Champion Industries, Inc. was founded with the premise that performance equates to results. From a small, community-based printing company, Champion has evolved into a large industry leading growth-oriented organization. Champion Industries, together with its subsidiaries, offers products and services for commercial printing, business forms manufacturing, office products and furniture supply businesses.
One of Champion’s subsidiaries, Champion Output Solutions, serves as a “single source” supplier to the outsourcer marketplace by blending emerging automation technologies with traditional printing processes and services. Their continued growth over the years enhances their position as a “world class” provider of printing solutions.
Champion has grown throughout the years in a strategic manner. Their growth has been planned, deliberate and managed. Acquisitions have allowed the Company to expand their competitive footprint in the marketplace. Additionally, these actions have allowed Champion to capitalize on opportunities to provide outstanding service to their customers, ethical and considerate attention to their communities, and fiscal and social responsibility to their shareholders, partners and families.
Solimar Systems recently interviewed Tim Dagostine, Division Manager at Champion Output Solutions to discuss how implementing Solimar technology has enabled new revenue opportunities while reducing operational expenses.
Champion Output Solutions realized they had production workflow bottlenecks. These
bottlenecks were restricting their ability to operate at desired efficiency levels. Champion performed an internal workflow analysis and discovered the limitations concerning their document production operations. Due to manual processes and lack of automation tools, Champion identified several workflow areas requiring improvement. Their analysis discovered:
- Lack of automated output management
- Limited output flexibility and access
- No mechanism for job reporting
- Lack of high volume PDF creation
- Inadequate document quality appearance
- Slow turnaround time of jobs
- Inability to “scale up”/grow and expand
- Limited ability to accept and process a variety of data streams
“In certain areas of our operations, we had too many manual processes that were holding us back,” said Tim Dagostine, Division Manager at Champion Output Solutions. “We were forced to open each file before sending to the printer, which slowed everything down. We also were somewhat restricted because we could only accept and process certain types of data streams.”
Champion researched potential solutions to address their workflow limitations. They wanted to find a vendor who had the industry experience to deliver the right software technology, implementation services and post-sales technical support. Champion’s objective was to identify and select a vendor that could deliver the best overall solution.
“We wanted to partner with a proven experienced vendor that had a track record of demonstrable industry success,“ said Dagostine. “We knew of Solimar’s excellent reputation and how they have helped their clients improve production workflows. Once we saw Solimar’s solutions in action, we knew it was right for us. Their experience, their proven past successes and their great products - that’s why we choose to work with Solimar.”
Champion‘s solution consisted of Solimar® Print Director™ Enterprise (SPDE), Rubika™, SOLindexer™ and SOLfusion™. SPDE gave Champion the ability to interface with virtually any printer and accept any data stream. This flexibility provided them the ability to process a variety of data stream conversion routines within their printing environment. SPDE also enabled workflow control and job management capabilities to minimize costly human errors.
Leveraging the job load balancing functionality from Solimar, Champion has increased their output production by 60%. “Increasing our production capacity without adding personnel or new equipment is a huge benefit for us,” added Dagostine. “The Solimar technology has allowed us to maximize the use of our existing equipment.”
The document re-engineering workflow solution, Rubika and SOLindexer, combined to automate manual processes for Champion. Rubika modules were configured in several combinations to enable postal savings, leverage finishing equipment, add value to documents such as barcodes, and modify print files. Rubika allowed Champion to quickly re-engineer documents without reprogramming, recoding or recomposing.
SOLfusion allowed Champion to automatically control, stage and sequence workflow tasks needed to produce desired output. SOLfusion’s integrated workflow complements Champion’s other products from Solimar, including SPDE and Rubika.
The Solimar solution at Champion has proven to be a very good business decision. SPDE and Rubika have drastically cut labor, reprint and mailing expenses. “Our Solimar solution has helped us save over $50,000 per year in labor, reprint and mailing costs,” said Dagostine. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The manual costs associated with controlling and managing content has been essentially eliminated, which is saving us nearly $30,000 per year. We also have reduced the need and expense for programming resources. The bottom line is that we have removed the bottlenecks from our production workflows.”
By eliminating manual processes through automation, Champion has been able reduce job turnaround time by 50%. More customer jobs are being completed faster. Faster jobs translate into happy customers that ultimately become repeat customers.
“With the help of quicker job turnaround, our customer satisfaction levels have increased,” said Dagostine. “As long as we can keep our customer satisfaction levels high, we will keep the customers we currently have. Customer retention is very important to us and Solimar has helped us address that too.”
Champion has also been very pleased with the post-sale technical support they have received from the experienced Solimar staff. “The Solimar technical support staff is very knowledgeable concerning all our installed products, said Kenny Lore, Champion Output Solutions. “When we have a question, they always have a fast, accurate and courteous answer.”
