Raising the Bar in Singapore’s Printing Market
Is the print industry really dying out? That’s not the case for Applied Colours, as they set out to redefine and change it through the production process and quality of prints in their work.
As a digital printing-enabled company in a rapidly changing market, Applied Colours Pte Ltd has automated many processes to meet its customers' demands in commercial and packaging printing.
We sat down with Eric Boo, Managing Director and founder of Applied Colours Pte Ltd, established in May 2019. With Eric’s rich experience in the printing industry of more than 20 years, we are curious to find out how Applied Colours has kept forging ahead and differentiated itself in the printing industry.
What are some challenges you have faced in the printing industry?
We produce a lot of print work daily such as bookwork for commercial print, annual reports, magazines and textbooks, alongside packaging print. With our wide range of orders, there isn’t a one size, or in our case printers, fits all solution. Offset printing was something we had started with but due to the time-consuming nature of it, it became a drawback for us and our clients. So, for our business, we know we had to utilise both offset and digital printing to meet these different print job needs.
Even before the pandemic struck, it is known that the print market has been shrinking with decreasing demand. However, with the pandemic, this has expedited the decreasing demand with everyone onboarding the digital space. For example, there is a decreasing trend in the need for textbooks and it is a trend we foresee to remain, even in the future.
A great challenge being in the print industry is that of a price challenge as there is always a price pressure downwards while capital costs continue to increase. In turn, it is absolutely necessary for us to constantly innovate, such as in our case, hybridising our operations. We chose to go with Canon’s varioPRINT 110 and imagePRESS C750 so that we remain profitable while maintaining the quality in the prints that we deliver. For our digital printing needs, we rely on our varioPRINT 110 for black and white prints and Canon imagePRESS C750 for colour prints.
Canon has been great at supporting our daily operations, especially so during our high demand period at the end of the year. Canon’s varioPRINT 110 and imagePRESS C750 have opened up more opportunities for us as it enables us to bring in jobs with smaller quantities with a faster turnaround. This not only generates greater cost savings, but it is much faster as well with higher yield, which was helpful in lessening our initial strain as a relatively new company.
Why did you choose Canon varioPRINT110 and imagePRESS C750, and how have these solutions helped improve the quality of your work process and production?
A big reason why we have chosen to change our printers to Canon is that it’s very cost effective. For smaller batches of prints, digital printing becomes a much faster and viable solution as compared to offset printing. The offset plate making process is time consuming in itself and that delays the process before any printing could even start. Printing jobs that others might only be able to complete in 2 days only took us 1 day. The quality of the print meets our needs as well, as the digital print finish is close to that of offset prints.
They provided us with the right solution suitable for our start-up, the varioPRINT110 and imagePRESS C750. The role that a digital printer provider plays is important to us as well. We need to have a partnership with our provider, rather than a seller-buyer relationship, which Canon’s team did by providing us with plenty of space and time in our decision making process.
Furthemore, Canon’s digital printers are reasonably priced compared to other printers of similar features which played an important role in our decision making, especially as a start-up company. The print quality of varioPRINT 110 and imagePRESS C750 is also close to what we achieve in offset printing, in terms of the quality and colour accuracy, which has been impressive.
How was your customer service experience with Canon?
Overall, we are impressed with Canon’s professionalism, including their engineer servicing services. Their team has always been able to give good solutions based on our requirements and demands, always making sure that they fulfil what they have promised within a short period of time. The guidance from the after-sales service team is something that we appreciate as well and we will definitely look to Canon for future solutions to meet our needs.
If you would like to find out more about our printing solutions and how it can be implemented in your organisation or venue, visit us here for more information.
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