What’s having the greatest impact on your business at the moment?
The biggest negative impact is pricing and the competition! The market is very aggressive at the moment and prices are under real pressure. Also, due to the fact that a lot of people are really pushing hard to fill their capacity, clients or jobs that would historically have been too small for the big boys are now being targeted by them and its really difficult to compete just on price.
On the plus side, our new Agfa Jeti Tauro H2500 LED and Agfa Anapurna RTR3200i LED presses are having a massive impact on our production speeds and making life a lot easier!
Where do you see the greatest wide-format opportunities?
Bringing our experience in personalisation and customer experience on small-format to life in a wide-format environment is really exciting for us. We are also seeing some amazing home and business décor opportunities which we feel fits our experience and technology perfectly.
What would make your day-to-day operations easier?
Continuing with ProCo’s automatic workflow program utilising Switch and various other automation tools that we are currently trialing will enable us to speed up the day to day issues of proofs, amends and approvals as well as making the delivery of jobs slicker to the presses.
Your favourite bit of kit is..?
At this moment in time all of the new kit that we have installed throughout our large-format department - they have all brought so much change to the whole way that we produce our work. The Agfa Jeti Tauro H2500 LED has benefited us with the speed and quality of print that is produced as well as the huge uplift on speed in our production of work with white ink. The Agfa Anapurna RTR3200i LED is just a machine you can set up and leave to just run and run with no issues at all unattended all day and night. The Crest X&Y Cutter has speeded up massively the finishing side allowing us to trim down big runs of banners, posters, vinyl’s and lightbox fabrics in no time at all compared to our previous methods. The piece that of the jigsaw that has really impacted our finishing with high demands on banners and stretch frame graphics is the Matic Chronos Ultimate sewing machine enabling us to turn jobs around of this kind within hours rather than days.
What’s the best bit of business advice you’ve been given?
Be diverse and take every opportunity to learn something new and you will forever be in front.
What are you most proud of achieving?
Having started ProCo’s internal large-format department from scratch two years ago I would say I am most proud of educating its current print production staff who had no previous experience of anything large-format print-wise prior to the day the first presses were installed. I can say without a shadow of a doubt they are now some of the best operators I have ever worked with.
What lesson does the wide-format sector need to learn?
That what we do is amazing and we have to make sure our clients value the products and innovation we deliver - they are worth more than they want to pay!