Palo Alto, Calif. – Following the successful completion of a three-month beta testing period, Grandville (Mich.) Printing Company has purchased an HP Indigo 7500 Digital Press to meet increased demand for retail in-store signage and luxury automotive manuals.

The progressive print service provider, which directs a nationwide distribute-and-print network of HP Indigo users serving the grocery signage market, bought the new 7500 model in July to accommodate an influx of new business. Much of the growth is driven by complex, online web-to-print ordering programs developed in consultation with HP IT and business development staff.

"There's no question that the HP Indigo 7500 makes us more productive and more competitive: Our operators run it more than the other six HP Indigo presses we own," said Chris Nunez, Grandville's director of digital printing. "But there's also the larger story about working with HP – they play an important role in our company strategy for everything from technical R&D to sales and marketing."

When another hue just won't do: true spot-color inks in corporate colors
The seven-color press prints 120 letter-size, four-color pages per minute (ppm), but also offers a faster 240 ppm speed for monochrome and two-color pages. This makes it an ideal solution to produce high-quality auto manuals for one of the world's best-known luxury car brands.

Grandville prints the auto manuals on demand in 24 languages, providing its client with an efficient, just-in-time manufacturing supply chain option that eliminates warehousing costs. Grandville prints covers for the manuals in four colors, while the book blocks themselves are printed in two colors – all done on HP Indigo presses including the new 7500 model.

According to Grandville, HP Indigo was the ideal digital production platform because of the number of language versions required and the automaker's stringent quality demands.

"The corporate color that runs inside the manuals has to be dead on," said Nunez. "HP, with its full range of custom spot-color inks, gives us the option for printing in a corporate color. Plus, we would not be able to reproduce the detailed, grayscale pictures in these manuals using a dry toner digital press; we need HP Indigo's liquid inks to ensure the quality is there."

The ideal choice for high-value applications
Launched at the Ipex 2010 printing trade show in May, the HP Indigo 7500 is ideally suited to replace small and midsize analog offset presses and to handle high-value applications, such as variable-data-driven marketing collateral, photo books and personalized direct mail. New Intelligent Automation features on the press increase press productivity by up to 10 percent, and a new HP Labs-developed Vision System automates manual calibrations and diagnostic troubleshooting to save time and reduce waste.

The HP Indigo 7500 Digital Press also improves color consistency and uniformity by up to 20 percent, consumes up to 10 percent less energy per printed page and uses less imaging oil.

Load-balanced productivity using HP SmartStream Production Pro
With the HP Indigo 7500 in place, Grandville is poised to significantly increase its production of automotive manuals. A new, 64-bit version HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server purchased with the press improves turnaround times on jobs for Grandville's largest client, a grocery retailer that purchases digitally printed in-store signage from the company.

The print server eliminates press downtime by raster image processing jobs off-line. Grandville's production staff connects to all seven of the company's HP Indigo presses through the print server. Centralized job management features on the HP SmartStream Production Pro allow staff to route processed, ready-to-print jobs to the next available press for immediate printing – significantly improving overall plant productivity.

"By bringing together HP's leadership in printing with our IT expertise, we can help companies such as Grandville handle increasingly complex digital printing jobs," said Jan Riecher, vice president and general manager, Graphics Solutions Business – Americas, HP.