Deliver What You Promise

New technology, and what some might consider an old-school philosophy, can be a winning combination if you do it right. Just look at president and founder John Palica's Traco Manufacturing. It started out as a manufacturer of one small portable shrink wrap machine in 1985 and grew, eventually offering printed shrink sleeves as a service, along with its wide array of existing product lines. The trouble was Traco wasn't a printer and off-shored most of the print work to be printed either via flexographic or rotogravure presses. The arrangement worked for a time, but the printing industry these days is all about short runs and just-in-time printing—nearly impossible if a business is sending work overseas to be printed. What's a business to do?

Well, it could jump on the digital bandwagon, which is exactly what Traco did. Once it combined digital technology with its tried-and-true motto of "promise only what you can deliver, and deliver what you've promised," Traco was well on its way to success with short runs, building on the trust it had already established between the market and the company's sales staff.

Honesty is the best policy

When Palica and his management team look at prospective employees, they look for candidates who possess impeccable honesty and integrity. "So when you talk to a salesperson at Traco, he becomes the source for you for just about any product line that you want, even if we don't sell it. We can direct you and give you some good information on where to find the product. We don't try to broker things and become middlemen. I think our sales team [members have] become 'go-to people' for purchasing agents around the world because they can trust them," he says.

Building trust is no easy task, but with what Palica calls old-fashioned business practices, it comes naturally. “There’s no hype in our sales. We’re very factual,” he says. “We own up to any of the mistakes we’ve made. We’re not perfect. We’ve made mistakes in the past. We have to own up to that, and we do so. I think it’s very hard to find old-fashioned business tactics and practices like we have at Traco where we actually promise what we can deliver and deliver what we promise.” Although he admits that may sound a little clichéd, “if you really do that, which we really try to do, then customers will learn to appreciate it and they’ll tell others.”

The honest approach helps Traco retain its employees, adds Palica. “It’s very easy to hold onto people because at a lot of other companies our employees used to work for, they’ve been told to say certain things or try to cover up for other people. In our company, there is no such thing.” Palica’s company “fesses up” to the mistakes, and lets customers know what to expect. “We found that customers, as long as they know what’s going on, can deal with some adversity that arises unexpectedly,” he asserts. “It’s the unknowns or surprises that people don’t like. And, we just don’t surprise people. If anything, we try to under promise and over deliver.”

Combined with technology

Traco’s foray into digital printing didn’t take the normal path. Often, digital printing is embraced by a flexographic or offset printer, according to Gary Whitehead, print production specialist at Traco. The company knew it wanted to go digital to satisfy a variety of customer requirements, including just-in-time printing, regional versioning, or the ability to test-market a variety of shrink sleeve labels without printing massive quantities. “We looked at other digital presses, and they didn’t have the ability to print on shrink films,” says Palica. Based on that alone, the company opted to go with an HP Indigo ws4500.

Quick turnaround is the key to all of the above. “We found that we had a large customer base that needed a product just-in-time, didn’t forecast properly, were late in ordering, or had somebody pushing them for a product that needed to be turned quicker than most presses could do,” he says. “The Indigo press filled that niche for us because we can turn a job in 24 hours if we have to.” Palica claims the makeready on the press from job to job can be less than 5 minutes. “So we can do a job for a different customer, with a completely different set of artwork, with less than 5 minutes of setup between them. We can do anywhere from a single impression, if they are looking to do prototypes, all the way up to 40,000 impressions.”

The deciding factor, though, was the ability to print on shrink film. “Most of the digital presses out there are using heat to fuse the ink or toner to the substrate, and we couldn’t do that because of our film’s shrink properties,” says Whitehead.

Shrink, through and through

Shrink film is what Traco has specialized in since its inception. So, it should come as no surprise that Palica claims when you put a pressure-sensitive labeled product next to a product with a printed shrink label, the consumer will almost always choose the product with the printed shrink label. “The ability to show-off 360 degrees of high-definition, digital-quality graphics is unmatched in the industry.”

Purchasing the digital press has simply augmented what Traco can offer any customer in terms of printed shrink sleeves. “I think right now, what this press does very well for us is allow customers to try things out without investing a lot of money in plates and prepress costs,” adds Palica. “We can take it from the artwork stage and transfer it to a shrinkable substrate to fit any shape of container. Traco can also provide the sleeves as roll stock for use on automatic application equipment or as single cutbands for manual application.”

Digital’s on the move

Both Whitehead and Palica agree—the print quality of the end products coming off their HP Indigo press is as good or better than rotogravure. “I think it’s better than gravure when you compare them side-by-side,” says Palica. “The quality is unmatched. Gravure and flexo just can’t match the registration detail and process-color quality [of] this press.”

Digital printing has made believers out of Palica and Traco because of its surge in quality. “Most people don’t look at the printed graphics through a loupe and pay attention to that much detail or look at the registration, but we do,” Palica says. “When you look at the differences, it’s obvious that HP Indigo’s capabilities are unmatched out there right now.” pP