Company Profile: Getting the Inkjet Details Right

High Cotton USA, Inc. in Birmingham, AL, is bringing color and capabilities to its expanding roster of clients thanks to a pair of new presses and an excruciating attention to detail.

By leveraging color, High Cotton has been able expand its business by tapping into new verticals such as banking, health care, and utilities.

The company was founded in 1962, primarily as a service bureau for publishers. It specializes in financial documents, working in vertical markets that involve financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies. “We also get involved in health care with medical billing, as well as utilities and account receivable management, or collection letters,” said President and CEO Thomas S. McGahey, who purchased the firm in April 1988.

Its 75 employees are split between its two facilities: a 130,000-square-foot plant in Birmingham and a 15,000-square-foot facility in Coppell, TX, a suburb of Dallas.

Year-over-year sales rose by 15 percent in 2015, McGahey reported, and projections are calling for a 20 percent gain this year. “We are having a very good year, better than last year. We are growing, and the two SuperWeb machines have a lot to do with that.”

Power of the Presses

The biggest event of 2014, according to McGahey, was getting its two Super Web Digital WEBJet 200D commercial presses, one for each location, up to speed. High Cotton needed to transition from preprinted shells to a white-paper-in shop to remain competitive. The units, powered by Memjet inkjet print head technology, have enabled High Cotton to evolve into a white paper shop with full variable color capabilities at an acquisition price that was half the cost of competing products.

The presses “allowed us to move to a white paper factory,” McGahey explained, “so that instead of having to preprint shells, or buy preprinted shells, we now print everything from a white sheet. It also allows us to give our clients much more flexibility in the design of their documents because they are not locked in to certain areas of the page that they cannot put variable data on because of the preprint shell. Now they can use variable data in any color anywhere on the page.”

The other major factor, he addes, is that “we get the details right. The financial document business is a very detail-oriented business, and that is our mantra. If you look at our website you will see that it’s our tag line, Get the details right – that’s what we do. That’s why, once clients come to us, they stay.” High Cotton is an SSAE-16 SOC 1 Type II organization, he continues. “That requires that we have those policies and procedures in place to make sure that the details are covered."

Every document the company prints has a 2D barcode on it, which is tracked by cameras throughout the process: at the printer and the inserter or folder in the case of a self-mailer. The barcode includes all the vital statistics for each page of a particular document.

“If it’s a multi-page document,” McGahey said, “first it will identify who the owner of that document is. Then there will be a job ID for that particular file that our client sent us. Then it will have a unique document ID for that document, whether it’s a one-pager or a multi-page document. And then it will tell the camera and the software that this particular 2D barcode it is reading is page one of however many pages there are. We track those documents all the way through the process.” If a document gets diverted -- that is, if a camera sees something it doesn’t agree with -- the automated system knows that that document needs to be reprinted and sends it back to the print room.

Black, White and Beyond

Color, McGahey pointed out, has made the difference. “A lot of those markets had been strictly black and white. They had not utilized color. On the financial side a lot of that business, the rendering of those statements, has been in-house operations, and those in-house operations are using technology from back in the early '60s. They’re just strictly black and white, not very attractive. We’ve gone out and shown them that their documents can be attractive, and can be used as marketing tools as well as statements of account.”

By providing customers with customized document printing, High Cotton is reducing costs by 75 percent per image. Said  McGahey, “That’s the difference in the cost of ink for color versus toner for color. We have clients who have been using toner-based color, and could only use it for very high-end clients, those who had a lot of money for their institutions (and) were willing to pay the price for the color. Now we have been able to bring color down to an affordable price for all documents with inkjet versus toner.”

The remainder of this year into next looks nothing but promising, McGahey concluded. “We continue to convert clients to our system so they can utilize full-variable color, and that’s what we plan to do next year. A lot of people call it trans-promotional; we call it onserts. Marketing messages are onserted on the document rather than being inserted into the envelope along with the document.”