PALO ALTO, Calif., July 17, 2006 -- HP today announced that a newly installed HP Indigo press w3250 at Adair Printing, a 75-year-old Dexter, Mich., litho firm, is helping the nation’s top auto makers and automotive aftermarket firms improve customer communications while saving money. Adair is using the versatile web-fed digital press to offer its customers on-demand printing and, in the future, plans to offer high-response personalized marketing campaigns. Featuring extensive substrate flexibility that includes the same lightweight paper as high-volume conventional runs, the new seven-color HP Indigo press w3250 supports Adair’s traditional printing and bindery services. “The HP Indigo press w3250’s ability to cost effectively print short and medium runs has transformed catalog printing by virtually eliminating the costs associated with overproduction,” said Alon Bar-Shany, vice president and general manager, Indigo division, HP. “With liquid ink color quality that easily rivals offset, plus in-line finishing options and speeds of up to 272 pages per minute, it is the fastest, most productive digital press on the market.” Founded in 1931, Adair Printing produces owners’ manuals and service literature for several auto manufacturers as well as automotive aftermarket catalogs, price lists, reference books and directories. The addition of digital color printing to extensive prepress, printing, bindery and fulfillment systems lets Adair’s clients order these and other materials more strategically. Adair Printing also plans to expand its customer base by giving clients access to sophisticated variable-data applications. “The industry is changing and we needed to get ahead of the curve,” said Dennis Adair, owner and president of Adair Printing. “We wanted a solution that would grow with us, print color rather than just black and white…and could also handle 27-lb text. The automotive industry is one of the most competitive there is; we chose a press that would create new directions for our business while making our customers more efficient and successful.” The HP Indigo press w3250 has enabled full-color inserts that were once jobbed out to be printed in-house and dropped into catalogs for streamlined mailing. Adair officials also look forward to producing highly personalized marketing pieces that reflect the recipient’s individual needs. Adair is leveraging the HP solution to design its own targeted direct mail and web-to-print collateral, including an Adair 75th anniversary announcement personalized for individual recipients, with variable information such as their salesperson’s name, e-mail address and phone number. These postcards are designed to generate interest and show all the possibilities of one-to-one marketing. Currently, the company is custom-designing a web-to-print application for its salespeople, and shortly thereafter will roll out this application for its customers. “We’ve already had interest from major customers to do one-to-one print marketing and we’re hoping to create relationships with marketing firms and anyone else who wants personalized mailings of any kind, whether they’re brochures, direct-mail pieces or postcards,” said Dennis Adair. More-efficient runs eliminate waste and save money Equally important for Adair, the HP Indigo press is providing successful short-run support of the 8 ½-inch x 11-inch perfect-bound collateral printed at the company’s 70,000-square-foot lithographic production plant. Typically ordered in 20,000 to100,000-quantity runs that sometimes exceed actual distribution requirements, the resulting excess inventory often languishes in warehouses. Consequently, the need for more cost-effective inventory management was a key factor in the company’s decision to adopt digital printing technology. “Because we can actually print on the same paper we use at our litho plant, customers can update materials on a quarterly or even monthly basis instead of throwing thousands of books away at the end of yearly cycle,” said Glenn Thomas, Adair’s general manager. “It’s a whole different concept of producing fewer on your initial run, and then supplementing with shorter quantities, while saving money in the long run by reducing overall costs.” The HP Indigo press w3250 is the fastest offset quality digital color production press on the market. Designed for high-volume 24/7 manufacturing in publishing, direct mail and photo-related applications, the HP Indigo press w3250 can produce up to 4 million color pages per month, printing at speeds from 136 pages per minute (ppm) in full color to 272 ppm in 1 and 2 colors. It dramatically reduces total production costs by printing on any standard off-the-shelf paper (from 27-lb text to 100-lb cover, or 40 to 300 gsm) and automates post-print processes with inline finishing to produce a final trimmed, collated and stacked product in one pass by a single operator.