Principal Financial Adds 10th NexPress

It was big news when The Principal Financial Group installed its first five Kodak NexPress 2100 digital presses beginning in 2003. Then the Des Moines, Iowa, company added a sixth NexPress 18 months ago. And now, with business booming at The Principal’s 120-employee Print to Mail operation, the company has made history by adding four NexPress 2500s, making it the largest single-site NexPress user in the world.

“Those machines just run non-stop” at the end of each quarter, says Rex Brooker, manager of the Document Automation Team.

They are busy pumping out 401k statements for the company’s growing Retirement and Investor Services (RIS) business unit.

Brooker detailed his in-plant’s success with digital color printing in a session at last month’s In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association conference, in Oklahoma City (see story on this site). Up until mid-2000, he said, RIS had been providing simple black-and-white 401k statements. When color images and charts were suggested, RIS contemplated outsourcing the work. The in-plant offered an internal solution and added nine Xerox 2060s, its first foray into digital color. Four years later these were swapped for five NexPresses. The rest is history.

As a leader in the financial business, The Principal wanted to continue using technology to provide relevant information to customers. So the company decided to move into “the next generation of 401k statements,” Brooker says, prompting the need for four new NexPresses. Principal’s customers can now add customized content and logos to their statements. In addition, statements have now gone from an 11x17˝ format, folded into four pages, to an 8.5x11˝ format, with a variable page count.

The four new NexPress 2500s brought some changes to the in-plant. Two new employees were added, and the finishing operation was moved into the vacant former offset area to make room for the new machines.

Brooker says variable data printing has been the key driver behind the shop’s digital color growth. Some 75 percent of the work done on the NexPresses contains variable content. What’s more, 50 percent of the in-plant’s digital color work has 10 or more variable elements.

Selling variable data has been easy, Brooker says. It’s just a matter of bringing the creative folks and IT people to the in-plant.

“You just show them what our capabilities are,” he says. “They go back to their desks and they think about it, and they [say] ‘I wonder if I could do this.’ Those folks have the best ideas. My team. . .we work with them and match up their requests with what the capabilities are of [our employees] on the floor, and magic happens.”