The reality of print life across the Channel is not so different from the UK. Overcapacity has pushed prices down, digital is having an impact (though the business models are not settled), and customers continue to expect more of their printers. The market is also splitting between the very large companies able to offer a broad range of services and the small, able to be nimble and without the heavy overhead. The mid-sized companies are caught in the middle.

This is one reason why Sego Print, one of the larger independent groups in the country, has sought ISO 12647-2 for its Sira operation just north of Paris. Sego operates a sheetfed plant here with a web offset operation 20km away at Taverny. The latest investment on that site is a twin web 48pp Lithoman installation to deliver a 96pp section.

The group comprises 10 operating companies with a turnover of 80 million euros, employing 550 staff. But print is just part of the offering. Sego’s background is based firmly on prepress and it continues to handle the repro requirements for the majority of French publishers – around 120 magazines and 600,000 pages a week – even if it doesn’t always print their magazines, because despite its size it lacks the sheer firepower of Maury or Quebecor’s operations in France. To counter this, Sego has a joint venture with Agir, a similarly sized independent print company, to offer customers the benefits of five sheetfed presses and 19 web offset machines, as well as the prepress, under the Print Alliance name.

Vindication of this approach has come from winning the contract to print Air France’s inflight magazine and other marketing collateral for the airline.

“It doubles our impact in the market, but at the same time we never forget we are also a small company and so can stay close to our customers,” explains Sego’s ceo Hervé Richard. They also enjoy a partnership approach as the printer aims to work hard at identifying and interpreting customer needs. This led last year to a decision to attain ISO 12647-2 certification, something that will reassure existing customers and which can be a marketing tool for new clients.

“We needed to be more competitive and to have a system of process control in place,” explains Richard. “This is because the time we have to produce a job is becoming lower all the time and so we need to have control of everything under one roof.”

The company chose to work with Swiss print research consultancy Ugra, which has close ties to Fogra in Germany. Ugra’s approach to print standardisation includes using a series of calibration and measurement tools, all within ISO definitions, and marketing this as Process Controlled Offset. Sego’s workflow and production system, from prepress to printed sheet, was analysed and checked for variances, the tolerances tightened across the company and finally test sheets were printed for a final audit and assessment. Ugra’s PCO regime results in internal production efficiencies by promoting repeatable predictable steps which reduce waste and the errors which can mean putting a job back on press or having it rejected by the customer. Consequently everything from monitors to proofing is calibrated to the same visual standard. And while ISO 12647-2 is intended as a standard for sheetfed offset litho printing, Sego has also included its Nexpress 2500 in the accreditation, making it the first to have the Kodak digital press qualified in this way. Clearly the digital press cannot have the same dot gain and density characteristics of the sheetfed press, but it is profiled to match the printed output of the conventional presses.

Work on attaining the ISO certification began in 2006. Richard explains: “For a long time I was chairman of the technical committee for Cicogif, the French print employers’ federation, so knew about the advantages of ISO 12647. But we couldn’t find an auditor in France to help us, which forced us to look at Fogra or Ugra, eventually choosing the Swiss. It was more than just my project, it was a company-wide project so that at the final assessment meeting there were eight of us around the table, covering commercial activities, colour management, platemaking, digital printing, offset printing and proofing. We had had to print some extremely difficult work, which because we were all working together as a team we were able to do. The most important thing is that everybody works together.

“Now when our sales people visit a customer they have something more to talk about than just the price, they can talk about value and quality.”

It’s too soon to quantify the impact of the standard, either on internal processes or for its marketing impact. Richard, however, is convinced it is the right thing to have done.

This strategy has also involved investment in presses and training to offer high quality print, varnishing and other effects, particularly to luxury goods clients. “We think that it’s very important to have the highest added value for what we print,” he explains. “There is competition from a lot of printers in countries like Belgium, Germany and Poland who print very well so we need to have processes and professionals in place here. We need to be training our people in order to produce the best quality and highest added value that we can.”

This is equally the case for the investment in digital printing which is increasing in importance as runs fall and turnaround demands become more stringent. There is as yet little appreciation of the technology among the customer base, Richard explaining that customers tend to think of it as very much like a short run offset press. Consequently, variable digital printing accounts for just 15% of jobs, he says, this covering what is quite often simple work. This cultural resistance to digital will fade and he expects digital to grow significantly over the next five years. “It’s an issue of price and the size of the sheet that can be printed,” he says. “I’m sure that at Drupa we will see new machines, including inkjet. But to ensure we get high quality from these technologies we are going to need process control.”

Aside from the digital press the company has three MAN Roland sheetfed machines at the Sira plant in Asnières, just north of Paris. This is close to the Seine, on land which is now earmarked for residential development. This decision will force Sira to move to a new plant a mile to the north sometime next year.

The other direction that Sego is headed is into cross media production. Its prepress experience and resources are second to none in France and as well as magazines it works for major catalogue and travel companies producing hundreds of thousands of pages a week. There has however been a change for customers like ClubMed. Where once the brochure reigned supreme as its sales tool, the internet has taken over “because that’s where the reservations are made” he points out. Now as the final files are prepared for print, the same pages are passed over for the web site in an XMO data format. At the same time the print production system takes in pricing data from the internet. The two media become complementary, aided by interaction with digital print for targeted marketing. “We believe the future is about cross media: the internet, to handle the transaction is important but to dream I need to hold paper in my hands and that will always require high quality printing.”