THREE YEARS AGO, service point was an operation which had a wide geographic spread, but concentrating on what is called the AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) sector, it could offer little depth. Three years ago Chris Fowler International was an independent sheetfed printer in the shadow of Tower Bridge with good penetration in the financial sector, including operations in Hong Kong and New York, but lacking the critical mass that is going to be needed to survive in the current economic climate. Moreover, its main shareholders were no longer involved in the business and wanted to sell. Today, both organisations have changed.

Service Point, under Spanish ownership, has been acquisitive, has been moving into new sectors in the last year, and has bought six companies, CFI included.
“While CFI was profitable and cash-rich,” says its managing director Kevin Eyers, “Service Point has given us the financial stability and growth potential which, as a standalone organisation, we didn’t have.”

The promise is to expand the range of work that the printer handles, particularly during the daylight hours when financial work is quiet. Eyers says: “The main focus of our work is overnight research reports, which means we are busy from 6pm to 2am printing and binding work which has to be delivered for the next morning. It’s a specialist sector demanding high standards. But it is changing. When I first joined 14 years ago, you could make enough money from overnight research, but these days you have to utilise the printing equipment you have during the daytime.

“We needed to grow that even more, which is where Service Point came in. We have just pitched for a large contract where the backing that Service Point offers was an important consideration. People today are concerned about which printers they use in case the worst happens and they can’t get to their work.”

Work is currently underway in Bermondsey to transform the unit next to CFI into Service Point’s London hub. It will house the presentation suite and the large format printers that high-profile projects like Wembley Stadium, the Emirates and the Olympic Stadium require, alongside the five Digimasters and two NexPress machines that CFI has had. The four B2 Speedmasters remain in situ. When everything is finished at the end of this month, it will be something of a print powerhouse under the Service Point brand.

Service Point has been expanding in other sectors, building on its print management, document management and managed services businesses. “Our target has been the companies with sales of £250 million and single or multiple locations,” says marketing manager Kevin Godfrey. “It has been a tier below where Williams Lea and Xerox Business Services have concentrated, though we are bumping against them more and more. When we set up internal production, we gear up for average page production in house and then can use our hubs to produce work when volumes exceed that internal capacity.”

This ability to distribute files for remote printing is a skill shared by CFI, which with operations in Asia and America can print close to the point of need, rather than distribute everything from London, which is the European hub, working for customers in Paris, Moscow and Madrid as well as in London. “Only 38% of our customer base is from this country,” says Eyers. None of the investment banks and finance houses using CFI has yet been a Service Point customer, offering great synergistic potential in growing the offering to the customer sets of both companies.

The deal came at the right time for CFI. The company had expanded into producing fund raising documentation, the sort needed to explain a company to prospective shareholders during an initial public offering (IPO), as well as the market reports. It had been doing well, but as the crunch has tightened, IPO activity has dried up. Even research reports are less frequent as volatility in the markets means that any advice is likely to be rendered out of date by events. Nevertheless the research report is still a printed document, even though the material could easily be distributed electronically.

Eyers reasons that there are a number of explanations for this. One is that it is an age-related issue and that a new breed of analysts will migrate to screen-based information. Another is that the recipients of the reports are working off as many as eight computer screens to feed information, so the printed product provides some respite as well as something that can be digested on the train journey home. “And don’t forget that the research report, although written by some very clever people, is fundamentally a marketing document. Banks don’t make money from research – they are hoping to create a good impression so that people will use their other services,” he says. “In order to make that stand out, you need hard copy.”

It also needs colour; and no longer just on the cover, but increasingly throughout the volume. “These reports are going to be more high-value, they will be four-colour throughout and they will be either fully variable or else highly customised. Runs will become smaller, a trend that will increase thanks to our increased global footprint and the number of sites that can print, meaning that if the end reader is in Johannesburg, we can print in Johannesburg.”

What would be an ideal product, though highly improbable, would be a single publication amalgamating the research from different banks, tailored to suit a specific subscriber. What is more likely is that a tailored product published by an individual bank would include research related to that in which the subscriber is interested, in order to promote the publishing bank’s other services. Again digital printing makes this possible.

What is needed, says Eyers, is for the banks to have better control over their data in order to support this type of customisation. “The question from them is always ‘How do we know that there is a pay back from this type of personalisation?’,” he says.

However, the banks are not averse to digital printing, as one is using the NexPresses to produce a daily report. The company has had its NexPress 2100s since the early days of the press. Production director Tim McAuliffe is delighted by their reliability. “For me it’s the ease of use and that we can maintain them without needing to call engineers for everything.”

Four Digimasters could cope with the volumes of work going through the factory; the fifth, though, is necessary to guarantee that four will be available at any time. Apart from the short run work that only the digital presses can handle, the printer will produce initial batches of a longer run job, the first 50 copies perhaps on the digital presses, with the remainder going litho. Watkiss Power Square or Spinemaster inline finishing handles the digital work while the new Horizon CABS 4000 perfect binder ensures that adhesive bound jobs are completed in house without the cost and handling that trade binding entails.

The print operation is set up to be as slick as possible. The presses are characterised to ISO 12647-2 using Mellow Colour’s PrintSpec system, and are serviced and checked each quarter. McAuliffe likes the fact that this will show up issues with rollers or worse, that need dealing with because print quality is affected. What is missing from the production side is a modern MIS, CFI having coped with a home-grown solution based on Lotus Notes.

With the acquisition by Service Point and perhaps a flood of new types of work, this is going to have to change to something that can support JDF and that offers the ability to track work digitally.

Also on the investment list is a move to a chemistry-free plate system and, in the longer term, to replace the B2 Speedmasters. “Digital is going to catch up with B2 litho,” says Eyers. “When it comes to replacing them in three to five years, we might have to look to B1.” Equally the reshaped business may find it has less need of litho. In print the next three years is going to be a long time.