Palo Alto, Calif. – Jeppesen, the Boeing Commercial Airplanes subsidiary that delivers aviation charts, data and operational tools essential to the global transportation industry, is converting its remaining analog offset chart-printing operations to digital production following a multimillion-dollar purchase of five HP Indigo W7200 Digital presses.

The five-press deal is one the largest installations ever completed for continuous-feed Indigo presses. The presses are currently being installed and will be used to print charts starting next month.

"The HP Indigo W7200 delivers peak digital color productivity, representing the collective knowledge, expertise and technical advancements assembled since the introduction of the first continuous-feed Indigo press 15 years ago," said Alon Bar-Shany, vice president and general manager, Indigo Division, HP. "This significant expansion of Jeppesen's digital press fleet sets the stage for Jeppesen to accomplish a highly successful analog-to-digital transition."

Three of the presses are being installed at Jeppesen's headquarters facility in Englewood, Colo., where they will operate alongside another HP Indigo W7200 the company purchased and installed earlier this year. Currently, the Englewood facility produces half of its aviation chart work using digital printing, with the remainder printed on analog offset devices. Jeppesen intends to shift all of its standard-size aviation chart work from offset presses to digital.

The other two HP Indigo W7200 presses in the purchase are being installed at Jeppesen's facility in Neu-Isenburg, Germany, near Frankfurt – an all-digital facility that will use the press's faster speeds and improved ease of use to improve productivity.

"One of the goals of our printing operation centers is to use the best available technology to increase efficiency, service and quality," said Dan Olivas, director of Production and Distribution at Jeppesen's Englewood facility. "When it comes to continuing the transformation digital printing has brought to our business, the new HP Indigo W7200 presses fit the bill 100 percent."

Significant savings with digital
The HP Indigo W7200 presses are replacing several HP Indigo w3200-series presses Jeppesen installed starting in 2004, when it embarked on a highly successful digital-adoption process that trimmed overhead and significantly reduced waste.

Jeppesen keeps its customers updated with essential information by printing new charts when there is an official change to procedures, airspace or other information for a particular location. Analog offset production for the charts requires a large amount of manual collation as new pages are assembled and delivered to customers. Digital printing has given Jeppesen the ability to print new charts in sequential order, eliminating the collation of hundreds of millions of new charts the company produces each year.

In the past, the company also stored large quantities of offset-produced charts to accommodate new orders. Those inventories, which could number in the tens of thousands per chart, were frequently discarded when a chart was revised. With digital printing, Jeppesen has stopped producing overruns and switched to a print-on-demand model for new customer orders.

"Before we used digital printing, fulfilling some of our customer requests could be very costly," said Vincent Van Over, director of Production and Distribution at Jeppesen's Neu-Isenburg facility. "Now, we provide better service at a lower cost, and we are looking forward to seeing continued benefits that will come about with the higher level of productivity the HP Indigo W7200 Digital Press offers."

HP Indigo imaging: maximizing quality and value
Designed to meet offset-quality, application-focused production needs, the HP Indigo W7200 press prints up to 7.5 million pages per month. It can produce up to 240 four-color or up to 960 monochrome letter-size pages per minute at resolutions up to 2,400 x 2,400 dots per inch.

Since its release in September 2009, the HP Indigo W7200 has been installed at customer sites worldwide for publishing, photo specialty, transactional/ transpromotional and direct marketing print production. Next week, HP will highlight the press at the Graph Expo trade show (Oct. 3-6 in McCormick Place, Chicago) in booth 1200.

The new presses will operate using HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server systems to efficiently manage the flow of data to each press. Jeppesen also is installing new HP SmartStream Production Analyzer software, which monitors, tracks, benchmarks and reports production metrics. The software provides customers with a deeper understanding of their production floor so they can make efficiency-minded management decisions.

When making its purchase, Jeppesen received flexible, vendor-direct financing from HP Financial Services, the company's leasing and life cycle asset management services division.