‘We transport information for our customers and organise everything concerned with this core business at a very high level,’ says Carl Michael Nägele, the CEO, when describing the activities of this supplier of services. Their main focus is on customisation of business and advertising documents for a multitude of large customers from almost all sectors of industry. Since both quality and productivity play an equally large role here, Georg Kohl was one of the first companies in the world to acquire an Océ VarioStream® 9000. ‘This new printer operating principle has immense advantages. It leads to a much finer resolution, to better printing of images and thus to a hitherto unachievable print quality’, summarises Mr Nägele after several months of continuous operation of the printer. The single-pass printing technology also meets with his approval. ‘This has enormously reduced set-up times and initial teething troubles, because we can now print on both sides in one system and no longer have to use a twin. As an environmentally certified company, that was also an important aspect for us.’

 

Bearing the environment in mind
Being able to test this new technology in continuous operation even before it was officially introduced to the market went without saying for the CEO. ‘We’ve been a development partner of Océ for many years, and the very first NDX Twin printing system,’ he explains as background, ‘was installed in our works as a pilot. In the course of the years a real basis of trust has developed between ourselves and Océ. They have stable and reliable systems that deliver good quality. And, most of all, Océ has specialists on board who do a perfect job from sales right through to service, and who don’t just think about their printers but take the entire environment into account.’

Nowadays, this environment consists of much more than the numerous offset and digital printing systems at Georg Kohl GmbH. ‘Information is not only transported on paper these days, it’s more and more becoming a digital process’, says Carl Michael Nägele. ‘For example, many telephone customers want their invoice per Internet. So we don’t only offer our customers invoice printing and postage, we make the invoices available on a portal in the Internet. Customers are then informed via email that the invoice is there to be viewed. We call this media-neutral document processing.’

Like a bank’s computing centre
Georg Kohl counts on Océ PRISMAproduction® for printer management. The software ensures both trouble-free printing on the twelve Océ systems and security when creating the printing data. And data security is a central subject at Georg Kohl. ‘Our firewall is the same standard as that of a bank, we’re a registered data protection operation, all of our employees are subject to national data protection laws, we have very tightly controlled access hierarchies and so on’, he enumerates. ‘As well as the size and the performance, these are the main elements that differentiate us from a letter shop. With several terabytes of compute power behind us, we’re more like a bank’s computing centre.’

Then there’s colour
Mr Nägele believes the evolution in the production of business and advertising documents will continue. ‘The next big subject is colour,’ he says, ‘because documents with specific use of colour are simply better and more successful. That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about the Océ concept of being able to extend the Océ VarioStream 9000 step-by-step into dual colour or even multi-colour when and if necessary.’ The company has already decided to fit out the Océ VarioStream 9210, currently printing in single colour, as a two-colour system, and he’s already thinking about further steps. ‘If the printing speed suits, an extension into 4/4 or even a 5/5 colour system is most attractive. Multi-colour printing with variable data opens up completely new possibilities.’