Digital printer banks €150,000 per month with books

Innovation can open new untapped opportunities for profit and growth, but can also expose dangerous risks that must be evaluated and carefully considered. Typically it is said that the greater the innovation, the greater the risk. LaserTryk.dk struck gold with their company’s completely new offering of short-run books, which won them an award in the Books and Manuals Category of the 2010 Xerox Best-of-the-Best Contest.
LaserTryk.dk decided they wanted to expand their offerings to prospective customers by getting involved in the digital short-run book industry. They felt they could provide publishers with an attractive business model, which would include superb print quality rivaling that of offset, as well as a price point that offered flexibility not seen in the long offset runs. This solution impressed our judges by effectively displaying some of the most underlying benefits of digital printing: quality, flexible run length, cost, as well as environmental sustainability.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgzWqy_qiDs[/youtube]
As terrific as the quality of the books were, I found the story behind LaserTryk’s splash into the book industry to be even more impressive. Rather than limiting publishers to producing 1,500 copies of their title, publishers could produce 5 different titles, each with a run length of 300. Not only was the quality outstanding, but the cost also remained the same. By bundling these titles together, the publisher was able to reduce start up costs and ultimately get the production price per book to an incredibly low level. This allowed the publisher to reduce the amount of money being invested in their warehouse and eliminated the risk of not selling all of the books.
To help meet the production demands of their new offering, LaserTryk utilized their wide array of Xerox Digital Production equipment, including the Xerox iGen3 Digital Production Press, Xerox Nuvera 100 Digital Copier/Printer, and The Xerox 1300 Continuous Feed Printer. Depending on the scope of the job, LaserTryk could choose among their digital presses to best complete the job. Heidelberg offset presses were also used for covers and contents if the run lengths were long enough to warrant doing so. The Xerox 1300 Continuous Feed Printer, which can print on media as light as 40gsm, was critical to the success of this venture by reproducing the look and feel of an offset print with flash fusing technology and the use of fine particle toner that doesn’t use fuser oil.

To say this endeavor in the book publication industry has kept LaserTryk busy would be an understatement. They have been consumed with book production, printing the equivalent of 350,000 A4 pages a day! To manage the incredible amount of jobs, they rely heavily on the Xerox FreeFlow Process Manager. This helps prepare automatic workflows for each of the possible output formats and specifications, while increasing productivity and strengthening customer relationships. Operating costs are also reduced due to less manual intervention and required training. LaserTryk’s efforts in black and white book production have led to an increased volume in their digital color prints by approximately 700,000 to 1,000,000 A4 prints per month! That is an absolutely astonishing figure that shows how much of a positive impact LaserTryk’s book production business has been for their other services.
After starting their book production business with limited experience and no clients, LaserTryk has since built strong relationships with many publishers after displaying quick turnaround times, flexible pricing, and outstanding quality. The gamble paid off, as the company is now the beneficiary of €150,000 per month in revenue, a large portion of which can be attributed to their short-run book production. As I mentioned earlier, there is a certain degree of risk associated with innovation, as was the case with LaserTryk and their venture into a completely new market. But by taking a chance in trying something new and expanding their business services, they are now reaping the benefits of huge profits, along with an award in the Books and Manuals Category of the 2010 Xerox Best-of-the-Best Contest.
To learn more about LaserTryk’s book production business, please read the case study or watch the video above.