Digital Printer Deal To Boost Personalised Billing

Stralfors, a printer and manager of information logistics, has bought four Xerox 490 colour continuous feed printing systems for its plants in Finland and Sweden.

The EURmulti-million deal, which Xerox said is the company's single biggest order for the new product, was signed by Stralfors president and chief executive officer, Per Samuelson and Ursula Burns, the president of Xerox.

The equipment will be installed.

Stralfors will use the Xerox systems to produce full-colour, high-volume personalised communications, such as personalised bank statements and bills.

Hakan Larsson, the technical director at Stralfors, explained: "For years, our clients have recognised these documents as an excellent opportunity to market to their customers.

If you want to communicate something important, put it on a monthly statement, because then it will get read." At Drupa 2004, Stralfors met Xerox to discuss ways to replace the need for pre-printed shells and replace them with documents produced in a single process.

Stralfors wanted to do that in colour and with cost, quality and productivity standards equal to current operations, whilst taking in to account waste, hidden costs and the benefits of personalised communications.

Per Samuelson said: "We knew that we could not do what we wanted with one technology, so we began by assessing the market to understand how we could meet all of our requirements.

That led us to take a two-prong strategy.

First, we sought very high quality, which our five Xerox iGen3 digital presses have given us.

Secondly, we sought full-colour personalised documents using business colour to communicate in an affordable to many more customers in a personalised manner.

Xerox came through, meeting all our requirements with the 490 system." He explained: "It has taken many months to get to the point where our customers were ready to get on board with this personalisation strategy as we had to learn a lot about our customers' aspirations.

Xerox has consistently given us support to do this.

The company's technology and our partnership with it provide a very powerful option for our business and the success of our customers." The Xerox 490/980 prints at a claimed 600 dots per inch (dpi) resolution and maintains top speed when printing full-colour or mono, regardless of the number of colours used or the weight of the paper.

It prints 226 feet per minute (69 metres) or 493 images per minute two-up, simplex on 8.5" x 11" paper and 986 images per minute when in the duplex configuration, added the company.

It uses non-contact flash fusing technology, which Xerox believes is a key differentiator from competitors' products.

The system fuses the image using high-intensity xenon lamps instead of the conventional method that uses heat and pressure rollers to apply an image to the paper.

According to the company, flash fusing only heats the toner and there is no direct heat or pressure contact with the substrate.

That process maintains more moisture in the paper and minimises, or eliminates paper shrinkage, paper curl and static electricity.

The result is excellent registration, productivity and reliability in the printer and the finishing devices, it is claimed.

Another benefit of flash fusing is the ability to feed unique stocks that use adhesives, or are pressure sensitive, such as cards, labels, self-sealing materials, foil coatings and even RFID inlays.

The Xerox 490/980 also uses a new colour toner that is said to be unique to flash-fusing.

That provides consistent, precise image quality for continuous feed applications that require highly-detailed graphics, high-density bar codes, photographs and halftones.

Xerox's Ursula Burns said: "Our innovation continues to shape the digital printing market and change the way companies interact with customers.

Personalised messages produced on digital presses cut through the clutter, creating a high impact and high return.

Stralfors is racing ahead with this opportunity, creating value from personalised messaging that is a profitable way to reach customers.".

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