Part 2

Fenske Media Knows the Data Drill

How did Fenske Media transform itself from a small, family-owned print shop to a data-driven communications powerhouse serving customers across the U.S.? Some might attribute the company’s success to a combination of visionary leadership, commitment to ongoing learning and good timing. Others might say that’s just how they do things in South Dakota.

Fenske & Mt. Rushmore

Fenkse Media is located in Rapid City, SD, practically in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore. Indeed both entities have a lot in common. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum had to carve a mountain—something that had never been done before.

Borglum, with the help of his son, Lincoln, supervised hundreds of workers from 1927 to 1941. First powdermen cut and set charges of dynamite to remove precise amount of rock. Next drillers and assistant carvers “honeycombed” the granite to facilitate its removal. Finally workers smoothed the surface using a small jackhammer with a rotating bit.

Brothers Dave, Brian, John and Tom are the Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln of Fenske Media. Like Borglum, the Fenske family adapted existing tools to achieve specific and targeted results. If you seek their monument, you have only to look around their sparkling plant. Your eyes might gravitate to the state-of-the-art digital equipment, but the longer you talk to the brothers Fenske, the more the company’s data prowess sticks out like George Washington’s 21-ft.-long nose on Mt. Rushmore.

Database Experts

As the company’s website explains: “Information today is a form of currency. Fenske creates and prints materials that drive high rates of return with increased revenues to helps clients leverage their databases.”

Indeed, as my fellow Greensheet contributor Dennis Mason observed, Fenske is far more than a printer: “It’s a database management company that uses printing to provide clients with a complete service—from conceiving programs that clients use to reach consumers, through design and testing, and then mailing after execution in print,” says Mason. “The Fenske Media website lists its presses and bindery machines, but data management tools and computers take precedence. Perhaps even more telling are things like SAS 70 Certification and a Caterpillar 550kw standby power source with automatic transfer switch to ensure data security and continuity.”

Founding Father Paul Fenske

The Fenske brothers cite their late father’s vision and entrepreneurial spirit as a key guiding force. “He always said, ‘Don’t ever say no, find a way,’’’ recalls Tom.

 In 1957, Paul Fenske and his wife founded the company with $4,000 worth of letterpress equipment they purchased in Minneapolis. In 1977, when Dave graduated from college and joined the business, paste-up was the order of the day. Galleys were created using output produced on a Linotype. The company was just on the cusp of adding an offset press.

“Over the next decade we were on the fringe of [being] computerized,” recalls Dave. “Meanwhile, during the Carter Administration, business dried up. Paper went up and up, with salespeople coming in two or three times a day [with new price lists]. Film kept going up. We couldn’t keep up.”

Salvation arrived in the form of a weekly real estate listing book. With a current population of 67,956, Rapid City is the second largest city in South Dakota. In the late 1970s, there were 300 real estate agents in town. Every Thursday, they needed listings, indexed by ascending prices and street. It took 12 hours of processing on a mainframe to generate the listings on green bar paper which the printer then keylined and shot with a photostat camera.

Citibank Comes to South Dakota

As a “flyover” state, South Dakota was an unlikely location for some of the nation’s leading financial institutions. But In 1980, Walter Wriston, then president of Citibank moved the bank’s credit card operations from New York to South Dakota. New York’s usury laws coupled with a double-digit inflation rates, prompted the move.

“You are lending money at 12 percent and paying 20 percent,” Wriston told Frontline in 2004. “You don't have to be Einstein to realize you're out of business.”

At the time, South Dakota was in dire economic straits—even the revenues generated from 3 million annual visitors to Mt. Rushmore were no match for lousy wheat prices and rampant inflation. With the blessing of the state legislature, then Governor Bill Janklow, drafted an emergency bill eliminating the state’s usury laws. Delaware soon followed South Dakota’s lead, but in the interim, many credit card companies relocated to South Dakota.

Opportunity Knocks

Fenske Media welcomed the new arrivals. “We asked one customer what kept them up at night,” recalls Dave Fenske. “They had a ‘Take One’ credit card application displayed on top of cigarette machines and store counters. The customer said “If we knew which neighborhoods or stores the [returned] applications came from, we could profile the neighborhood, and grow our portfolio.’”

The Fenske crew put on its thinking caps and came up with a solution that involved combining a 40-inch press sheet with a single-line inkjet spray line (a Videojet model developed for food canning applications) and a glue line. A DOS-based programmer in Chicago (none could be found in Rapid City) completed the set up.

From those rather primitive roots, Fenske Media developed its central database management expertise. “We’re sharing information in real time, 24/7 with our customers,” says Dave. “Who bought something, what they bought, how much they bought and so on…We’re looking for patterns of communication, in essence the dots across the board. Analytics help us connect the dots and make sense of the data.”

An Increasingly Digital World

Today, about 60 percent of Fenske’s work is digital, a number that is only expected to grow. In addition to banking and financial customers, Fenske works with insurance, health care, non-profits, political, religious, tourism and government clients. Examples of its data-driven solutions include CRM tools (lead management, response tracking/reporting); non-profit intelligence (automated donor acquisition and management system and relationship building); Real-time collateral management; loyalty building (consumer database management and direct mail reporting).

Tom Fenske likes to describe what Fenske does as "Sending love letters to people who love what that company stands for and what it sells. We see a lift of 20% to 30% for many mailings  by tailoring the mail package, words and pictures to a particular corporation's microsegmented active, cold or defector customer file."

The Inside Scoop

Fenske Media is a model of efficiency. The 90,000 -sq.-ft. plant has 50 employees (including eight 8 database specialists) and operates on a 1.5 shift schedule. It's a lean operation, with a labor/sales ratio materially below the national average.

"We believe that when we give our talented employees the tools they need to do their jobs-the technology as well as our proprietary software-we can use direct mail to its full advantage," says Tom. "We're helping our customers grow their top and bottom lines."

• Kodak Prosper 5000XL Platform (first U.S. direct mail installation)
• 8-color Heidelberg perfector with aqueous coater
• Kodak VL2200 web press (4-color duplex variable data/image, with perf & 3-hole punch inline) 
• Kodak Nexpress 3600
• Xeikon 5000
• Three Halm Jet Presses
• Three Pitney Bowes high speed inserters (two MPS 22k/one Flowmaster 16k)

Fenske installed the Kodak Prosper 5000XL in December 2010. The high speed inkjet press gives it the flexibility to produce offset quality output across a range of full-color mail applications on glossy paper, including personalized self-mailers with membership cards and reply envelopes built-in, fully variable  direct mail and more.

The full color press offers 4-over-4 perfecting with a print width of up to 24.5 inches (62.2 cm) at speeds up to 658 feet per minute (200 mpm). Depending on the job requirements, Fenske often runs rolls as narrow as 18 inches. Duty cycle is 120 million A4 or US letter pages per month.

The press can achieve print quality up to 175 lpi on uncoated, matte, and glossy papers ranging from 45 to 300 grams per square meter or 30 to 200 pound text weight. To reach the required quality levels its customers demand, Fenske uses pre-treated glossy coated substrates and will be adding a pre-treatment module (Inline Optimization Station).

The Big Finish

During our tour, Tom Fenske also pointed out some bindery and finishing highlights. Some of us old timers were cheered to see an old Heidelberg letterpress tucked away in a corner but very much in operation doing some die cutting. As many printers will attest, for odd jobs sometimes you just can’t beat the classics. Fenske doesn’t do much in the way in fancy finishing with foils or embossing and doesn’t have much call for perfect binding.

An inline InterFlex UV coater on the Kodak Prosper 5000XL provides extra rub protection and hi gloss finish to  on coated stocks. Fenske can produce offset quality output across a range of full-color mail applications on glossy paper, including personalized variable catalogs, self-mailers and direct mail.

Tom also called our attention to the company's ability to produce booklets and magazines with variable page counts. One person might get a customized 12-page travel brochure about England, while another might receive a 40-page version showing English bird watching tours (bird lover), accommodations and train schedules.

Sounds like a real postpress challenge, but it isn’t, thanks to a Standard Horizon StitchLiner 6000. Variable sheet-count booklets can be produced using barcode scanning or mark reading. The digital high-speed saddlestitcher has been integrated with Standard Hunkeler’s UW6 unwinder and CS6 rotary cutter for production of up to 6,000 high-quality booklets per hour, in-line with continuous feed printers. It provides in-line cover feeding and non-stop booklet production on a very wide range of paper stocks.

Fenske’s latest addition is a Pitney Bowes Print+ Messenger system. As InfoTrends’ Jim Hamilton notes, the process color inkjet system was introduced at Graph Expo in 2010. Fenske will use it for printing personalized messages, logos and split testing  and postage on the outside of envelopes.

Additional postpress highlights include:

• Two Heidelberg Polar cutting systems
• Variety of folding systems up to 50 inches wide
• Two Flexo mailers systems for inline self-mailer finishing
• Two Standard Hunkeler roll-to-sheet systems with MBO folding in-line
• Standard Hunkeler Veriweb System
• Two Bowe Bell + Howell Enduro Inserters with Printegrity ink jet + JetVision
• Bowe One Enabled for Item Management tracking
• Roll fed, pinless, slit merge, accumulator, folder, direct into inserter
• Three Bowe Bell+Howell standard inserters with inline ink jet printing
• Muller Martini 6-pocket + cover stitcher
• Ehret SVC 775 C high-speed 600 fpm variable sheeter

Coming Soon: A Digital Mountain

Don’t look now, but Mt. Rushmore is going digital, too. Last year, CyArk, a company that digitally preserves cultural heritage sites, was part of a project that involved three teams of climbers with laser scanners. Many sensitive, off-limit areas were being documented necessitating strict data security protocols. Ultimately billions of data points representing a millimetrically accurate model of the mountain and park.

The National Park Service will use the data to create a realistic interactive model of Mt. Rushmore for virtual tours. A data-driven vacation experience? Now that sounds like South Dakota!

Part 3
Stream Technology Partnerships  

At the Fenske Media open house, Bill Schweinfurth, Manager, Market Development Communications Group, summarized the advantages of Kodak’s Stream continuous inkjet (CIJ) technology vs. drop-on-demand (DOD) and other technologies; explained the field upgrade path from the monochrome Prosper 1000 to color 5000XL; and provided some case studies illustrating how customers are growing their businesses.

Briefly Noted: Kodak’s Stream Inkjet Technology & the Coated Paper Challenge

The 5000XL has a print width of 24.5 inches on a 25.5-inch wide web, with speeds approaching 650 feet per minute. The image equivalent for the color press is 133-175 lines per inch.

The Prosper’s Stream technology is a continuous inkjet process (CIJ) with what Schweinfurth termed “revolutionary” differences vs. other CIJ and drop-on-demand (DOD) approaches.

Each stream of ink is subjected to miniscule heat pulses which changes the fluid’s surface tension and divides the stream into large or small droplets. Only the larger, heavier droplets reach the paper—a steady air current pushes the smaller, lighter droplets aside into a recycling path.

With drop generation at 400KHz, Schweinfurth equated Stream technology to traveling at 50 mph vs. DOD at 17 mph. In terms of reliability, he said Stream heads and jetting systems achieve about 1,000 hours of life—the equivalent of a 12,054-mile trip from New York to South Africa, vs. other inkjet technologies which he likened to a trip from New York to St. Louis (1,185 miles).

Tiny particles won’t clog printheads

Stream technology sidesteps the clogging/coating paper challenge seen with some drop-on-demand (DOD) and other inkjet technologies. DOD inks typically require significant wetting agents (i.e., humectants) to prevent clogging in the print heads. But the additional wetting agents may restrict substrate options—DOD inks can be difficult to apply to non-porous stocks.

Prosper’s nano-particulate ink reduces clogging concerns while reportedly increasing color saturation with less overall ink usage. The ink requires only a trace amount of wetting agents and therefore poses less of a glossy stock challenge.

Inkjet coated paper quest continues

HP, Kodak and Océ are all working with the leading coated paper manufacturers to expand the range of coated stock choices for high-speed production class inkjet presses. As InfoTrends’ Jim Hamilton observed: “To date, placements of high-speed color continuous feed devices in the 10 million+ duty cycle category have been heavily weighted toward transaction, direct mail, and some book printing environments. As devices add the ability to print on economical coated stocks, the application set will grow to include higher quality documents such as promotional pieces, color books, catalogs, custom publications and magazines.”

Pretreatment potentially expands substrate options

To reach the required quality levels its customers demand, Fenske uses pre-treated glossy coated substrates and will be adding a pre-treatment module (Inline Optimization Station). As OutputLinks noted last year, the in-line module is built around a roll coating technology that allows the use of a wide range of water-based pre-treatment fluids, with different chemistries, viscosities and coat weights. Pre-treatment can be applied to a variety of paper surfaces: coated or uncoated, matte, silk, or glossy.

The Inline Optimization Station’s water-based pretreatment fluids contain adhesion-promoting additives that can be customized depending on the specific paper stock being treated. Virtually any paper surface can be pretreated.

As Donald J Burns, Kodak Business Development Director – Media previously told us, the optional module lets users get good results from different types and grades of paper. Pretreatment can be applied to all kinds of different paper surfaces, coated or uncoated, matte, silk, or glossy.

“I think this is really significant, in business terms, as it will let printers use the widest possible range of standard offset and commercial inkjet papers,” said Burns. “It’s not the most glamorous side of the Prosper revolution, but in-line optimization is going to help a lot of Kodak customers compete and win profitable business, without having to invest in a warehouse full of different papers.”

In Closing

I hope my industry reviews prove of value to your professional interests. You can follow me via the RSS feed button and talk to me via the Comments Section. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you,

Katherine O’Brien
Senior Editor American Printer
Senior Editor OutputLinks Communication Group
KOB@OutputLinksCG.com