Drukkerij Michiels (Book printer)
“Stimulate innovation and apply the latest technologies”
Drukkerij G. Michiels is a medium size book printer, located in the industrial zone of the city of Tongeren. Almost 90% of their work is dedicated to the creation, printing, finishing and shipping of books, mainly from specialized publishers in the fields of educational and law.
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Drukkerij Michiels
website
:Azura Vi at Drukkerij Michiels
Managing director, Mr. Jacques Michiels, explains more about his company. "We offer a full service book production service for a wide range of international universities, societies and companies. Our added value comes from a dynamic and flexible team of only 22 persons, supporting the complete production workflow from graphic creation with powerful software programs through to finishing and shipping.
This allows us to work to very short deadlines and as such, stay competitive even with our larger competitors. The company, originally founded in 1919, has invested continuously in terms of effort and money to keep up with the ongoing technological advances in the Graphic Industry.
Our aim is to stimulate innovation and to apply the latest technologies such as digital printing and e-publishing to our business."
One of the difficulties with new technologies is that no one can predict the real return on investment over a longer period of time. The fact is that during that same period, the performance of the hardware solution you've bought may already be outrun by newer developments. On top of that there is the 'human factor' which also has to be taken into account: will my employees be willing and capable of keeping up with all the productivity and speed improvements of the new technology, can they be trained and motivated? Of course these considerations apply to any kind of productivity improvement that manufacturers develop…
Another company objective we set is to be at the front line of doing sustainable business. We are, for example, running the complete facility exclusively with green electricity and the heat which is generated by the offset printing presses is recycled back into the air conditioning system.
We were one of the early adopters of Agfa's chemistry-free Violet Photopolymer plate systems and we have recently started using their next generation chemistry-free :Azura Vi plates and were positively surprised by the extra advantages this new plate technology has to offer: longer run lengths, reduced water consumption and lower waste production. All this, together with a high level of user-friendliness due to the low maintenance and service requirements of the :Azura Vi plate system.
We adopted digital printing solutions to combine high quality offset printing, typically used for medium and long runs, with the cheaper short run xerographic 4 color print production some time ago, at the end of the last century
In addition to our print work, our digital workflow also enables the creation of pure digital output such as .pdf or XML files, to be used for non-printed communication purposes. All these files are archived in a professional data management system and as such, retrievable for later re-use or other cross-media applications.
The strength of this company comes from our motivation to give our customers advice and help to realise their communication objectives. Thanks to innovation, automation and cost efficiency we are able to offer the best fit solution for the best price".
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