Nextgen consolidates resources at new home with new identity & looks to a bright future
By Nancy A. Hitchcock
When Nextgen (Next Generation) Printing started as Copytech in 1973, it offered a value added service unique to the industry: a hint of perfume on the print. Coincidentally, Copytech operated its one press, an AB Dick 360, in the basement of a perfume factory. “We didn’t charge extra for the scenting,” says Paul Rothstein, laughing about the early days of the company he started. “The longer the paper hung around, the more it would absorb some of these exotic odors.”

Today, it’s by no coincidence that the company has evolved from a typical copy center to a full-service graphic communications company. With many calculated, strategic moves, Nextgen operates numerous offset and digital presses in a brand new 48,500 square-foot facility in Canton, Mass., with 85 employees. The company has topped $10 million a year in sales and is experiencing a 20 percent growth rate. Its goal is to provide high-quality print on time, every time, and for customers to “expect more,” as stated in its tagline. One strategic move proving successful is developing partnerships with its customers.

Delivering on promises
When Copytech started as a copy shop, it developed popularity with businesses and high-tech companies. As it grew, it expanded into two Massachusetts locations: one in Brookline, one in Stoughton. “The 80s was a wild time,” Rothstein said. “Massachusetts was a hub for high tech and employees moved from company to company fairly liberally. As a result, we started to do more and more work with more high-tech companies because our buyers would go from company to company. The one thing you had to do was deliver on your promises.”

When Xerox introduced the DocuTech in 1990, Copytech began replacing its one- and two-color presses with the digital printers, then moved into one facility in Canton that would better accommodate a digital workflow. The company
grew to $15 million in sales with an arsenal of eight Xerox DocuTechs. In 1996, Lanier Professional Services bought the robust company and shortly after, Rothstein retired. Or so he thought. Lanier experienced difficulties and sold the company
back to Rothstein in May 2002. “We completely revamped the company and brought it back from $3 million in sales in 2002 to $10 million,” says Paul Rothstein.

Rothstein attributes Nextgen’s growth to a business model that welcomes trade customers and a consistent focus on providing customers what they need. By
welcoming trade customers, and not competing with them, Nextgen was able to grow their business and continue to build their reputation in the industry.

“I have been working with some of our current trade partners since the old Copytech days,” says Rothstein. “They know that they can trust us not to go after their customers. At the same time we provide a state-of-the-art facility that allows trade customers the opportunity to show their customers where the work is getting produced, conduct press checks, and take plant tours.”

In addition to catering to trade customers, Nextgen has achieved growth through acquisition and strategically growing the Nextgen sales force.

“We have seen that digital print and marketing solutions is what our customers are looking for, so, in addition to investing in the latest digital equipment, we have sought and brought on board several sales representatives whose experience was based in digital print and cross media marketing,” Rothstein added

Becoming a one-stop shop
When Paul Rothstein took charge of the company again, it was only nine months after 9/11 and he realized that customers were operating differently than a few years earlier. “When I came back, we looked at the market and saw that budgets had been cut, departments had been slashed, and in-house advertising departments were outsourcing. People buying the printing were handling a lot more
responsibility. Ten years ago you’d go into a company like Fidelity, for instance, and you’d have a buyer that buys big stuff, a buyer that buys small stuff, a buyer
that buys electronics. Now you go to a company and the whole department is two people and they’re managing all this work that’s outsourced, and they probably deal with 10 printers. So when we started thinking about buying the company back and
looking at what customers wanted, we realized that what they were looking for was closer to one-stop shopping. Really, there were too few people in purchasing to go out and get many bids from different printers: they were looking for someone they could partner with and count on to handle jobs from start to finish.”

In order to build a one-stop shop, the company installed equipment that now includes four Heidelberg Speedmasters, four two-color presses, five Kodak Digimaster 9110 printers for black-and-white digital printing, and a Xerox DocuColor 6060 and an HP Indigo 5000 six-color digital press for digital printing. The company also supports a full prepress department, a finishing department with bindery capabilities, kitting, and assembly, and mail and fulfillment services.

Today, Nextgen operates two shifts, five days a week servicing clients including printers, colleges, medical and pharmaceutical companies, seminar companies such as MIT Sloan Management, and Dunkin brands.

Partnering
Nextgen has established partnerships with customers and other printers — many of which are etched on the front door. If a printer specializes in digital printing and needs offset capabilities, it partners with Nextgen for its expertise. Or if the printer has offset technology and needs digital capabilities, the printer can turn to Nextgen.

“Part of our growth is attributable to our focus on marketing our services to brokers and trade partners and being able to accommodate their varied needs,” explains John Rothstein, vice president at the company. John, Paul’s son, received a bachelor’s degree from Plymouth State University and a law degree from the New England School of Law, then founded a New Jersey law firm before becoming a full-time employee at Nextgen. “We like to think of ourselves as the printers’ printer. Some employees and customers have been here for 20 years. Some of the brokers names out front used to be salesmen for Copytech and now have come back as brokers to use our services.”

Web to print solution launched
One recent move the company made to strengthen its partnerships is to offer its customers a web-to-print solution. Nextgen implemented Online Print Solutions, a software that provides a central location for online ordering. Dunkin Donuts, for example, can have its employees order business cards from its corporate Web site, which links into Nextgen’s workflow.

“The interesting thing about the web-to-print capability is that it expands your geography quite a bit,” explains Sheldon Yarmovsky, a former sales representative with HP who recently joined Nextgen as director of business development. “We could get a multi-national company having orders come in from all over the world.” For Dunkin Donuts, the company has printed business cards in Arabic and Asian languages, and shipped them around the globe.

In response to customers looking for the one-stop shop, Nextgen installed the Indigo 5000 six-color digital press as its latest technology innovation. Featuring liquid ink technology, the Indigo offers speed, quality, and a wide range of substrate possibilities. Furthermore, the Indigo features HP IndiChrome, a six-color printing process that uses CMYK plus orange and violet. Now, when customers need PMS colors, Nextgen can answer that request with on-demand digital printing.

“When we have customers with urgent color needs, we have the ability to go in and give them the exact PMS color for their logo on the digital press,” says Yarmovsky. “As digital printing becomes more accepted, people are going to start transferring higher quality literature over to it. We can have a customer with a four-color process brochure, and we could add a fifth and sixth color spot color to it. When Dunkin Donuts orders business cards online, they want to be sure there’s consistency in the logos, color, setup, and we’re able to do that for them on the Indigo. ”

Combining offset and digital capability
Another advantage of being able to produce high-quality digital printing is that when a customer’s job requires a combination of offset and digital printing, Nextgen can meet the needs of hybrid printing. If a financial brochure, for instance, requires only a few pages with variable information and the rest is static, the company can cost-
effectively produce the job using offset and digital technology. “With our capabilities, we can match the color of the variable Indigo to the Heidelberg press so it looks like one static piece that happens to have some personalized information for that client,” says Yarmovsky. “You’re going to see a lot of hybrid mixes between offset and digital in the same piece, where in the past you couldn’t do that.”

One customer ordered 100,000 four-color promotional brochures, but they needed 200 immediately to hand out at a tradeshow. Nextgen printed 200 brochures on the Indigo and finished the order on the 40-inch Heidelberg press. “Our customer was happy with the work and glad we were able to get the Indigo quality,” said John Rothstein.

Another customer wanted to print a run of 50 250-page books, twice, for reviewing before they sent the book to full production. Nextgen was able to print the book on the Digimaster and the color cover on the Indigo, then bind and ship the book.

Today, the company’s business is 60 percent offset and 40 percent digital, with digital growing the fastest. Total digital impressions for black-and-white and color printing amounts to about 5 million impressions per month and growing.

One of the most challenging offset jobs that the company recently produced involved creating a four-color wiro-bound flipchart with its own stand and tabs. “We’re very proud of this complex piece for Joslin Diabetes Center,” says John Rothstein. “It is a flipchart for medical professionals to use for a rollout for an inhaled insulin. It was challenging because it needed to be durable and stand, yet ship flat. We had to get board material and score it and wiro-bind it a certain way so that you could open it. It was a labor-intensive project. We printed 100,000, outputting 20,000 at a time.”

As the company continues to transform with the needs of its customers and with technology innovations, it enjoys the support of organizations such as the Printing Industries of New England (PINE) association. John Rothstein finds PINE to be a good educational source. He also benefits from participating in roundtables. “At a roundtable, it’s a group of people running printing companies, and you can find out you’re not the only ones fighting with your Management Information System, for example. Everybody seems to be having the same problems, and it helps to brainstorm for a solution. You’re working out problems together with a friendly group.”

Yarmovsky reports that at a recent PINE conference, he learned about interesting trends, had some of the company’s strategies validated by peers, and learned about new opportunities.

As customers’ requirements change, so do the capabilities and direction of the company. Listening to customers’ needs steers the company down the road to progress.

“We fit to what the customer needs; we don’t try to have them fit to what we offer — that’s the only way it will work,” states Paul Rothstein. “The business is moving more and more toward newer kinds of services being provided to fewer companies. We’re essentially becoming part of the fabric of some of these organizations.”

Printer is becoming an out-of-date word
“We’re moving into full marketing solutions and programs using cross-media marketing and the newest technology,” adds John Rothstein. “We’re are more of
a full service graphic communications provider as opposed to what many think of as a printer. Printer is becoming an out-of-date word.”

The team of six sales people has been shifting its focus from selling printing to selling solutions that will help customers achieve their core mission.

“Printers are not going to be strictly printers in the future; they’re not going to be able to be,” says Paul Rothstein. “They’re going to have to partner with their customers to be providing more than just printing. And the printers that don’t understand that will have difficulties in the future because that’s what customers want — someone that’s going to help them achieve their goal. If your customer is a car dealer, he’s not looking for someone to do printing, he’s really looking for someone to help him sell more cars. Customers are asking for help purposing the print — personalized postcards with interactive Web sites, for example.”

To provide customers with more solutions, Nextgen continuously adds new technology. It recently added an HP DesignJet 5000 to provide large-format graphics, such as signs banners, and trade-show graphics. The company also turns to new technology to speed production and deliver jobs faster to meet customers’ demands.

“The printing community is moving into a just-in-time manufacturing environment,” says Yarmovsky. “Printers used to have warehouses full of paper, and now paper is delivered daily. You don’t have to print as much and store it for the customer. Print-on-demand lends itself to just-in-time manufacturing.

“With capabilities such as digital presses and web-to-print technologies, and digital platemaking, it allows you to do things in a much quicker manner,” he continues. “The customer is also trying to order as little as they can as often as they can because they want to have up-to-date materials. The customer is creating the necessity to print smaller runs in very high quality.”

Nextgen meets customers’ expectations by delivering the highest quality jobs in a shorter time frame. By taking advantage of the latest technology, such as online ordering, Nextgen speeds print to market, can offer total solutions, and stays competitive.

“A lot of companies that didn’t embrace this type of technology and this type of change,” says Paul Rothstein, “aren’t here today, or they’re scrambling to get caught up with technology.”

“We’re embracing technology to meet and anticipate customers’ needs,” concludes John Rothstein. “I think that’s what made Copytech grow and I think that’s what’s going to keep Nextgen at the forefront of the industry.”

About the author: Nancy A. Hitchcock writes about the printing and graphic communications industry. She can be reached at .