RRD Facility Spotlight: RRD Allentown

11/6/2024

Located in Pennsylvania, RRD Allentown is one of RRD’s six print fulfillment and distribution (PF&D) sites strategically located across the U.S. The facility features not only best-in-class digital print and finishing technologies, but also comprehensive warehouse and kitting capabilities. 

RRD Allentown provides products and services for customers in such industries as financial services, healthcare/pharmaceutical, and manufacturing. In addition, it serves as a distribution center for RRD plants that have inventory shipped to clients throughout the East Coast — integrating digital print and kit assembly into customer projects where needed. Digitally printed products at RRD Allentown run the gamut from short-run saddle-stitch and perfect-bound books and booklets to manuals, brochures, sell sheets, ID cards, and compliance printing. These products are complemented by custom inkjet imaging, automated inserting, kitting, mass distribution and rollout programs, pick-n-pack, and full carton distribution. 

Don Petz, Vice President, Print Fulfillment & Distribution, RRD, shares more about RRD Allentown and how it provides a comprehensive print supply chain solution for its variety of customers.

What about this facility makes it unique? 

Don Petz (DP): We are RRD’s largest and most comprehensive print fulfillment and distribution operation. The facility boasts 550,000 square feet and features a wide variety of capabilities, providing a print and supply chain solution all under one roof. This includes the ability to ship preprinted inventory produced by other RRD facilities — forms, labels, and commercial print work — along with digital print inventory that we produce in-house, combine them, and then send the complete finished project out to the client. 

If you had to narrow it down to one thing, what do you consider the facility’s forte?  

DP: RRD Allentown allows customers to order digital print-on-demand along with existing stored or supplied inventory — as a result, we’re able to create an optimized print supply chain for our clients while fulfilling orders based on the recipient’s particular needs. Through our customer-specific solutions and our investment in digital print technology, we can truly provide an unmatched experience. Our capabilities enable us to increase speed-to-market while reducing freight expenses, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership.

Can you share a client project where the facility’s technology played a critical role?

DP: We produce personalized and versioned enrollment books for managed care insurance providers, enabling those organizations to deliver critical information to their clients and prospective clients. The project requires us to source and utilize a variety of paper substrates — carbonless forms for the application inside the book, 20-lb. bond paper, a business return envelope, and pre-printed covers that feature the insurance provider’s specific logo and branding. We digitally image the book’s internal pages using automated tray pulls (where each tray in the digital device holds the appropriate paper stocks), and they’re then perfect-bound on our finishing equipment. We ship the books, along with other sales collateral, to sales agents or, if the client prefers, we send them directly to their customers through the mail stream. 

What role do you see RRD Allentown playing in its clients' evolution? How do you help your clients evolve as they strive to keep pace with customers’ demands?  

DP: By utilizing digital printing technology, RRD Allentown can offer solutions that might start primarily as pre-printed inventory on the shelf, but then ultimately become a print-on-demand solution. A digitally produced piece of collateral, for instance, could feature not only the recipient’s name and information but also the sales agent’s name and contact information, providing additional value to the printed piece. We’re able to deliver an extensive print supply chain solution comprising longer-run, pre-printed inventory and shorter-run, static inventory printed digitally — along with on-shelf and/or digitally printed and personalized items. 

When talking about RRD Allentown to a potential customer, what’s the one thing you find yourself repeating time and time again?  

DP: The breadth of our digital print capabilities. We have 18 production devices, including an industry-leading inkjet color cut-sheet press. By having this extensive digital asset base under one roof, we can take on larger programs that need to be completed within a predefined time period. Plus, we have the redundancy to move jobs as needed from one print device to the other. Those capabilities are complemented by our robust kit assembly services — our facility can store thousands of SKUs in more than 40,000 pallet locations and 50,000 forward pick bin locations. 

Anything else you’d care to add about RRD Allentown? 

DP: The Allentown facility is cGMP-compliant, and is HIPAA and CMS compliant with an annual SOC 2 + HITRUST CSF third-party assessment. Also, as I mentioned earlier, Allentown is one of RRD’s six print fulfillment and distribution sites, and is the largest. Because we’re networked together, we can share resources across our sites — providing numerous benefits to customers, including:

• Reduced transit time to the recipient 
• Lower actual cost of freight, because we’re closer to the recipient
• A built-in business continuity and disaster recovery plan — if one site happens to be down for some reason, another has the same program and inventory to ensure the job is completed in a timely fashion 

For more information about this facility, visit RRD Allentown's location page.