Westmont, Illinois — MAN Roland today announced that VistaPrint North American Services Corp., the North American manufacturing subsidiary of VistaPrint Limited, has installed a third ROLAND 700 in its Windsor, Ontario plant. The expansion comes less than six months after VistaPrint opened its North American facility, which provides 68,000 sq ft of production space. With the new addition, the company now runs a total of five 41-inch presses from MAN Roland. Each ROLAND 700 is equipped with five printing units, in-line coating and perfecting. Two have been operating at VistaPrint B.V., VistaPrint’s European production center in Venlo, The Netherlands for over a year. “It’s always gratifying when a customer purchases another new press from us because their business is growing,” says Yves Rogivue, CEO of MAN Roland Inc. “But in this case, that synergy of achievement is even more significant because VistaPrint is a model of how to successfully apply Computer Integrated Manufacturing in the marketplace, and our systems are an integral part of their CIM workflow.” VistaPrint applies the principles of CIM to drive out costs and improve response times. It connects its customers directly to its CIM chain by providing a simple, yet feature rich, online layout program that can be used on any of the company’s 16 localized websites, which serve customers in 120 countries. CIM enables VistaPrint to produce a current average of 12,000 unique print jobs per production day, while using a minimal amount of production labor per order. Business cards are VistaPrint’s top sellers. But VistaPrint’s menu of Internet-accessed products doesn’t stop there. Postcards, brochures, data sheets, letterhead, presentation folders, thank you cards, and even magnets can be ordered in an instant and produced within hours. VistaPrint efficiently prints the short-runs by aggregating jobs on the ROLAND 700’s 41-inch sheets. A proprietary computer program developed by VistaPrint’s resident team of software engineers decides which project is positioned where, based on such variables as format, run length and customer location. The number of projects placed on each sheet depends on the type of product that is being produced. For example, a sheet can hold 143 business cards, 42 post cards, 21 oversized postcards, or 9 pages of letterhead. This ganging process is what enables VistaPrint to print massive volumes of products at low cost. The average run length is 250-500. VistaPrint’s printed products are satisfaction guaranteed. That makes print quality a prime consideration. “Our ROLAND 700s are critical to the success of the quality of our product,” Connors says. “The state of the art color quality and UV coating help us provide the best possible printed products for our customers.” MAN Roland’s printnet press operating and automation system helps keep the short runs productive. “We use printnet to track job level information,” says Chris Connors, VistaPrint’s vice president of manufacturing. “It provides us with a bridge of information from the plate making process to the press.” Connors is also pleased with the press maker’s project management capabilities in getting three presses up-and-running at the Windsor plant: “MAN Roland helped us every step of the way and did it under very tight deadlines. With their help, we were able to complete the building infrastructure and install the presses in record time.” The manufacturing head describes MAN Roland’s training as “a huge value add.” Once the presses were installed, MAN Roland trainers spent 40 hours on the floor with VistaPrint’s press operators so that when the plant went live, the presses were staffed with operators who knew how to use them. “With profit margins exceeding 60 percent, VistaPrint has the resources to continuously invest in advanced technology to expand its services and grow its business,” says MAN Roland’s Yves Rogivue. “That’s the power of CIM in action.”