HP Indigo press produces 'Guardian' voucher book

A HP Indigo 7000 digital press is being used by F E Burman to produce a voucher booklet for Guardian News and Media.

The 32-page, DL32-sized booklets are aimed at sustaining sales, rewarding customer loyalty and encouraging customers to buy more Guardian News and Media products per week.

The company decided to offer new and current customers a loyalty scheme, providing readers with a range of prepaid, discounted packages incentivising them to subscribe to the newspaper.

It developed three subscription packages tailored to its readers' requirements, using a voucher system for its various titles.

For ease-of-use, the vouchers are collated in a booklet containing tickets for the next three months.

Each voucher features the date of the issue each voucher can be redeemed against, the subscriber's name and a subscription number and barcode.

This ensures that each booklet can be tracked throughout the production process.

The HP Indigo 7000 digital press is said to print at speeds up to 120 A4 four-colour pages per minute.

The booklets are folded, stitched, trimmed and finished in-house and, because the vouchers are all dated, speedy production and timely distribution are vital, as F E Burman produces the booklets in a weekly run.

Readers of the 'Guardian' and the 'Observer' are invited to sign up to the loyalty scheme by telephone or online.

This information is then collated externally, before being supplied to F E Burman to produce the personalised printed content that appears on the vouchers.

The company uses its HP Smartstream Production Pro Print Server to handle the high volumes of variable data required to feed its HP Indigo press, enabling sophisticated personalisation.

Michael Burman, managing director of F E Burman, said: 'The "Guardian" wanted the booklets to be as user-friendly as possible.

'The vouchers are all perforated, so that they can simply be torn out of the booklet at the time of redemption.

'We pre-perforate the paper and then run this through our HP Indigo press.

'We print each book individually, to eliminate the time-consuming and costly process of collating the personalised pages.

'It's 100 per cent accurate and ensures that the correct information and booklet gets sent to the customer it is intended for.

'Using the Indigo 7000 digital press and the Smartstream Production Pro Print Server is ideal for the production of the voucher booklets, offering us high productivity and efficient data handling.

'This combination of technology is vital in ensuring that we can produce all the booklets in time,' he added.

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