Premier Streamlines Operations

Premier, a family-run company in Portland, OR, was founded by Arnold Wheeler in 1974. Beginning as a commercial printer, the company has evolved over the years instep with market requirements, and today describes itself as a “creative production company.” Premier has a diverse product offering, including a full creative department, photo studio, branded apparel, warehousing, and fulfillment services as well as direct mail and commercial print.

When faced with a direct mail client that was growing exponentially, Premier needed to scale up their operations to keep up with demand and deliver output more efficiently. That process began with the presses. “We have both digital and offset printing,” said Vice President of Manufacturing Scott Gorman, “including an HP PageWide T250 HD production inkjet web press that supports our direct mail vertical. Because of the quality of that press, we anticipate pulling about 25% of our offset work to that device as well.”

During the evaluation process for the production inkjet investment, Gorman explained that the company was considering using a roll-to-roll configuration with offline finishing. Gorman spoke with a number of industry contacts doing similar work, and many brought up an inline solution by Hunkeler which quickly rose to the top of Premier’s considerations. “As a sheet fed printer,” he said, “we are used to picking something off of a pile for quality control. So, even though the HP T250 has a lot of technology built into it, including vision inspection systems, we had a hard time accepting running multiple rolls and then finding out later that we had an issue. We decided to go inline on that press, which gave us peace of mind, and also the added efficiency of a single-touch process.”

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