publicly listed company, before Peddlesden - ever the savvy entrepreneur - bought back part of what he'd sold at a compelling price when the larger company decided to refocus on its core business. The reborn enterprise is called TDC3, and under Peddlesden's careful stewardship it has grown to the point where it employs 42 people across two sites, in South Melbourne and Richmond, Victoria.
Peddlesden has been one of the leaders of the digital copy and print business for so long he now jokes about being "the dinosaur in the industry," but if that's true, he should be likened to the handful of nimble dinosaurs that evolved into birds, ensuring survival when the world changed overnight
Dinosaur Days
The changes that Peddlesden has been able to make with his new Canon solution are a case study in business evolution, but to understand them we first have to return to the dinosaur days of digital print and copy ? the era from which TDC3 has quickly emerged.
Until recently, TDC3 depended on three large digital presses from a well-known vendor along with a handful of smaller colour copiers.
"All the systems were separate," Peddlesden explains. "The black & white system couldn't talk to the colour system. The colour system couldn't talk to the black & white system."
No surprises there ? but think about what this meant for TDC3's labour costs and workflow. "Most of our jobs involved printing documents that had colour, black & white, tabs, the whole bit," Peddlesden says. "We would have to run the colour separately. Then we would have to hand-collate the colour pages into the documents. It was messy and time-consuming."
"That's the way we'd always done it. That was the only way it could be done," explains Peddlesden. "You'd physically have to go through and pull colour files out of a job, and then send them over to another machine and print those. Then you'd print the black & white, then you'd print the tabs, and then you'd have to have staff there manually collating everything in a sequence." Collating machines were not a practical alternative for the run lengths that are typical of digital printing.
The Evolution Solution
Peddlesden was frustrated by the inability of these devices to work together as one, but then he came across EFI Balance ? and the opportunity for his business to reach the next stage in its evolution. "You just drop a mixed-bag file in Balance, and it will print the colour on colour devices. It will then ask you to put them in the document inserter and press Go and it basically comes out with a complete book at the end. Black & white, colour and tabs are all ready to put straight into a binder," he explains.
The concept is called "cluster printing," and Peddlesden says that while he had seen software that was capable of matching some of Balance's capabilities, nothing compared to the overall package.
These obvious labour savings are just the start of what Peddlesden has been able to achieve with TDC3's new solution from Canon, based on Balance and nine new imageRUNNER devices. The solution's "load sharing" capabilities have also transformed TDC3's ability to smoothly meet multiple client deadlines.
A day might start with five imageRUNNERs working on five jobs for five clients, but if an urgent job comes in involving a print run of 100,000, Balance can divide it between the five imageRUNNERs, each doing 20,000. If there is a service interruption to one of the machines or it's needed for another client, Balance will automatically reallocate the urgent job to the remaining devices, splitting it so they finish their portions simultaneously and the urgent job is completed as quickly as possible.
The six iR105s and three iR C3200s from Canon are small enough to be moved and smart enough to operate without skilled labour. If one TDC3 office grows while another shrinks, he can move an imageRUNNER from one to another. If a major client wants to bring some of its printing in-house, he can place one on their premises. "None of this would have been possible with the other machines," says Peddlesden, who will soon decommission TDC3's three older, larger digital presses from a rival well-known vendor.
It's fair to say that the imageRUNNER hardware, the EFI Balance software and Canon's support services have come together as a complete print and copy solution for TDC3. "I wanted a total supplier, and Canon was able to offer that. All the pieces ? the iR105s, the iR C3200s and Balance ? work together perfectly. It was Canon's commitment to the total project that convinced me to go with them," says Peddlesden. "They were prepared to work with me to implement it and iron out any problems straight away."
"Now we have a total solution ? a total production environment, that can be all swung onto one job, that can be split to run half on one job and half on another. We have that flexibility and the ability to meet customer requirements," said Peddlesden. "We have seen a reduction in our labour cost and we've seen an increase in our profitability. Canon has been very good working with me to minimise my costs on the whole project and we envisage that the software will pay for itself in under a year."
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