Palo Alto, Calif. – HP today announced that Alexander's Print Advantage, a customized print automation provider, has replaced its five-color offset press with an HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press to expand its range of print applications and better support high volumes of web-to-print generated variable-data work.

The Lindon, Utah-based print service provider (PSP) – which also operates an HP Indigo press 5000 – chose the HP Indigo 7000 model because it can serve as an offset replacement solution to help the company stay ahead of marketing collateral trends among its customers. With print buyers expressing increased preference for greater customization and just-in-time manufacturing, the HP Indigo 7000's productivity and flexibility proved the best fit for meeting and exceeding client needs.

The new press provides Alexander's with maximum versatility, high-volume printing and low operating costs so the company can compete for a wider range of projects. This includes high-volume print-on-demand work such as book-printing projects the company does for ancestry.com.

"The HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press has done a great job in replacing our offset press and expanding our digital, variable-data business. It provides fast processing speeds and high uptime, while expanding the variety of substrates and applications we can now support," said Jeff Alexander, president and chief executive officer, Alexander's Print Advantage. "Our cost per impression has dropped, and because all of our operators are trained HP technicians, our overall costs have decreased."

Customized one-off printing at high-volume prices
The HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press is instrumental to the company's web-to-print applications, serving as a high-volume production engine to print marketing collateral, book covers and other jobs.

For network marketing and franchise companies such as Nu Skin and TCBY, Alexander's creates web storefronts that enable users to place orders for a wide range of customized products, including promotional items, flyers, forms, franchisee manuals and signage. The storefront software automatically combines all similar orders placed on the same day, from one or multiple companies, and then interfaces directly with an HP SmartStream workflow to print them.

Similarly, Alexander's uses the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press to print personalized appointment reminder cards for dentists nationwide. Working with client Henry Schein Inc., a leading provider of management software for dental practices, Alexander's IT-driven prepress system checks dental office databases, groups the printing required daily and delivers orders to the Indigo press's HP SmartStream print server systems.

The high volumes and low operating costs of the HP Indigo 7000 – which is designed to handle a monthly duty cycle up to 3.5 million four-color letter-size pages per month – provides cost advantages that Alexander's uses to build volume and strengthen its customer relationships. For example, Alexander's passes along some of the print cost savings to Henry Schein in the form of quantity purchase discounts for personalized products.

"Today's print customers are seeking the value of print-on-demand manufacturing for traditional marketing collateral, but they also have a strong interest in adopting the highly personalized communications that increase the relevancy and effectiveness of their communications," said Jan Riecher, vice president and general manager, Graphics Solutions Business – Americas, HP. "With the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press, progressive PSPs like Alexander's Print Advantage can meet this growing demand with high-quality static and customized printing and high production efficiency."

Delivering 120 high-quality, four-color, letter-size pages per minute, the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press enables the fast production of large numbers of static jobs, as well as variable-data work requiring the "every page is different" capabilities of digital. The HP Indigo 7000 also offers the widest digital color gamut available with PANTONE-licensed emulation, off-press mixing of true spot colors and HP DreamColor Technologies, a certified system that makes it easy to produce accurate and consistent color across a series of digital color devices.