The Bureau Realigning Its Operations to Embrace Digital Printing, Workflow Automation

MINNEAPOLIS—April 19, 2012—The Bureau of Engraving, a 114-year-old, Minneapolis-based commercial printing and distance education company, announced that its graphics division—known as “The Bureau”—is realigning the company by merging its digital and offset businesses into a single business unit.

“The printing industry is moving quickly with digital technology, we continue to stay on top of those changes and reaffirm our commitment to our customers by investing in key hardware and software that improves the way we print for our customers,” states Lynne Alexander, chair and CEO of Bureau of Engraving. “We are up against tremendous competition and we need every advantage we can get. This realignment removes a lot of the traditional touch-points in the offset workflow and embraces a digital and automation strategy for the future.”

“It has become clear to us, we can no longer have separate offset and digital businesses, we have to be a digitally driven business and embrace technology and automation,” states Patrick Stuart, executive vice president. “The time is now to merge these businesses, take advantages of what a digitally driven and automated workflow can bring to traditional offset printing.”

As part of this realignment, The Bureau will consolidate many separate departments into three groups—sales support, output and finishing/fulfillment.

“We need to align our business with our changing customer needs and become a much more agile print provider,” added Stuart.

Along with this realignment, The Bureau is adding UV printing capabilities to its two-year-old, 73˝ manroland six-color sheetfed press, as well as additional UV flatbed inkjet printing capacity, digital finishing equipment and workflow automation software to their portfolio. These additions will help with the merging of the two business units as well as streamline and add automation to the overall workflow.

“We are excited to move into this next phase of our business and as a result of the realignment we are now One Bureau,” added Alexander. “We are streamlining our operations, adding additional capabilities, like UV printing and additional inkjet technology, and expanding our overall print capacity. We remain, ready as ever, to handle whatever our customers can throw our way.”

About The Bureau
The Bureau is a woman owned and operated national commercial printing business that has been in operation for over 114 years. The company is a national leader that offers the latest technology in digital and offset point of purchase, packaging label printing, QR and bar coding, and marketing services. Some of the biggest names in retail are customers. Diversity is a core value of The Bureau; women and minorities make up nearly 40 percent of the workforce.

Source: The Bureau.