The company currently employs approximately 120 full-time employees and provides printing services to the Australian domestic market. Its core business is commercial offset printing, which accounts for about 65% of total sales. The remainder of the business provides a wide range of services, including commercial digital printing, large format digital printing, software development and 3PL warehousing services. The customers vary from direct corporates through to agency publishers and some print managers (brokers).
“Originally our business was offset offerings only and whilst offset is still representing the majority of our turnover, Southern Impact has evolved and diversified into other market segments as mentioned above. We want to have a holistic offering to our clients underpinned by delivering a quality product and services every time.”
Printshops nowadays are facing increasing challenges of shorter run lengths, faster turnaround times, increasing costs, a competition for talent and declining print prices. Therefore, it’s important more than ever that print shops are optimizing every aspect of their production to stay competitive and profitable.” says Rod Dawson, Managing Director of Southern Impact.
The business will continue to invest into latest technology to underpin our service offering and achieve lean, efficient manufacturing outcomes at the same time.
Plateau in demand of Commercial Print Work whereas other sectors such as Packaging, Labels, Retail POS continue to grow. Clients expect faster turn around and extremely competitive pricing with most transactions. Clients are also seeking more and more one stop shops with a holistic offering across all areas such as products, services B2B integration.
“We therefore need to continue to identify bottlenecks in the overall workflow to meet the ever-increasing demand for fast turnarounds from our customers. At the same time, we have to tackle challenges such as increasing market share, retaining qualified staff, rising material costs and supply delays.” says Dawson.
“Since we have the latest technology in Prepress (CtP), Presses as well as postpress equipment from Heidelberg, the integration between Prinect Production Manager and our Production floor is outmost importance. As it addresses many of the points as mentioned for us. It gives us a lean production workflow, a consistent quality outcome, accurate repeatability, and transparency across the entire production which in turn helps to identify any bottlenecks and uncover potential areas for further improvements. In addition to our Production Floor which we have fully integrated with Production Manager, we also use our Prinect Business Manager – also integrated with Production Manager - as our MIS/CRM collecting shop floor data allowing us to closely analyse our performance in real time.”
Production Manager enables to centralise the entire workflow and ensures consistency throughout the entire production which allows Southern Impact to apply a tight standardisation in procedures and colour management. This reduces errors and increases quality and repeatability.
The advancements of the Production Manager allowed them to do very high volumes of work and plating with reduced staff numbers supporting their lean manufacturing policy approach.
“Southern Impact remain committed and excited about the future of the graphic arts industry. We have always invested in the latest technology to ensure we can continue to operate in a lean and efficient manner. We have just taken possession of a new Speedmaster XL 106-10P which will provide us with the latest in printing automation, speed and manufacturing sustainability. We firmly believe companies will need to be at the cutting edge of technology to be able to thrive in an ever evolving market place. Working in partnership with our suppliers has always been a key contributing factor in our success and this will continue to be the case.
Our reputation has been built on quality of manufacturing and building long term relationships with our customers but adding real value. These outcomes will be present in everything we do as we strive to maintain a successful business for our staff, customers and suppliers.” Dawson stated.
Southern Impact
181 Forster Rd Mount Waverley
Victoria 3149 Australia
Phone: (03) 8796 7000
southernimpact.com.au
