Inkjet & Digital Printing

Pulmen rises to the top of Spanish book printing with new digital press and software

Thursday 20. May 2021 - Producciones Digitales Pulmen, the leading Spanish digital print company specialised in the printing and binding of books, has not looked back since installing SCREENs Truepress 520HD+ and Equios print management software.

The investment has transformed Pulmen’s competitiveness, halving its delivery times while achieving market-leading print quality.
To seize new opportunities in the fast-growing Spanish digital print market, Pulmen purchased a Truepress 520HD+ in June 2019, allowing it to replace seven smaller toner presses. “Almost two years later, the 520HD+ has exceeded our expectations. In our market analysis we estimated that the Truepress would increase our sales by 10 to 20 percent annually. But our growth is now between 20 and 30 percent,” says CEO Fernando García Rodriguez who runs the business together with co-founders CFO María Ángeles García and Head of HR María Ángeles Soria García.
With the Truepress, Pulmen now can produce almost 2,000,000 books per year, which in some periods of the year amounts to 16 million double-printed pages per month. Pulmen experienced continued growth during the pandemic. “COVID-19 has hardly affected demand for full-colour educational textbooks. For that market, the Truepress 520HD+ is competitive up to a print run of currently 2,500 copies. That is more than enough, since the average print run of a school book is around 1500.”
The 520HD+ printing line allows for productions of up to 150 meters per minute, halving Pulmen’s delivery time. For all steps of the production process, from prepress to binding over staple and spiral and finally packaging of the printed books, Pulmen now needs only one week.
The Truepress 520HD+ also meets the high quality standards for textbooks. “The printer offers a maximum resolution of 1,200 dpi, and a drop size of 2 picolitres. Moreover, with digital printing, there is no difference in quality between a long and a short print run and there is no need for manual intervention to check the quality.”
Fernando says shorter delivery times and the excellent print quality of the Truepress 520HD+ are particularly important for promotional book copies. These are sample copies which publishers take to school buyers and which therefore have to be of impeccable quality. “Whether our customers order only two or a thousand of these ‘promotionals’, they still expect a delivery time of three days. With the speed of the Truepress 520 HD+, we are putting virtual stock into practice and reduce the risk of unnecessary printing.”
When growing demand for digital printing led to a bottleneck in prepress work in mid-2020, Pulmen switched to SCREEN’s Equios PTR software, to control all of its printing machines with the same software. “Equios PTR has enabled our prepress employees to prepare twice as many print jobs per day. They only have to perform a single ripping of the files sent by the client. This is a big time saver, especially for re-prints of previous jobs.”
The time savings in prepress work and printing freed up time for Pulmen to horizontally integrate the supply chain, and to perform work in-house that it used to outsource. In this way, its 17 employees still work for the company, and no restructuring of the personnel was necessary, despite the COVID-19 crisis.
Having taken a big step forward in the Spanish digital publishing market, Pulmen is now looking across the border for opportunities in other European countries, says Fernando García Rodriguez.