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Mail-Well Expands Customer Access To Total Printing And Envelope Capabilities

Press release from the issuing company

ENGLEWOOD, Colo., March 31, 2004 — With 65 plants across North America, the Commercial segment of Mail-Well Inc. is one of the nation’s leading high-quality commercial printers and providers of visual communications, the largest envelope manufacturer, and a major provider of documents and labels for office applications. Soon, say company executives, this impressive network will be as seamless as it is diversified. That’s no contradiction in terms. Focused on providing total solutions that customers can access at any point – and in the same way – from one end of the network to the other, Mail-Well is implementing a nationally integrated strategy to standardize almost every aspect of its customer-facing operations. Investing millions of dollars in new equipment and technologies, Mail-Well has significantly increased its product offerings and is providing customers with single-contact access to the total capabilities of its printing and envelope facilities across all five of its operating regions. The extensive changes recently made in the operations of Mail-Well’s South Region particularly exemplify the company’s national strategy. “It’s about understanding the needs of our customers and providing them with all the options from one source to really serve those needs better,” says Don Remley, Executive Vice President of the South Region. “We have made major strategic investments in the Region to bolster our capacity significantly and deploy where it benefits customers best. We’ve simplified our organizational structure, integrated operating systems across the plants, and most importantly, trained leaders throughout the organization to assure that no matter where customers are located, we will match their needs with Mail-Well’s printing, envelope, and services capabilities.” The South Region, one of Mail-Well’s largest geographically, includes printing facilities in Maryland, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, and Texas; envelope manufacturing plants in Florida and Texas; and direct mail operations in Ohio and Tennessee. Equipment Expansion As a major element of its strategy in the South Region, Mail-Well’s Baltimore facilities have been completely reconfigured to serve as the Region’s large-format web offset hub, producing the bulk of the web work for the Region’s customers. Recently added to the Baltimore operation are a high-speed Baker Perkins 8-unit press with extensive inline finishing capabilities and a Heidelberg Web 16 6-unit press. Major upgrades were made to existing equipment, including a Harris M-1000 8-unit press and a 5-unit Harris half-web. To better service local sheetfed customers, the plant also has added a new Komori 640 LS, a 6-unit, 40" press with an in-line coating system. In the Region’s other printing facilities, which are configured primarily for sheetfed work, Mail-Well has installed a wide range of new postpress equipment to expand finishing capabilities. The new equipment includes inline finishing systems, inline ink-jet addressing, die cutting, automated cutting systems, and folders capable of micro-folding, a format used to produce package inserts for pharmaceutical companies. Digital printing has made its debut in Houston, where Mail-Well has added a seven-color HP Indigo 3000 digital offset press. To streamline prepress, Mail-Well is installing Creo platesetting systems in plants throughout the Region. “With our new platemaking system uniformity, we can intake work at any plant, do the prepress there, then drop the files here in Baltimore or in plants anywhere in the Region to produce plates,” Remley notes. “So, no matter where a job originates, we have the ability to print at the best Mail-Well plant for the job. It’s a combination of local service with a greater scale of national resources to serve our customers.” In addition to printing, South Region customers can source envelopes from the company’s manufacturing operations in Jacksonville, Fla., and Dallas, Tex., as well as from envelope facilities in any other Mail-Well region. This demonstrates, says Remley, that customers can access whatever they need from wherever in Mail-Well’s North American network the requirement can best be met. Integrated Estimating Key to providing customers with access to the Mail-Well facilities best suited for their jobs has been the introduction of an integrated estimating process linking all of the printing, envelope, and direct mail plants in the South Region. Customers continue to work with their local sales reps and estimators, who now can estimate and schedule work across the Region’s combined capabilities. For customers, the Region’s integrated estimating process and standardized pricing mean faster estimate turnarounds and superior production efficiency by matching each job’s parameters to the optimal Mail-Well equipment wherever it may be located – in the Region or elsewhere in the country. To facilitate the speedy and smooth transfer of work, Mail-Well is installing the EFI Hagen OA system as the common internal operating platform for all plants. “If we have an overload in one facility, we can easily move it to another,” Remley explains. “With all plants using common systems, we have full control to make workload leveling an easy, fast, and reliable process.” Sales Reps Supported To insure that customers understand the full range of capabilities available to them throughout every Region, Mail-Well launched an intensive training program for sales and customer service representatives in all of its facilities. The training has qualified them to offer and support the full spectrum of Mail-Well visual communications offerings – quality commercial printing, envelopes, labels, business documents, fulfillment, and digital services. “We really have bolstered our personnel,” says Mike Emerson, Senior Vice President, Sales, South Region. “You can do a lot with the equipment we have in the Region and throughout North America, but to make it all work, it takes well trained, experienced and motivated people. “Customers today are downsizing their supplier base,” he adds. “Not only do they want to work with fewer suppliers, but those suppliers must deliver the highest quality products with exceptional value. With our span of regional and company-wide capabilities, they know they can turn to their local Mail-Well representative to produce virtually any type of work anywhere in North America. It saves them time, and gives them personal consultation and support that helps them make cost-efficient decisions.”