There's More in Store for Miller Zell with EFI

Atlanta-based retail design company, Miller Zell, Inc.'s customers are seeking increasingly shorter runs, lower inventory quantities, and the ability to provide more regionalized offerings. With two six-color inline screen presses, one six-color carousel, and three single-color offset presses as well as several wide-format offset presses, Miller Zell decided it was time to invest in increased production throughput to meet its clients' short-run, quick turnaround projects. And, that meant going digital. The company still produces high volume graphics for national rollouts, but with digital superwide-format capability now in house, Miller Zell can more easily regionalize messages and provide just-in-time inventory replenishment.

"Our original target was to convert up to 25 percent of our regionalized and variable screen runs to digital output, but we have exceeded that; now, 35 percent of our total revenue comes from digital production," said Ford Bowers, general manager of Miller Zell's print division. "We also will be able to bring in-house virtually all of our digital printing for prototype projects."

Adding digital was not as simple as placing the new press on the floor. Miller Zell also needed to address a number of workflow challenges. For example, Miller Zell needed to create seamless workflows between all screen, offset, and digital output devices while tightly managing color across the board.

Printer Solution

Miller Zell did its due diligence, searching for the best superwide digital printer available—one that would offer the quality, reliability and productivity the company was looking for, with a good ROI. Miller Zell's choice: the EFI VUTEk GS3200 flatbed and roll-to-roll UV superwide digital printer. Designed with all the latest digital superwide technology, the VUTEk GS3200 is capable of handling materials up to 126.5 inches wide and two inches thick. Quality is extremely important when working with clients such as Walmart, Home Depot, Citizens Bank and Exxon Mobile—especially matching all corporate colors. EFI's Fiery XF RIP ensures consistent color quality and fidelity for these color-critical applications. Its white ink capability and the variety of substrates that are compatible with the GS3200 printer were also key factors in Miller Zell's decision.

"Due to our product mix and the surprising demand for digital capabilities, including a great deal of digital white, as well as production on both roll-to-roll and rigid substrates in excess of 10 feet, our need for a second digital machine was inevitable, and we have been running two GS3200 presses since September 2010 with an average production schedule of 120+ hours per week," added Bowers.

Integration Solution

"EFI offered us a solution to our current print management information systems as well," Bowers continued. "EFI's Pace print MIS handles all of the workflow for our screen, offset and digital technology, and ties into our legacy system through its easy-to-use API—achieving a seamless system that allows bi-directional data transfer. This system affords us tremendous efficiencies in all three disciplines."

Bowers pointed out that EFI's Pace MIS was a very big cultural change for the company. "It has changed the nature of how we do business. Now we can see what we are good at or not so good at and have a much better picture of where we are, continuing to refine our processes for increased efficiency. We are more much competitive due to our ability to access and act upon real-time business and production data from the Pace system."

"Part of our decision to purchase EFI's VUTEk GS3200 and the Pace print MIS solution was based on our partnership with our long-time supplier, Nazdar. Nazdar thoroughly understood our challenges relative to quality and workflow. It has been a very smooth implementation and their suite of services addresses our core capabilities," added Bowers.

Results

Miller Zell has been able to convert a substantial portion of its screen work to digital. "At the time we developed our ROI modeling, we were concerned we might be overlooking details that would undermine our projected profitability due to our inexperience in digital production," said Bowers. "However, in practice, digital conversion of analog print has exceeded our expectations. At our current rate of conversion, it won't be long before we describe Miller Zell not only as a screen printer with digital capabilities, but also as a digital printer with screen capabilities. While screen will never completely disappear, there is no doubt that the most profound change in our industry over the past generation has been the move to digital print. We are excited to be in the midst of that transformation."

Bowers said, "Additionally, we created bi-directional data integration between EFI Pace, our Print MIS, and JD Edwards, our back-end financial and accounting software still used in other areas of the company for creative engineering, logistics and installation support. Costs, purchase orders, labor, inventory receipts and material pulls all flow seamlessly to keep both systems in synch."

The addition of PrintFlow as Miller Zell's plant scheduling system has taken the company from paper-based schedules to online scheduling at each machine, removing a number of bottlenecks from the production process.

Bowers admited that there is one area that is likely to remain an ongoing challenge faced by digital printers: the reproduction of PMS colors within the constraints of a CMYK build. He said, "With EFI's VUTEk GS3200 and its Fiery XF RIP, we have a solid foundation to address the challenges of PMS color matching. It is unusual for us to not be able to come close enough to satisfy even very demanding clients with this configuration."