Ames On-Demand:
Practicing today what the future will look like for many printers
AOD provides content management, digital print, and electronic delivery solutions for a growing list of publishers and other clients nationwide. Its order entry and manufacturing process helps publishers meet the rising need of offering content in a variety of recombined forms and formats. Other graphic communications companies are catching on to the value of proprietary workflows that exploit the strengths of digital on-demand manufacturing that is augmented by a seamless online ordering and job processing system that minimizes human interaction and speeds delivery of a job request. AOD, however, has been refining its processes since its start in the mid-1990s, and thus has a head start on the field. Although the smallest and youngest of the four divisions within Ames Safety Envelope, AOD is the fastest growing business unit, according to Steve DeForge, the business division’s vice president and general manager. Part of a larger operation
With approximately 425 employees, Ames Safety Envelope is one of the largest employers in the city of Somerville. Its total gross annual sales exceed $50 million, of which less than $5 million comes from clients in New England. That geographic diversity in sales is due in part to a national sales force that has been in place for many years and includes sales offices in New Jersey, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and California. The corporate structure of Ames includes four separate business units that share employees, work space and production equipment. In addition to Ames On-Demand, there is Ames Color-File, Ames Specialty Packaging, and Ames Digital. Ames Safety Envelope remains one of the largest privately owned companies in the region’s printing and graphic communications industry. It is governed by a board of directors and led by Kirk Ramsauer and a team of senior executives.
Prior to becoming Ames’s top executive, Ramsauer was deputy general counsel at utility company National Grid USA, where he led the corporate and transactional practice including corporate, commercial, financial and new business practice areas. As head of Ames, his leadership team includes seven key managers: the vice president/general managers of each individual business unit; vice president of manufacturing; the vice president and chief financial officer; and the vice president of human resources. Seeing a digital opportunity The term “on-demand printing” has different meaning for different people. In its most basic definition, on-demand book printing means that whenever a book is demanded (ordered or requested by a client), a copy of the book is printed. The challenge has been to make the process cost effective and profitable for the book manufacturer. That has happened with today’s digital reproduction equipment and constantly improving workflows, which are becoming more automated everyday. The technology and business concept that drives Ames Safety Envelope’s print on demand digital enterprise was developed at KMS Companies in the mid-1990s. Ames purchased KMS when it fell into bankruptcy in 1998.
A handful of Ames employees are dedicated to AOD. They are led by DeForge, and Bill Linnane, director of technology. Both men were with KMS and joined Ames in the bankruptcy purchase. A few other KMS employees joined Ames and remain with the company today. “KMS had a great vision,” Linnane said. “They were a fulfillment company primarily that saw an opportunity to get into on-demand printing and publishing as new digital technologies were arriving in the marketplace. It started out as a manual process of building a book. We would merge together sections of what would later become a book by using a Xerox black and white Docutech,” Linnane said. “We’d even type up a table of contents for the new book. “We could see early on that the idea was a good one, but it needed refining or we wouldn’t be able to grow it,” he said. “We realized the process had to be more automated and more database driven.” The process improved dramatically in the ensuing years with new and faster reproduction equipment. Then along came the Internet and the creation of Bookbuild, a web-based user interface where professors and other creators of written content could go to a web site, update their original written content such as chapters from textbooks and other research, and their publisher (AOD’s client) would submit an order. Great value, selling points and end-user
cost savings Once the order is approved, AOD will manufacture the book and ship it. “Our most successful publishers continually update their content,” DeForge said. “Gone are the days when publishers want to place large orders of college textbooks and risk many of those books sitting on bookstore shelves and not being sold,” he said. “Publishers understand the value of on-demand printing and ordering only what they think they’ll need. This kind of manufacturing flexibility allows college professors to alter the content of their teaching material semester to semester. “Ames On-Demand is still the smallest piece of Ames Safety Envelope,” DeForge said, “but it is the fastest growing.” He said AOD has been growing at a 20 to 30 percent annual rate for the last five years and the future looks bright as the overall concept of on-demand printing becomes more rooted and better understood throughout all facets of the print buying marketplace. AOD’s main markets include higher education textbooks and corporate education training. In 2005, Ames On-Demand processed 6,000 orders that totaled more than 500,000 individual books, which accounted for $3 million in sales. “That work came from no more than 50 clients,” DeForge said. “We have ongoing relationships with our customers and we are always looking for ways to enhance that relationship and deliver to them greater value. The beauty of the book building process we have here is that it is scalable. We can easily ramp up to accommodate much higher production numbers and more clients.” The general manager said the average number of individual units within each order was 119 books. AOD has fulfilled orders of 4,000 books for a school district in Texas and 10,000 books for a school district in California, but DeForge said those types of orders are rare.
DeForge and his team are developing ways to reach into other markets to expand their service with a goal to develop steadier business throughout the entire year as opposed to separate periods of frenzied manufacturing activity. One of the strongest values in print-on-demand book manufacturing is a much lower price point for the publisher, who can pass some of that cost savings on to their clients — college bookstores and students. Publishers are learning that it is easier to sell books at a lower price and move inventory quicker. “Our costs to manufacture a custom-built book are about 60 percent less than the typical costs to make books,” DeForge said. “Sixty percent of our business is from repeat users, so that shows that most of the market for on-demand book publishing is untapped.” One AOD publisher client has 500 representatives selling the print on-demand concept across the country. Publisher benefits from AOD With the company’s library of digital materials doubling nearly every year since 1996, Pearson wanted to construct a scalable, web-based system that would better accommodate the volumes and workflow that were emerging. Lacking this type of online system, Pearson would soon face a staff expansion requirement that would grow faster than its revenue base could support. To partner on this opportunity, PCP selected Ames On-Demand based on its unique expertise as a full-service printer specializing in short-run digital book manufacturing, fulfillment, and distribution of materials used in the education and training, financial services, and health care markets.
Praise for Xerox The 6180s are workhorses, and the iGen3 allows AOD to speed book production and increase print quality for education and training publishers and other customers for less. The iGen3 produces books and book covers at a high resolution with speeds up to 100 pages per minute. Additionally, the iGen3 prints a variety of CMYK process colors, provides matching for most Pantone colors, and prints in accurate registration. Before the iGen3, all color covers were made on Ames Safety Envelope’s offset presses. The iGen3 offers more flexibility in ordering customized — even personalized — publications with variable data and four-color images. “I’ve got to commend Xerox,” DeForge said. “They have good equipment. We will add equipment as needed as demand for our product grows and we need more capability to get through the spikes in demand. During busy periods, we run two 12-hour shifts and operate 24/7.”
All of AOD’s printing work is done in black and white. Ninety percent of the book covers are done on AOD’s digital equipment, and the books are put together using AOD’s full finishing capabilities. “We’re a Xerox shop,” said Linnane, the director of technology. “They had the solutions at the time while others, like Océ, were just getting on board.” Finishing includes three Horizon perfect binding finishing machines, a Foliant 520 laminator and a variety of binding equipment. Ames On-Demand laminates all of its book covers to give them a longer life. While publishing companies have embraced the digital-on-demand “only order what you need” concept, Ames is selling the concept to other markets. Two burgeoning markets are continuing education — as all post-secondary schools including vocational-technical schools, community and junior colleges are marketing services to adult and non-traditional learners; and corporate education and training markets. “This is ideal for anyone that’s got content,” DeForge said. “No one wants to fill warehouses with printed goods that you’re not going to use. Print on demand is the future of printing. “People are just beginning to understand how to market it,” he said. “Now we’re ready to go to color.” “Color is becoming affordable in the print on demand environment, and we have a relationship with a sizeable publisher that wants to be the first publisher to do this,” DeForge said. Linnane said color will work and be in demand if professors think there is a need for color in their books. Color augments teaching materials in some academic disciplines such as geography or medical illustration. “It will also be a matter of what the market will bare,” DeForge said. |
Ames On-Demand
(AOD) offers both digital and commercial printing services augmented
by BookBuild, an innovative, web-based content repository that simplifies
the entire process of selecting, ordering, manufacturing, and distributing
customized published materials.
Ramsauer
joined Ames as president and chief executive officer in January 2005
after serving on Ames’ board for 10 years prior. He is married
to a granddaughter of the founder, and only the sixth president in the
firm’s 87-year history.
Ames’
senior management at the time saw KMS’ printing-on-demand business
model as a good way to enter the digital printing era. Their hunch has
been proven to be correct. They rebranded the concept as Ames On-Demand
and set up shop in KMS’s former location in Woburn, Mass., where
it remained for several years until it was moved to the Somerville facility
several years ago.
Publishers
— who are AOD’s most prolific clients — can custom-order
books to be made using the online order entry system. Linnane said AOD
has more than 400,000 pieces of originally written content — most
of which is book chapters for use in college textbooks and writings
based on academic research — stored on its servers for one major
publishing client. This repository of content allows the publisher to
review content, modify it if necessary, and include it in the order
of a new book for a specific college-level course at his institution
of higher learning. The entire proofing, reviewing and approval stages
are done online before the green light is given to AOD to actually manufacture
the book.
“We
sometimes get a larger number of orders over a short period of time,”
DeForge said. Historically, AOD has been extremely busy in the months
of July, August and September for the fall academic semester, and in
December and January for the spring academic semester.
AOD offered
PCP digital and conventional printing services, augmented by BookBuild,
the web-based content repository that simplified the entire process.
AOD’s
equipment produces finished book sizes of 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches, 6 by
9 inches, 8 1/2 by 11 inches, and 14 1/3 by 20 1/2 inches, which is
the largest finished sheet the iGen can handle.
