CHICAGO, IL - To say Kimball Midwest is experiencing tremendous growth would be an understatement. To say Gregg Johnston is pleased with his new A.B.Dick CXP3000 color copier would be equally understated. But that’s the situation within the marketing department of the Columbus, Ohio maintenance and repair supplier, a $53 million company that services the industrial maintenance aftermarket and doubles its sales every five years. The CXP3000 has been a significant contributing factor since installation in mid-March. “We never had the ability before we bought the CXP3000 to do full color because of the cost,” said Johnston, an 18-year veteran. As marketing manager, he oversees 13 employees including those who work in the 1,000 square-foot print shop, which is home to an A.B.Dick 8800 press. “The Canon 1150 color copier we had did 10 copies a minute but because of quality issues, we could not get the desired production. The CXP3000 outputs 50 sheets per minute and we are getting lots of payback with more product in less hours.” Kimball Midwest employs more than 450 people to sell and service over 30,000 national customers, including those in the agriculture, automotive, construction, government, institutional and manufacturing markets. Some of these customers are corporate giants with 24/7 maintenance crews that need almost immediate responses when parts are necessary for repair or replacement. Time is of the essence with the amount of work they are doing with the CXP3000. “People see the results and know what the CXP3000 can do,” summarized Johnston. “It takes us three days to do what our other copier would have done in 15 days. These are some of the hidden costs that you can’t figure on. How does someone measure what your time is worth to you? For us, saving time is invaluable.” The figures prove his point. For the second half of March, the CXP3000 was in use for 11,000 copies after getting up to speed with just two days of training. With a national sales meeting in April, it was put to the test and responded by handling over 70,000 impressions. “In April we printed a new, full color 62-page double-sided chemical section of our catalog that we used to do with spot color on the press,” recalled Johnston. “The feedback we received indicates we should see a 15 percent increase in chemical sales because of the quality. The results are so good that we are now preparing to do all 860 double-sided pages of the catalog in July.” Johnston said the fold features saves labor costs, and the booklet and saddle stitch feature on three occasions has saved him time by letting him use the CXP3000 binding system. The S300 Fiery RIP has also proven to be worth its weight in gold. “The Command Workstation is terrific. It is very easy to use and you don’t need much technical knowledge to know how to run it. The training on it was fabulous. When you have a product this easy to run, it tends to draw interest from everyone in the company.”