DRUCK.AT IS LAUNCHING AN INNOVATION CAMPAIGN WITH AccurioPress C14000

The Austrian online printing company druck.at is continuing its innovation campaign by installing Konica Minolta’s new flagship of production printing: the AccurioPress C14000. With a total of four AccurioPress C14000 presses, the company continues to develop its key themes of print quality, versatility and speed, once again securing a competitive edge in the highly competitive online printing market.

The combination of printing and IT

Fast, personal, customer-focused: These three key qualities summarise druck.at, Austria‘s largest online print shop. With its e-commerce platform, druck.at is one of the leading companies in this sector. The secret to the company‘s success is employing not only qualified specialists in digital printing, offset printing and large-format printing, but also a knowledgeable team of IT professionals.

druck.at has its own manufacturing facility, which means that the majority of products can be delivered free of charge within one to three days. For those in a hurry, the Karacho service also offers same-day delivery in selected areas. The druck.at team treats every order equally, regardless of the order value, because keeping customers satisfied is the only way to ensure that they will return to the platform again and again. Business cards, flyers, magazines, ballpoint pens, pencils... The range is enormous. More than 180,000 products with digital, offset or large-format printing can be ordered online 24 hours a day. This innovative company stands out from the competition thanks to its lightning-fast service, high customer satisfaction and personalised advice.
The big difference to pure online retailers is that at druck.at every product is individually designed - whether it’s a printed deck chair, a product catalog or complete trade show equipment. With druck.at, marketing departments don‘t have to laboriously research which manufacturers can supply which products, but can instead procure everything from a single source. Today there‘s almost nothing the online printing company cannot print on — and if the production possibilities really are exhausted, it can call on the knowledge of its sister companies within the Cimpress network. What‘s more, druck.at was awarded the „Printed in Austria“ seal of origin in April: Customers can use this to show that they have had their printing carried out in Austria, which demon-strates that they act locally and sustainably. The premium-quality print products are produced using digital, offset and large-format printing in three modern facilities spanning an area of 6000 m2.

Reliable delivery is key with online printing

In the customer care centre, employees respond rapidly to customers‘ enquiries with regard to order acceptance, prepressing and telephone switching. More than 99 percent of deliveries reach customers on time and druck.at boasts impressive figures even with regard to complaints: 99.98 percent of all complaints are resolved to the customer‘s full satisfaction. To secure a competitive edge time and time again, druck.at relies on a perfectly in-sync team and innovative technologies across the board.

When evaluating the new pool of digital printing machines, the key decision-making criteria were speed followed by efficiency and availability.

Konica Minolta has asserted itself in the field of digital production printing with the AccurioPress C14000 systems. To install and implement the systems, Stuttgart-based company „The Document Group“ relies on the actions of Konica Minolta specialists. Man-aging Director Bernd Rekirsch sums up The Document Group‘s corporate philosophy as follows: „We focus specifically on our customers‘ business, applications and processes, developing tailor-made solutions accordingly. We will happily to go the extra mile for our customers and partners — or rather, the (e)xtrameter!“

Equipped for the premium segment

„With a total of four systems, we are now able to produce orders with a significantly higher quality even faster and more cost-effectively — and we pass this added value on to our customers,“ says Markus Graf, Operations Manager. „The crucial factors for us were not only automation, but also reliability at up to 2.5 million SRA3 prints a month and the ability to process a huge variety of printed products with a diverse range of substrates and grammages for our premium segment.“ The printing speed does not decrease even at high grammages and image reproduction on textured papers now looks consider-ably better. Nikolaus Waldhauser, Technical Manager at druck.at, cannot help but rave about the ability of Konica Minolta systems to print on envelopes: „This makes up a significant volume of printing work that‘s now partly switching from offset to digital, so this enables us to make our offering even more attractive, especially for small runs.“

End-to-end production chain

Intelligent Quality Care Technology IQ-501 ensures that the production process runs smoothly. Two integrated scanners and a colour spectrophotometer continuously measure the colour consistency on each sheet and correct the settings while printing is in progress, which keeps the colour stable during production. Pages with printing errors are detected, rejected, then automatically reprinted. All this is made possible by the fact that all printing and quality parameters are highly automated, which offers the advantage of minimising stress on the operating personnel during printing. Konica Minolta has reduced the need for time-consuming interventions in a targeted manner. This ensures that production never has to be paused and provides another building block for customer satisfaction with druck.at.

Scalability ensures expandable capacity

druck.at has largely achieved the objectives it set for its digital printing investment package. “The package has enabled us to improve our quality and efficiency in digital printing, which in turn has allowed us to achieve cost leadership. The simple scaling will also make it possible for us to expand our capacity very easily in the future.” Whether the company will continue to invest in offset printing is not yet clear. The relevant figures that will decide the next steps should be available by the end of the year.

“All in all, launching the project with Konica Minolta and The Document Group was definitely the right decision,” say Markus Graf and Bernd Rekirsch, concluding: “The machine is one thing, but ultimately it’s the people who set the tone for collaborating on a project — and the people at druck.at were and are true professionals.”