Offset Printing

Subscription offering speeds up investments

The subscription model has now also arrived on the Austrian print market with the pay-per-use agreement between the Klampfer Group and Heidelberg.

Tuesday 10. April 2018 - The Klampfer Group in Austria has two production sites - Universitätsdruckerei Klampfer GmbH in St. Ruprecht an der Raab and Druckhaus Thalerhof GmbH in Graz. The company has chosen the digital subscription model of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg) for the sites reorientation and the modernization of their equipment.

That makes the Klampfer Group the first printers in Austria to sign up for a Heidelberg subscription model. The commercial print shop boasts 70 years of experience and supplies well-known publishing houses, industrial and service companies, advertisers, and individuals with innovative, high-quality print products.
Klampfer Group invests some four years ahead of schedule
The subscription agreement with Heidelberg covers the Group’s entire print volume for the next five years. Heidelberg is supplying the latest generation of its large- and small-format presses – a Speedmaster XL 106 and a Speedmaster SX 52, the associated software, and all the necessary consumables and services. The Klampfer Group is using the two new presses to replace older Heidelberg equipment and proceeding ahead of schedule with investments the company was only intending to make in 2021/2022. It has also concluded a consumables supply agreement with Heidelberg for the Speedmaster XL 106 supplied back in 2016, on which the company has so far been printing over 40 million sheets per year. In return, the Klampfer Group gets defined printing capacity that it can utilize for its customer orders. It only pays for use of this capacity (pay-per-use arrangement).
“We require a reliable partner and maximum flexibility for our reorientation. After all, we don’t want to compromise on customer satisfaction during such a sensitive phase,” stressed Daniela Klampfer, CEO of the Klampfer Group. “The subscription model offered by Heidelberg enables us to continue focusing fully on our customers. The five-year term also means we can make vital technology investments years ahead of schedule,” she added.
The Heidelberg subscription model is following the growing pay-per-use trend in mechanical engineering and aims to move away from growth based solely on selling and installing printing capacity.
“The agreement with the Klampfer Group demonstrates that our subscription model is making our customers more willing to invest to secure faster growth. What’s more, the Klampfer Group is our first customer with a subscription agreement for the small format. This underlines that the model is suitable for all customer segments and format classes,” said Dr. David Schmedding, Head of Corporate & Digital Business Development at Heidelberg.
Establishing pay-per-use models in industrial offset printing is the result of the ongoing digital transformation at Heidelberg, and also the company’s software and data expertise. Heidelberg offers customers a smart complete system comprising press, services, consumables, and software solutions. The stable management of a system of this kind is inconceivable without big data applications – in predictive maintenance, for example – and the company’s Push to Stop approach to autonomous printing.