Digitising a Traditional Print Business

Entrepreneur Ho Hoo Yin started Ho Printing in 1951 with a vision to build a business that prospered with modern technology. As the business grew, Ho made a bold venture and invested in new equipment to keep pace with technological advancements.

Today, Ho Printing is a leading midsized integrated design, print and digital solutions provider in Singapore with 100 staff in its 7,700 sqm plant with almost 70 years of experience. It specialises in designing and printing marketing communications and direct marketing print materials and serves a global clientele including Fortune 500 companies, multi-national corporations, government agencies and medium to large enterprises.

Digitising Print

As the volume of orders grew, Ho Printing became limited by its printing capabilities. Customers were sending in hundreds of short run jobs each day and its existing offset printers were unable to produce these short runs economically. In addition, though it was facing rising customer expectations in terms of digital printing, it only had one digital press to work with. This created a bottleneck for Ho Printing’s short run jobs, which overflowed to its offset printers. Ho Printing was also being challenged to find new ways to streamline its workflows while still meeting the needs of its clientele. In order to grow the business and give it a competitive edge, Ho Printing needed to increase its printing capabilities and capacity in digital printing, and expand the range of its print services. Ho Printing was concerned about its carbon dioxide emissions and wanted environmentally friendly production presses. This gave Ho Printing the opportunity to differentiate its service offerings by seeking out the latest digital features in an ever-changing business landscape.

Driving Print Perfection

With a strong product portfolio featuring a wide range of print devices and solutions, Fuji Xerox was a natural partner of choice for Ho Printing. Over the past 8 years Fuji Xerox has demonstrated its ability to add value to the business by keeping Ho Printing informed of the latest industry news and trends. This knowledge has

empowered Ho Printing in making well-informed business and investment decisions.

To position Ho Printing as the frontrunner of technology adoption and appeal to a wider market, Fuji Xerox recommended its Iridesse™ Production Press to enable high-quality and colour-rich printing expressions. The Iridesse™ Production Press, which employs advanced digital printing technology, is a sophisticated print engine that is new to the market. This strategic investment proved crucial to Ho Printing’s digitisation drive.

Digitising a Traditional Print Business

It realises limitless print expressions by transcending Ho Printing’s print offerings beyond CMYK to include specialty metallic colours such as White, Clear, Gold and Silver, which were done mainly by offset. It also performs at a high capacity to deliver outstanding image quality, productivity and print for a wide media latitude. To further support Ho Printing’s growing customer base and varying customer demands, Fuji Xerox recommended its Color 1000i Press. The Color 1000i Press produces vibrant images and delivers one of the widest ranges of media handling – from a lightweight 55 gsm to a hefty 350 gsm.

With this image quality powerhouse, Ho Printing could be assured of greater versatility, speed and reliability.

The business’ print capabilities were also enhanced with the Xerox Nuvera Perfecting Production System, which is an easy-to-use, modular system that delivers exceptional image quality and productivity. Ho Printing wanted to be able to deliver on-demand printing with the freedom and flexibility of customising a system that can be designed to meet specific customer needs. With 4800 x 600 dpi printing at a speed of up to 314 duplexed images per minute, the machine is lightningquick while offering outstanding image print quality that challenges offset. Fine particle Emulsion Aggregation (EA) toner is a key factor in the system’s razor sharp print performance. In addition, it reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 35%. From feeding, image and processing, inserting and finishing, the Xerox Nuvera Perfecting Production System propelled Ho Printing ahead of customer expectations and its competition.

Ho Printing’s letter shopping and mail management services such as collating, inserting, labelling and sealing represented a large share of its business and demand has been growing. This is because retailers are increasingly sending personalised direct mailers to their customers based on their individual buying patterns. To cater to the rising demand for variable printing, Ho Printing required new digital production presses that would also meet the needs of its clientele, as well as create new revenue streams for the business.

"Fuji Xerox offers superior machine performance and impeccable after-sales support 7 days a week. Throughout our partnership, Fuji Xerox’s consultants have gone the extra mile to help push Ho Printing to the head of the pack with the right digital solutions. For exceptional print quality and service, we choose Fuji Xerox."

- Ho Wah Yuen, Executive Director

Impressing Customers

With the Color 1000i Press, customers of Ho Printing now enjoy excellent sharpness and colour consistency in their print products. This is complemented by the award-winning Iridesse™ Production Press, which handles both printing and finishing in a single pass and brings unprecedented power of expression to digital printing. This unparalleled combination of presses has boosted the business’ productivity by automating several time-consuming print setup and maintenance procedures. Operators could also always be assured of optimised performance before reliably processing short run jobs. On the whole, the business’ digital print volume increased by 25%.

The Xerox Nuvera, which boasts the highest monochrome resolution in the market, has created a lasting impression for Ho Printing among its customers. Each run is printed with heightened clarity and detail while realising true end-to-end productivity for Ho Printing. Customers could also access a wider range of large format finishing options at Ho Printing, featuring extremely accurate print-to-cut registration for any jobs or applications.

Taken together, Fuji Xerox’s comprehensive suite of innovative print solutions has helped Ho Printing increase its workflow efficiencies by reducing manual order-taking and increasing their productivity by 30 to 50%.