One of Europe’s biggest direct mail printers steps up production still further after investment in Fujifilm’s XMF Workflow solution
Founded more than 25 years ago, UK printer Howard Hunt is now one of Europe’s most prolific producers of direct mail, door drop leaflets and advertising inserts, with some of the UK’s biggest retailers and well known blue chip corporations among its many clients. With millions of records produced every month across a range of sheet fed, web and digital presses, maintaining an efficient, integrated workflow solution is vital. Eight months ago the business made the decision to invest in Fujifilm’s XMF Workflow solution, which included XMF Remote, XMF Workflow and key elements of XMF ColorPath.
“We needed a solution to seamlessly integrate our workflow systems across all our production lines,” says Howard Hunt’s Technology Director, Stuart King. “We had been aware of Fujifilm’s XMF Workflow for some time and had considered switching when we conducted a review two years ago. We made the decision to stay with our incumbent supplier that time around, but as more and more challenges presented themselves and we found ourselves dealing with ever greater numbers of different and more complex files, we made the decision to reassess our options again in mid-2016. It then became clear that Fujifilm’s XMF Workflow solution had matured as a product and was now exactly what we required.”
“Fujifilm was able to provide us with a very clear roadmap to demonstrate how its solution could help us to achieve our goals as a company,” King continues. “We’ve been a Fujifilm plate customer for nearly four years and their service and professionalism gave us great confidence that we would receive the same high level of support as we made the XMF investment.”
King also has high praise for the product itself: “It handles complex PDFs much more quickly than our previous system and, to allay any doubts we might have had, Fujifilm came and installed a separate server so we could run our existing workflow system and XMF in tandem to compare the two. This left us in no doubt which one we preferred.”
“Our customers prefer XMF as well. It’s fully HTML5 compliant and features improved processes to render files in different versions for different devices. It can handle a huge variety of complex artwork files and it does this more smoothly than any system we’ve operated before. The whole production process has been speeded up as a result, which is great for us and fantastic for our customers.”
Says Chris Broadhurst, General Manager, Fujifilm Graphic Systems UK: “For a printer the size of Howard Hunt, efficiently managing workflow can be a hugely complex task. We’re delighted to have been able to provide them with a solution to meet this challenge and quickly and efficiently manage the millions of records they produce on a monthly basis.”
