Two Employees, Four Colors

When a two-employee in-plant gets a four-color press, you know there’s a lot of demand for color. That’s exactly the case at Iowa Bankers Association, in Johnston, Iowa, which counts 93 percent of the state’s banks as members.

“Everything just started moving to four color,” remarks Todd Palmer, print shop coordinator. He produces the newsletters, conference promotional materials, marketing brochures and other items for those member banks.

When the amount of four-color work he and his coworker Kristi Junkin were printing on their two-color Hamada increased dramatically, Palmer knew it was time to upgrade. He did a cost justification for a four-color press, with an estimated payback of 4.5 years. In January he was rewarded with a Ryobi 3304. To date that press has produced a million impressions, he says.

“We get a lot done for only being two of us here,” he says. “We’re able to keep a lot more [work] in-house, which was our main goal.” The in-plant now does 95 percent of the association’s work; much of that used to be sent out. And the quality, he adds, has never been better.

“When you do four-color [printing] on a two-color press it’s not real consistent,” he notes. “You can never really tell what your finished project is going to look like until it’s done. Now we have the ability to change it on the run if we don’t like what it looks like.”

“We bought the four-color press mainly because of the time that we could save as well as the improved print quality that the press provided,” remarks Emily Saveraid, IBA’s editor. “We’ve been asking more and more of Todd in terms of how much he prints, and it just made sense from an efficiency standpoint. The four-color press has allowed Todd to do more in less time, which reduces the number of jobs that we have to send out.”