Hello all. Our commercial printing company has recently decided to venture into digital printing. We are a 2-up /4-up, 1-to-6C printer with annual sales around $20 million, and our average job value is around $1,200. Suffice to say we are not strangers to the short-run quick-turn world. We have several Heidelberg Printmasters and Speedmasters, we're 100% CTP, and we have full service Bindery and Specialty departments. We added some light mailing services last year to compliment our bindery, fulfillment, and warehousing services. Digital certainly seems like the next logical step for us.
My 20 year background with this company is in Bindery, Customer Service and, most recently, Prepress. I know darn little about digital printing, so I'm clearly the perfect guy in our company to act as point man in this venture, having no pre-conceived notions and all.
We purchased around $120,000 in digital printing last year, including layflat laminating, collating, and finishing services related to these jobs, so we have a small base to build upon.

There's my story, in a slightly over-sized nutshell. I hope to learn enough from this experience to actually be able to contribute something to this forum eventually.

Welcome! Glad you are joining us. You mentioned appr. $120000 in digital equipment. Which output device(s) do you have? Are you doing any variable print?

Why move into digital? Is it to migrate some short run offset work to digital or is it to grow into new types of work. Have you checked out the Today In Print Podcast? The first episode they did from a week ago talks about getting into digital print and is rather interesting. You should check it out.

We have no digital equipment, yet. We purchased $120,000 in digital printing jobs from outside vendors last year, indicating a level of digital print sales without our actually having any digital equipment on our floor. Something to build on, at least.
We are moving into digital to further differentiate ourselves from the competition. We aren't looking to move work from offset, although some of that will probably occur. We started our mailing services small, but are getting more and more requests to expand capabilities there, and digital seems like it ties in nicely with that effort. We have a copy of DesignMerge we use for large biz card orders that come as Excel files, so we have a modicum of experience with setting up files to incorprate the addition of variable data.
Thanks for the link. I'll listen to that podcast today.

At the moment, I am just starting to look into our options, and am finding that every pebble I look under illuminates a world of information to wade through. I put the original post in the Xerox forum b/c our parent company has 9 iGen3's (purchased last year) at various other locations, so we have a corporate contract in place with Xerox.

Welcome, glad to see more people here. Let us know if you have any questions.

I don't know how much of the site you have explored, but our podcast: Today In Print might offer you some insight going forward. 2 Episodes have been released and both have discussed a bit about digital print.

Also, if you do check it out, any feedback or topic suggestions would be appreciated. That feedback can be on the forum (general category) or on the Today In Print website.