Cimpress selects PerfectPattern's sPrint One

Print Solutions

Cimpress has selected PerfectPattern's sPrint One technology to maximise print production efficiency within its European upload and print portfolio.

Cimpress is the parent of mass customisation businesses including Drukwerkdeal, Exaprint and Pixartprinting.

In the course of progressing digitisation, the printing industry has evolved from a traditional market characterised by large print runs and high margins to a market dominated by online based customer specific mass production – with much lower print runs and margins.

As a consequence, online printing processes must be highly efficient and very flexible to successfully map the agile business. Conventional print planning simply hits its limits in this respect – it cannot provide the required dynamics.

‘In a mass customisation environment such as online printing, flexible yet stable processes and the highest possible degree of automation are essential. To master this challenge, we continuously strive to improve the processes across our network of global businesses by leveraging our Mass Customisation Platform (MCP) and complementary technology like sPrintOne,’ said Dr Christian Maas, Vice president marketing and technology for Cimpress‘ European upload and print businesses. ‘With sPrint One, we enable our businesses to exploit latest technologies to optimise their print planning.’

‘Our sPrint One technology for dynamic print planning in offset and digital printing helps printers to secure and increase their competitiveness. It provides the speed and flexibility needed to thrive in today´s fast paced print business,’ said Fabian Rüchardt, CEO of PerfectPattern. ‘We are very pleased that Cimpress, one of the most important players in the web to print arena, has chosen our technology.’ sPrint One combines sheet optimisation with capacity planning. It uses the job data as well as actual production and paper costs to find the most cost efficient production method. Within seconds, the system calculates a complete time and cost optimised print plan from a pool of unsorted print orders. The primary objective of the calculation is to meet the production deadlines for each job, followed by minimising production costs and materials consumption. For printing on an industrial level such as online printing, gang forms are an important option in print planning. The ability to combine various print products allows the sPrint One algorithm to dramatically reduce production costs. sPrint One also makes life easier at printing houses when a machine fails, or an employee is unavailable. Up until now, adapting the latest planning to new requirements has been a time consuming task. Now printers can simply update the basic data and click to update the planning. They can also react quickly to unexpected high priority orders and changes in the priority of orders.