Ricoh Europe is welcoming the dawn of a new era in print production with the opening of the Ricoh Customer Experience Centre in Telford, UK. At the new centre, Ricoh will showcase the breadth of technologies and capabilities its solutions deliver to the print production market.
For the first time in Europe, the centre brings together Ricoh's breadth of knowledge, and experience in production printing, lean manufacturing and inkjet development in one single location, as well as an impressive portfolio of products, solutions and services. Including, its newest additions. Print professionals are now able to assess and test:
The Ricoh Pro™ VC60000 continuous feed production inkjet platform designed to produce direct mail, books and marketing materials using Ricoh's own inkjet heads and unique multi drop on demand ink jetting technology for first class quality on a range of substrates;
The Ricoh Pro™ C9100 series of durable colour cut sheet high volume digital presses suited for larger commercial printers seeking to start up or expand their hybrid digital and offset workflow; and
· The Ricoh Pro™ C7100X series of digital colour cut sheet presses, equipped with a fifth colour station allowing applications with clear gloss or white, offering print services providers significant additional revenue opportunities.
The new facility also features recent software releases such as TotalFlow BatchBuilder, an easy-to-adopt, hardware-agnostic production management tool designed to allow print jobs to be batched together in the most efficient manner. TotalFlow BatchBuilder is the latest member of Ricoh's software family that includes a variety of solutions to streamline and control print production, including Ricoh ProcessDirector and the TotalFlow production management suite
"This end-to-end print production centre of excellence is designed to bring together and make available Ricoh's wealth of expertise and experience in production printing and manufacturing," states Peter Williams, Executive Vice President, Head of Production Printing Business Group, Ricoh Europe. "This will not only help existing clients to evaluate new applications, substrates and more, but it also shows them the breadth of offerings from Ricoh that can help them improve both productivity and profitability."
The centre demonstrates Ricoh's leadership and commitment to the European and worldwide print production markets and showcases its manufacturing excellence across a variety of disciplines. It features toner and inkjet technologies in cut sheet, continuous feed and wide format systems and is a test laboratory for software, media, digital front ends and inkjet technology. Specialists are also available to consult on lean and green manufacturing, waste management, and kaizen methodology to optimise print factories. It is also a knowledge centre that will help to ensure that Ricoh remains ahead of continually changing market challenges and needs, enabling emerging opportunities to be optimised for clients and for the company.
Along with industry-leading new additions to Ricoh's product portfolio, the centre also features Ricoh's tried and tested solutions such as the InfoPrint 5000 continuous feed inkjet system, the Ricoh Pro™ 8100 monochrome digital press series, the Ricoh Pro™ C5100 digital colour cut sheet production solution and the Ricoh Pro™ L4100 wide format colour printer series. To ensure that visitors can experience a complete range of solutions for a seamless, end-to-end workflow, Ricoh is also proud to be featuring third-party solutions from valued partners that integrate into a variety of production workflows. The existing European Media Qualification Centre, already located in Telford, is expanding to include media for continuous feed inkjet and wide format in addition to the qualification process that is already underway in the cut sheet arena. In addition, the new European Inkjet Technical Centre that opened in April has also extended the range of technical services available from the Telford site.
Dr Williams expands: "Our entire production printing line is integrated under the 'smart factory' concept, connected for maximum innovation, productivity and efficiency. This includes Ricoh solutions and those from our partners in digital front ends, software and finishing. The Ricoh Customer Experience Centre at Telford is the place for European clients to explore, test and confirm the optimum solutions mixes for their businesses, while also providing an important venue for testing of a variety of new offerings and applications that can provide competitive differentiation in a dynamic market. It brings together all of Ricoh's production print hardware, software, services and partners with the aim of helping print services providers identify solutions to their key pain points. Our comprehensive product portfolio provides them with a multitude of choices that can be assessed to create the best possible tailored solution and the Ricoh expertise to help them make the best decisions for their businesses."
