When Customark, one of the UK’s most diverse specialist printing and labelling companies made the transition from OEM inks to Sun Chemical’s Streamline range of alternative solvent inkjet inks, it didn’t just benefit from the combination of premium quality output and total reliability. The company has achieved significant cost savings without compromising standards, giving its service offering that all important competitive edge.
The West Midlands-based company, which specialises in the development and printing of unique labelling and identification systems as well as promotional and display graphics, prides itself on its customer service and high quality products at competitive prices. With such a diverse and growing product portfolio and its wide-ranging and demanding customer base, Customark was experiencing increasingly high volumes of ink usage on its Roland and Mimaki digital wide format presses.
“Our digital wide format presses are in almost constant use, running 24 hours a day up to six days a week,” says Steven Round, in charge of marketing at Customark. “And with customer demand for ever tighter turnaround times, shorter and more personalised print and high quality output, any disruption to the efficiency and quality of our operation just wouldn’t have been acceptable.”
The challenge of supplying Customark with its increasing inks and consumables needs lay with ScreenPro, Sun Chemical’s largest authorised distributor for screen and digital inks to
the UK graphics market. Liam Redmond, Director of ScreenPro explains: “We pride ourselves in keeping one step ahead of our customers by anticipating their needs and carefully monitoring product innovation. Having worked with Customark for several years, we could see through their increased volumes of ink usage, that they could benefit significantly by migrating from their existing OEM product, to the Streamline range of alternative inks, and just as importantly, without impacting on the quality and productivity of their output.”
Sun Chemical’s Streamline range offer fully OEM-compatible solutions for inkjet printers, which have been specially formulated to match the colour, physical properties and performance of the original inks. This enables them to be mixed and interchanged with OEM solvent inks, offering total flexibility and without affecting output.
Prior to introducing the Streamline inks to its customer offering, and recommending it to Customark, Liam and his team at ScreenPro needed to be totally confident that the ink would perform equally well, if not better, than the existing inks that Customark was using. “We could easily calculate the cost savings, but we had to be absolutely sure there would be no detrimental impact to the effectiveness of their equipment as well as replicate the highest standards of output,” says Liam.
ScreenPro undertook a series of trials over a period of 12 months to rigorously test all aspects of the inks in real production environments in terms of quality, performance, colour matching and compatibility with printing technologies.
“The results were quite remarkable,” enthuses Liam. “There were absolutely no issues with the Streamline inks, giving us complete confidence to recommend them to our customers, who have since welcomed the opportunity to achieve considerable cost and production efficiencies with some outstanding quality output.”
Having conducted their own trials to monitor performance alongside their OEM inks, Customark has since converted its Mimaki and Roland wide format digital presses and has been successfully using Sun Chemical’s Streamline alternative solvent inkjet inks for some time. Steven Round concludes: “It’s been a win/win situation for us. We haven’t suffered any quality or production efficiency issues – which is something that can happen when you introduce some alternative inks. In addition, we’ve also gained some substantial cost benefits, saving around 32% in ink costs alone over the last 12 months.”