Broaden your printing capabilities to differentiate the business in a crowded marketplace

Carving a niche with the right digital equipment

• To differentiate the business in a crowded marketplace

• Wah Han was facing stiff competition in a saturated market
• Several other print companies provided similar printing services at competitive rates
• The firm needed a way to attract new customers yet keep business costs low

• To transform its digital printing capabilities by leveraging industry leading technologies

• FUJIFILM Business Innovation D95
• DocuColor 1450 GA
• Iridesse Production Press

Established in 1982, Wah Han started as a small offset print family business with an aim to support its clients with the right tools and people. Steering the company’s course from its outset is Mr Jason Lim who has been in the printing business for more than 30 years.

Three decades and a generation later, both Mr Lim’s son and nephew, Mr Jim Lim and Mr Wilson Goh, are now ready to take over the business. They have built on the company’s success and continue its growth to become a hybrid commercial printing house offering an extensive range of print services.

Wah Han is now one of the few printers in Singapore providing a range of print services ranging from offset to digital, and Tyvek® (DuPont) as an alternative print material. With its passion for customer service and printing, Wah Han strives to deliver quality prints for its clients with its highly-motivated printing crew and culture of excellence.

Soon after its inception, cutting through the competition posed a challenge for Wah Han in a highly saturated market. While the business built a firm reputation for service and reliability, the low barrier to entry in the print industry meant that other print companies could easily provide similar printing services at competitive rates.

As a family-owned business, Wah Han faced the top three challenges as the others - the need to constantly innovate, the economic environment and international competition, highlighting the open nature of Singapore's economy as an added dimension of complexity for businesses here.

In addition, there is no denying that the face of competition for the small commercial print segment continues to change. In these challenging times, Mr Jim Lim and Mr Wilson Goh, the Managing Directors of Wah Han, understand that printers must employ disruptive thinking and creative ideas if they want to lead the company.

In order to attract a greater share of the market, Wah Han needed to cut production and business costs and improve the competitiveness of their services. At the same time, Wah Han also faced rising client expectations in terms of quality of print and turnaround time, especially for premium marketing materials and invitation cards by luxury brands which necessitated metallic colour printing. This offered Wah Han an opportunity to differentiate its service offerings by seeking out the latest industry trends in an ever-changing business landscape.

Having studied Wah Han’s business operations, FUJIFILM Business Innovation’s team of business development consultants identified the need for more productive high-volume print solutions that would enable Wah Han to print faster and more affordably.

Designed for higher volume applications with greater functionalities, the FUJIFILM Business Innovation D95 was added to Wah Han’s light production monochrome line-up. It combines full data management support with powerful media handling, feeding and finishing capabilities, making it the perfect solution for Wah Han’s hybrid production working environment. The business would also be able to provide accurate colour reproduction and high precision image quality with the high performing DocuColor 1450 GA as required by graphic artists and marketing professionals.

FUJIFILM Business Innovation further recommended its Iridesse Production Press, the first six-colour print engine in the industry designed to expand the boundaries of digital printing. For the first time in the industry, it is possible to overlay CMYK Dry Ink with Specialty Dry Ink using FUJIFILM Business Innovation’s patented technology, which combines crystalline resin with reflective pigment particles. This would offer customers a wide selection of metallic colours that can be easily printed and finished in a single pass.

To create greater design possibilities, FUJIFILM Business Innovation’s Specialty Dry Inks are available in Gold, Silver, Clear and White. White Dry Ink, for example, contrasts favourably with dark stock or other special substrates. An underlay with White Dry ink would enhance CMYK colours and create a glossy-like finish.

The press is also powered by a modern low-temperature LED-UV curing system, which dries ink gels immediately to enable further processing or laminating. The UV gel technology and the automatic nozzle control system also allows for dimensional stability of shapes, making it much easier for applicators to fit them during gluing.

These digital processes, which would have taken time and cost with offset, would enable Wah Han to offer specialty print services on a wide range of substrates through these new ink types and papers, and bring unprecedented power of expression in digital printing.

Having built a strong partnership with FUJIFILM Business Innovation over 10 years, Wah Han knew they would find a successful solution in FUJIFILM Business Innovation’s progressive thinking and leading-edge technology.

Through uninterrupted long runs and variety of inline finishing options, the FUJIFILM Business Innovation D95 helped ramp up the business’s productivity to meet customers’ rising expectations. They were also able to develop innovative, business-generating applications such as manuals, catalogues, newsletters and marketing collaterals and produce them within aggressive turnaround times.

With FUJIFILM Business Innovation’s breakthrough in the graphics industry, Wah Han was able to produce a variety of highly reflective metallic surfaces more simply and affordably as compared to traditional metallic ink processes. These high quality and colour-rich printing expressions and capabilities provided added value to creators and contributed to a 20% expansion in Wah Han’s service offerings. The new set-up also provided a 20% increase in productivity and reduction in cost savings which raised the business’s bottom-line.

Besides contributing to Wah Han’s efficiency across the various stages of its printing workflow, the FUJIFILM Business Innovation system helped the business bundle jobs of similar proper ties such as media type, size, paper weight as well as the type of finish to minimise the time and effort required to set stock and change finisher. This enabled Wah Han to support varied short-run jobs of a spectrum of large corporations and small enterprises from a variety of industries.

With the transformation, Wah Han went beyond four-colour printing to six-colour printing to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. In addition, the flexibility to produce dynamic finished products in new formats posed a huge advantage to Wah Han in comparison to other traditional offset printers. This catapulted the enterprise from being a traditional offset printer to a leading hybrid offset and digital commercial printing company.