Weekending farmer, Bruce Peddlesden likes to see things grow from the ground up. It may be a long stretch to compare his yearly wheat crop to Online Printing’s $15 million annual turnover, but for Peddlesden, both grew from the ground up.
Today’s 80-employee digital behemoth first saw the light of day in the 1980s as a two-man operation.
“The only reason I had to have the one employee at start-up was to run the machine because of my 80 per cent sight loss and complete colour blindness,” he freely admits.
This from a man who has masterminded arguably Australia’s largest digital colour print output (latterly from a giant Indigo 7000). In fact he has no hesitation in billboarding On Demand as the biggest (purely) digital printer in Australia, with black-and-white output running 24 hours, seven days a week. The throughput from his bank of mono Océ plant is simply astounding.
Confidence in the role of IT
This from a man who can claim to have been the first user of the earliest Canon colour copier in Australia; the first to progress to a BJA1 machine and the second in the world to have linked a RiP to a colour copier. His early confidence in the important role which IT was to play in the burgeoning digital printing world was to justify his being the first digital print supplier to create a RiP with digitised inks, using the legendary Dicenet system to send a computer file to a colour copier.
The Peddelsden progress report follows not unconventional stepping stones. Early grounding in plan printing; thought it a good idea and bought the company. Branch established in Perth, expansion into other states, all things going gung-ho, seemingly logical merger with major document distribution company ending in subsequent financial disaster and break-up into separate divisions; ending with buy-back of the printing operation (at less than net asset value, he rapturously recalls).
It is a measure of the man that he nominates the buy-back as being motivated “mainly because I didn’t want to see people who had worked with me lose their jobs”.
It is now a chapter in the history books that success followed a man dedicated to doing things well. His early conviction that in today’s industry there is little point in being merely a printer quickly took him down the variable data path, to the point where today he can justifiably claim On Demand is involved in “extreme” variable data. This he illustrates by the fact that the company creates variable data products, packs, and projects in the majority of cases of which the IT component is up to 80 per cent of the project and the print component as little as the remaining 20 per cent. To bolster this capability, On Demand has six full time IT professionals on staff.
Critical of recent trend
Today the Port Melbourne-based company regularly turns out literally massive
jobs in difficult-to-grasp short turnaround times. Peddlesden cited a recent requirement by the Victorian Government for a desalination plant impact study involving 1.4 million A4 colour images, turned around within three weeks.
The company has recently developed an emphasis on creating cross-media solutions for a wide range of businesses, a progression only made possible by its emphasis on IT.
As a result, not surprisingly, the other element of the Peddlesden formula for success is his unequivocal commitment to the digital world. He is critical of a recent trend where attempts are made to combine digital printing with offset under the one management roof because he is convinced that even today, business people have a lot of difficulty in understanding where digital printing fits in.
“The mentality of offset is wrong for digital printing. There are real dangers in going into digital printing with an offset mentality; it’s the wrong way of going about it,” he contends, warning that “you cannot run an offset company with a digital component; the two need to be separated”.
One of the lessons which have driven the On Demand success story is Peddlesden’s conviction that today’s production path is no longer the conventional one, where a job is printed in the one plant and then distributed to the various parts of the marketplace where it is required. Rather than this print and distribute model, he has long since been convinced that the more efficient, more profitable and in the end, more customer-focused approach is the exact opposite. Distribute and Print, rather than Print and Distribute, provides savings in time, savings in costs, and enables a customer to ensure that a series of sales meetings in six capital cities can receive their promotion material locally, having been printed there from an electronic file distributed from the originating source.
Australian version
To take this bespoke service one step further, Peddlesden has masterminded an Australian version of the International Printers Network (IPN), a multi-national organisation of like-minded printers who represent each other in their country and through whose co-operation international printing business can be generated. IPN claims to have the greatest coverage of any printing group around the globe.
As a result of this membership – On Demand is the exclusive offshoot in Australia – On Demand is regularly involved in jobs which are required by companies headquartered in the USA, Japan, Singapore, Holland and Sweden. To a lesser extent, Australian companies with overseas offshoots will reverse the process. Its real impact is felt by multinational companies who need to have their support and promotional material printed in all the markets in which they do business and can achieve this by a one-stop shop formula.
The local version, comprising six printers (Tasmania and the ACT are yet to be added) operates on a unique co-operative pricing model in that each member agrees to abide by the original price quoted to the customer by the originating printer. The group met at the recent PacPrint in Melbourne to finalise the administrative arrangements and is now operating on a fully co-operative basis. No prizes for guessing who the pioneer and founding member was. Ever the trail blazer, Bruce Peddlesden believes in his craft and its capabilities, but more importantly, in its potential for assisting modern business to achieve its goals.
A measure of this approachable and down-to-earth forward thinker is his commitment to the environment. On Demand maintains a “Green Team” to monitor the company’s pollution and waste minimisation, among other “green” initiatives. ISO 14001 compliance has been added to the important colour standard 12647 PSO accreditation, again the first small-format digital printer in the world to achieve this important milestone. It makes it possible for Peddlesden to achieve his latest objective: to develop a hub-and-spoke model which requires absolute adherence to colour disciplines.
It all sounds as if everything in the Peddlesden past has been without any setbacks. He is the first to admit he has made mistakes in years gone by, although the limit to those should always be, according to the On Demand chief, “mistakes that can bankrupt you”.
He values good advice and has always gone out of his way to seek it from those whose opinion he values. “But at the end of the day, you have to back your own judgment,” he maintains.
Seems that so far he’s backed more winners than also-rans.
Comment below to have your say on this story.
If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.
Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter