Wine maker raises toast to managed print services

Savings on printing costs and a device consolidation

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Printer management has long been the bane of IT departments, but a Melbourne-based wine company has reduced its printing costs by using a managed print service with its in-house label production.

The Independent Wine Group (IWG) offers “cleanskin”, or generic, wines to business customers.

In 2005 IWG began customising its wine labeling with varying designs, but struggled to keep the cost of printing wine labels in-house down without compromising on quality.

IWG director John Travaglini said buying more printers was not an option due to cost and the subsequent requirement for wine labels to meet colour reproduction standards of customers’ logos.

“The cost of offset printing is exorbitant with a small print run and it adds to the production time for each job,” Travaglini said.

IWG's printer reseller UDG recommended using Fuji Xerox's PagePack, a managed print solution that provides customers with a fixed price per page cost model for printing in-house, irrespective of how much toner is used.

“The cost per page with PagePack was 80 percent cheaper when compared to the cost of purchasing our own consumables and managing the device outside of the warranty period,” Travaglini said. “Since a lot of our printing is done in colour, having a set page cost gave us a high level of confidence on what we would expect to pay each month.”

That said, wine labels were not a standard paper stock, making a traditional in-house solution more difficult to cost.

UDG installed two Fuji Xerox Phaser 6360 colour laser printers at IWG where it previously had three laser printers for the printing of labels, general office administration and for delivery forms.

“In the past, there have been occasions where we’ve had to reprint labels because they did not meet the exact colour specifications,” Travaglini said. “We’ve had no complaints about colour accuracy or print quality from customers since the installation [and] been able to save paper.”

“Printing in-house gives us a competitive business advantage. We can now prepare and dispatch any last minute orders quickly. This has made our retail and restaurant customers happy because we can turn an order around almost immediately.”