Over thirty years ago, the printing industry as we knew it changed. Computer-driven, digital production printers were on the horizon and began to appear in the product lines of Xerox, Hewlett Packard, Kodak, Canon, and others. Not since Chester Carlson's invention of xerography in 1938 had there been such an innovation in the printing industry. The war had begun and arsenals were full of proprietary file formats, resolution ratios, toner particle size, printing speeds, RIP speeds, halftone screens, and so many more. It was chaos!

The machine that made Print-on-Demand possible. The Xerox DocuTech.

In 1991, we were the first to invest in a new, state-of-the-art monochrome printer from Xerox called DocuTech - the original digital, high-speed production printer. This new machine was a gigantic laser printer driven by a computerized front end. We eventually added some pretty sophisticated asset management tools and, before we knew it, we had one of the very first completely digital printing systems. As a matter of fact, the next closest installation was an insurance company in North Carolina. It was a huge risk - we had just made a deliberate commitment to Print-on-Demand and found ourselves on the cutting edge of a printing revolution.

As pioneers in this revolution, we had to prove our firm grasp on our newfound capability before we could offer it to our clients. So, after months of beta-testing along side Xerox (their tech-reps were onsite with our staff for several weeks) we began educating a few select customers about the concept of printing-on-demand. We demonstrated the value and cost-effectiveness of just-in-time delivery, the benefits of replacing their document inventories, and basically showing them a brand new way to approach buying printed material. All the while, we were just starting to realize the true potential of our investment.

Thirty-plus years later, we are still on the cutting edge and our dedication to POD is as strong as ever. The dozens of production processes, web-enabled tools, workflows, printers, finishing devices, and customer service have shown our clients the dedication we have to POD. Today, we partner with training organizations, manufacturers, publishers, universities, and others to produce their manuals, instruction guides, training documents, catalogs, and classroom text on-demand.