CHICAGO, IL -- If hindsight is 20-20, you have to give Dale Aigner credit for having excellent vision. With no printing experience, he and his wife, Donna, bought Brookhurst Printer, a print shop in southern California. With four-color business increasing constantly and revenues growing dramatically in the last two years, they recently purchased an A.B.Dick DPM2340 direct-to-plate device to keep up with the work. “We always try to be as forward thinking as possible. With the DPM2340, we were operating it in two days,” said Aigner, a former CEO of Speedo Corporation who also tried his hand at owning several Burger King restaurants. “My press operators noticed right away how easy the DPM2340 was to operate. The quality of our work has improved and it makes us more productive because we can get more jobs done per day.” The DPM 2340 gives small-to-mid size printers like Brookhurst a step up from a film and metal plate workflow. In this case, Aigner retired his A.B.Dick 430 camera for the fully integrated DPM2340 and gained an extra 90 minutes a day of production time. “Saving 90 minutes per person is having a big impact on our business,” said Aigner, who has the capability to produce plates up to 13.4 inches by 20 inches on the DPM2340. “We relied heavily on past experience but we determined film and metal plate work will diminish dramatically in the next few years. We had every manufacturer make a presentation but when we saw it at Gutenberg, we didn’t have to look any further.” As times change, so has the business. Aigner figured if the first 11 years were good, the next 11 will only be better judging by recent performance and his equipment investment. “We’ve grown our revenues 30 percent the last two years. I’d say we’ve had a 20 percent increase in production since we installed the DPM2340 in late September,” said Aigner. “We’re not making corrections so we just hang the (8 mil polyester) plates. Our jobs vary between two-color and four-color and some require runs of 30,000 to 40,000 pieces.” Being located in Fountain Valley, an Anaheim suburb not far from the heavily traveled I-405 freeway, has its advantages. Aigner did most of his printing work in the early years for medical groups. He still does today, but he has also branched out into the banking, insurance and hospitality industries, and some of the work has gone national. “With the medical groups and hotel/motel chains, we ship it throughout the U.S.,” said Aigner. “The DPM2340 has proven to be very versatile. We did an insurance company job that included a lot of background work on paper with a four-hole punch. For the hotel chains, we do everything from multi-color maps and menus on high-end paper to ‘How are we doing’ survey cards. We also do direct mail postcards for the banking industry; we’ve done hundreds of thousands a week for years, but they move faster with the DPM2340.” A.B.Dick’s service reputation was another selling point for Aigner. “The training we received was very good. We had questions about trapping but we got answers quickly.” A.B.Dick Company is a leading worldwide supplier to the graphic arts and printing industry, manufacturing and marketing equipment and supplies for all stages of document creation -- prepress, press and post-press -- as well as continuing service and support. For more information contact Scott MacKenzie, Vice President, Marketing, 7400 Caldwell Ave., Niles, IL. 60714. Telephone (847) 779-1900, fax (847) 647-6940, Web: www.abdick.com.