Ian Aniszewski, chief information and operating officer, IndoChine Group

The process was simply too slow, so much so that its graphics designers were getting distracted from their design work. "This was a soft problem, but it was becoming irritating," recalls Ian Aniszewski, IndoChine Group's chief information and operating officer.

The printer in question was a Canon A3 inkjet. He says: "My designers were getting so bogged down they began to blame the process."

Another problem was the insufficient print quality. This was exacerbated by IndoChine's unusually demanding graphics assignments.

The company prints its own promotional flyers, as well as color proofs of brochures, menus, and a monthly newsletter. These proofs, used to preview materials before being dispatched to an external printing firm, are critical to ensure the company doesn't make any bulk-printing mistakes.

At IndoChine, its graphic designers had to grapple with two of the toughest tasks in any design routine: printing food images and event-photos taken in dimly-lit, arthouse environments. And both are regular occurences for IndoChine, which serves colorful Indochina food in its 17 arthouse-décor outlets in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Hamburg.

"My designers were getting so bogged down they began to blame the process." Ian Aniszewski, chief information and operating officer, IndoChine Group

Imagine, for instance, a flyer featuring a bowl of piping hot Laotian noodle glistening under a cover of soupy steam. Or a candle-lit bar scene partly masked by flickering shadows.

In color printing terms, one requires an incredibly wide color gamut, while the other needs fine color gradation. And both are extremely tough to print with lifelike quality.

"We couldn't reproduce pastel shades accurately, and the colors weren't durable," he says.

The next step
Six months ago, Aniszewski went shopping for a printer replacement. It wasn't easy, because high-end color printing can be frightfully expensive--a color laser printer can easily cost more than US$6,000, with supplies sapping hundreds of dollars each month.

Like any COO, he knew he had to be prudent when it came to budgeting for any non-core business.

That was when he decided to take up a unique installment package by Hewlett-Packard, which combined hardware leasing with a pay-per-use pricing model.

With basic costs spread over five years plus a monthly pay-per-use cost component for service and supplies, HP's printer services allowed IndoChine to acquire a high-end color printing system it may not have otherwise considered: a HP 5500dtn A3 Color LaserJet with a street price of US$6,000.

Half a year on, Aniszewski says that the HP 5500dtn has been a revelation.

First, color quality improved. Color proofing is now a more accurate exercise, while in-house marketing materials look sharper. As an added bonus, printed materials have become more color-fast--which means that the colors on IndoChine's large-format outdoor event flyers stay vivid for weeks.

The result of this monitoring is better hardware management because, Aniszewski says, somebody is now always looking at his company's printer.

A second benefit was less anticipated. As part of its pay-per-use service, HP manages the printer and monitors supply usage for IndoChine by reading the printer's telemetry sent over a secure Web connection.

The result of this monitoring is better hardware management because, Aniszewski says, somebody is now always looking at his company's printer. That somebody is an HP engineer who also manages the printer's network security settings via a virtual private network (VPN) connection. Hardware maintenance is quicker now, since any problem is escalated immediately to HP.

Another problem that went away was the slow turnaround between print jobs. This had affected IndoChine's newsletter production before, because the color proofs simply took too long to print on the old inkjet printer.

These days, the designers can't be blaming the process. The HP 5500dtn can churn out 21 color pages in a minute.

Said Aniszewski: "Before, our newsletter would always be 10 days late. Now I can get them on the first day of the month."

All systems go!  

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