THE WELL WORN Yorkshire phrase ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’ could easily be adapted to suit Paragon, a print group whose roots can be tracked back more than 100 years. Its core products are what the company calls operational print; the non-glamorous end of the print spectrum, where printed forms, NCR sets, invoices, tickets, and so on continue to be in demand. If these are the ‘muck’ end of printing, the company’s track record shows that money can be made from concentrating at this end of the market, albeit by offering customers a service-led custom-designed solution rather than by print alone.

While Paragon can track its history to Lampson Paragon and the late 1800s, in its more recent past it was sold by Moore Corporation to Grenadier Holdings. That was in 1998 and at the time group sales were around €110 million. Today, after ongoing reorganisation has shed several plants and led to the acquisition of several more, the business is heading for sales of €180 million. Turnover in 2008 was €173 million; £43 million from the UK, the rest from France and from a plant in Romania. Operating profit reached €10 million, up from €3 million in 2007. This is the sort of brass that many printers would enjoy earning.

The secret is that while the printed products produced at the four UK sites and five in France may look straightforward, a great deal of intelligence lies behind the two-colour printed page at the end of the process. Ceo Patrick Crean says the policy is one of migrating up the value chain “with the increased provision of service solutions”.

In the annual report, Conor Donnelly, executive chairman, describes the development. “Over the last 10 years a loss making, unfocussed collection of companies has been transformed into a cohesive, tightly managed and consistently profitable group, committed to its customers and markets.”

The most recent of the nine acquisitions, Lithotech in France, still needs further work to make it as profitable as the rest of the group; but it has added considerable revenue and three extra facilities, and has eliminated what had been Paragon’s major competitor.

The general policy with acquisitions has been to add complementary competencies rather than volume, explains marketing manager Stephanie Girard. Hence the UK has Sunderland, as its main plant where long run technical products with personalisation are a core competency; Bradford, where the group produces pressure-seal envelopes for pay slips and the machinery to allow companies to manage their own payroll needs; Wakefield Europort, which is the shorter run print on demand operation; and Lutterworth, which acts as a sales operation for the group. France has a similar spread of skills but also has a specialist identification operation where 10 years’ experience with RFID is vested.

Gradually demand for RFID is increasing, says Girard, pointing to a diverse range of applications, particularly in ticketing and loyalty cards. One French ski resort was using Paragon’s RFID tags on lift passes this year, helping speed loading and keeping skiers happy.

Ticketing in all its forms has been part of the Paragon offering for many years. It counts Irish Rail, the Houston public transport system and Paris among its customers. It has not cracked Transport for London, but it does manage the print for Visit London, the capital’s tourism agency. Much of the promotional work is printed outside Paragon, though the company does control the printing and handles connectivity to the various outlets for the agency outside the UK.

Each of the remote offices is connected to Paragon through the Paragon E-commerce Platform where, using ROI’s implementation of Pageflex dynamic templates, they can modify and order print specific to their requirements. Similar solutions have been devised for the motor trade where, through major distributors like Pendragon, Paragon is linked to individual motor dealers who can personalise the print they require, including NCR sets.

Paragon first began to roll out the system 10 years ago and it is now connected to more than 50,000 users attached to the databases and websites. But Paragon’s services extend well beyond enabling customers to order print and replenish stock levels.

“What is important for us is to make sure we are not a victim of current market conditions and to help our customers to be proactive as well,” says Girard. “That’s about working together to discover what the customer’s requirements are, which is about consultancy. For example, if we respond to a tender we will try to suggest ways to make savings over the initial plan.”

Business development director John Barker explains that the ethos is to try to understand the customer’s business when pitching for business or on a continuing basis. “We do a fair bit of external research on a client and the market place they operate in, so that we can understand what we perceive to be the pressures they are operating under,” he says. This leads to suggestions about ways to cut costs, improve an environmental position or manage brand integrity, for example. “Two years ago, the environment was at the forefront, 12 months ago it was security and now it’s definitely pricing,” he adds.

The propositions that Paragon comes up with may be for products that are new, but which provide extra value. One, he explains, was for a perfume and cosmetics company that is present with franchise operations in many department stores. Because of a high turnover of staff, it was difficult to get consistent feedback on sales. Paragon developed a loyalty card system which promoted the brand and tracked purchases. “It was something new to them,” Girard adds. “They had not been retrieving data when customers were making purchases. We had a relationship with them through an earlier warehousing project, so were able to make the proposal. It was accepted and we now also run a call centre for their outlets.”

Public bodies are particularly receptive to thinking which achieves the aims while saving money, and may lack the expertise that creates these ideas in the first place. For the consultation process on a congestion charge and improved public transport for Greater Manchester, Paragon worked closely with the incumbent agency. Information needed to be distributed to every affected household and business on two occasions, and this had to be achieved within two months from start to finish, including managing returns. “In the end there was a vote against the proposal,” says Girard, “but it was a good sales story for us.” No doubt it also helped when the time came to pitch to the neighbouring Mersey Travel authority.

Another example Barker explains – which called on distribution expertise in organising doorstep delivery, keeping postage costs down and managing data – has been useful in winning a campaign for Scottish TV, which is working with Royal Mail to distribute catalogues of offers from advertisers that are tied in to TV advertising. “We had to keep the package below the 35gsm maximum, and needed to organise it so that every household received the catalogue. And it’s a very measurable way of advertising,” he says. Key to achieving the benefits for the client was being able to cut the weight of each catalogue from 51g to 35g. This experience was in turn applied to a recent pitch where post-out weight would come down, thanks to using 100gsm paper instead of 115gsm, without loss of quality. It was not part of the original specification because those drawing up the tender had not considered that it would be possible to achieve the required quality while changing the paper.

For a hotel group, Paragon was able to provide a solution using the web to print technology to keep the separate identities of the different brands in the group while also funnelling the local spending on marketing through the central system, to control the image.

It’s an approach that, as the chairman notes, is taking Paragon upstream from purely operational print – from merely supplying the printed forms – into managing print, other stock promotional items and work wear for customers. That seems to be the key. Paragon is being led where its customers need. As Girard puts it: “What is important for us is not to become a victim of the current conditions and doing so by helping customers be proactive as well.”


A glimpse of Wakefield
The Wakefield Europort site is a smart new-generation plant, a distance from the older factory in Castleford that the operation moved from.

However, alongside the ongoing investment in a computer-controlled pick and pack operation, the Timson continuous presses, envelope presses and sheetfed machines would have been familiar from the old site. The new NexPress 2100 and Digimaster, housed in a security cage, are a big advance from the straightforward forms that remain a staple product. These point to shorter runs, some personalisation and print on demand. Across the floor is a Halmjet envelope press where runs of 5 million can be accommodated.

It is a busy plant where as many as 1,300 jobs can be produced in a day. Managing this is a Wang system, adapted to suit Paragon’s own needs, with links to the Optimus MIS at other Paragon plants.

A studio handles design, both for customers printing at the plant and as an external service as well, while account handlers complete the set-up and bring the total complement to 90 staff.