Yishai Amir: My name is Yishai Amir and I am the Vice President and General Manager of the Indigo and Inkjet Business in Americas, both North America and Latin America. And I’m here with David Bennett, who is the President of Bennett Graphics and also the Chairman of the PIA with Georgio, right? Hi David, nice to meet you.

David Bennett: Hi, great to see you again.

Yishai Amir: And we are here at the DSCOOP Convention, DSCOOP number six. And thank for coming.

David Bennett: Sure. We enjoy it.

Yishai Amir: Maybe you could tell us about your business.

David Bennett: Sure. Our business is 40 years old; I’m a second generation owner. And up until six years ago, we were strictly off sheet fed offset and then we saw opportunities with new clients and with existing clients to get into digital. And we may have been a little bit late to the party, but it’s been a good thing for us as we’ve seen the rough times in the sheet fed theme to give us a cushion for things and it’s also allowed us to have a different way to approach new business rather than just going in and say that we’re another printer that we can offer solutions in doing that.

Yishai Amir: Great. I know that you have a lot of offset presses, can you just describe your fleet and what you have?

David Bennett: Sure. We have three 40-inch Heidelberg’s; we have a four, five and a six-color and obviously a lot of horsepower there. But the kind of the balance from my perspective, the challenge that we base on a day-to-day basis is generating enough work to keep those presses busy and you know and also we’ve gotten into digital. We’ve been able to take some work off of the sheet fed offset and put them into the digital thing, but we recognize that the growth is more of these program-type sales and but again, the balance we have is keeping the presses busy today and also trying to find time to develop these other options.

Yishai Amir: So you’re not new to digital, right? You’ve had digital for how many years?

David Bennett: For about six-and-a-half years now.

Yishai Amir: Six-and-a-half years. And you started with one vendor and then you moved to HP. Can you tell us more about your considerations?

David Bennett: Sure, sure.

Yishai Amir: Why you started digital, but then why you also changed and moved to an HP 7000 Plus Right, HP Indigo 7000.

David Bennett: Yes, right. So yeah, we… again, we started about six years ago and the main thing is we have a particular client that did a lot of ongoing work, that they were doing it at another supplier and so they were a good client and we decided to get into it. And we ran the other vendor’s equipment for about three-and-a-half or four years and because of certain issues, like quality issues and reliability and repeatability, you know, for day-to-day and even within the same runs, but mainly because of the culture of the organization, we kind of felt like we had gotten into a situation where it was not about us anymore, it was about them and you know, the reaction that we would get was that you know, the machines were within spec. And our thing was, well it maybe within spec, but our clients don’t like it or anything. So we began to look at other options and we had prior relationships with the HP reps in the Atlanta area, so we kind of brought difficult jobs that we were having trouble with and brought them up to your demo center and we ran them on your equipment and to be honest with you, we were amazed at the quality.

I brought my team up there and you know, we had heard this stuff was good, but it kind of blew us away.

Yishai Amir: That’s great. I love to hear that. Can you tell more about, you mentioned quality and how important quality is, can mention… can you share more about the importance of the digital to be a very high quality an off set quality like you get from the HP Indigo Press and how it works together to get a conventional look.

David Bennett: Sure. Well, again, one of the reasons that we changed was because we consider ourselves to be a very high quality vendor and we won many awards through out state association and also national awards for our sheet fed offset work. And you know, we would look at our digital printing and it’s like it didn’t match up and we felt like it wasn’t to the Bennett Graphic standards that we needed to do. But you know, we’d have combination jobs and part would print on the sheet fed and the other parts would be on the digital. And it just wasn’t what we wanted. And the thing with the HP indigo, it’s like we had heard that it’s you know, it’s offset quality and the way that we’ve color calibrated our presses, both on the sheet fed and the digital now, even I have a hard time telling the difference. So again, it’s easy for us to go out and make those sales with the confidence that you know, our clients are going to be happy.

Yishai Amir: When we’re talking with a customer we hear more and more that their run lengths are getting shorter and shorter. Can you tell us more if you see this trend and how it impacts your business?

David Bennett: Sure. Well our number of orders over the last couple of years have about stayed the same. But our overall dollar value per job has begun to shrink and we’re seeing the clients are usually producing the same number of jobs, but we’re you know in 2008/2009, they might have been doing 15,000 or 20,000 of them. Today it’s cut back in the 500 and 2,500 range. So that’s you know, giving us an opportunity on the digital area that we didn’t have before. So we can continue to serve the clients that we have, but, yes, we are… we had experienced and are continuing to see those run lengths come down.

Yishai Amir: Great. Can you show the… obviously digital’s playing a major part of demographics, value proposition and production, can you share with us your vision of digital at Bennett Graphics in the next years?

David Bennett: Sure. Well, our hope is that our sheet fed offset will grow too, but we think it’s gonna grow in a very small percentage. My feeling is that we’ll never buy another sheet fed press. We see the growth not only from you know, the number of pages and the number of jobs, but the bottom line growth that we’re gonna see, I think is in the digital area.

Yishai Amir: Great. David, it has been a pleasure for me to talk with you. Thank you so much.

David Bennett: Yeah. Always good to see you. Thanks.