SCREEN Americas’ Steady Growth Fuels Impetus for Move to New, Larger, State-of-the-Art Technology Center in Chicago Area

SCREEN Americas will be relocating in Fall 2020, to new, larger, more fully equipped and resourced North American headquarters in one of the Chicago area’s most replete business and industrial enterprise centers, Elk Grove Village, Illinois. The campus will be housed in a new construction, state-of-the-art technology park and will include an equipment staging and shipping depot, increased office space, and a leading edge Customer Experience Center just 15 minutes from O’Hare International Airport.

Established in California in 1967 as Dainippon SCREEN USA, a division of Kyoto-based SCREEN Graphic Solutions Co., Ltd, the company has been headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois since 1975, when its principal product was prepress image scanners manufactured for offset printing operations across the country.

Regarded as one of the leading manufacturers and providers of digital inkjet printing technology around the world, SCREEN Graphic Solutions Co., Ltd (part of the international SCREEN Group) and its Western Hemisphere Graphic Arts division, SCREEN Americas, have experienced consistent, year-over-year growth this past decade with the company’s key indicators pointing to continued expansion of its sales over the next three years and beyond. Ken Ingram, president of SCREEN Americas, says, “We were looking for a facility that will serve our needs for years to come. We want to be able to fulfill customer demand by providing complete solutions.”

Driven by the rapid adoption of inkjet as an increasingly popular and viable printing production solution within the broader printing industry, SCREEN, which has played a key role in pioneering and popularizing the technology, has achieved increases in virtually every facet of its business: equipment and workflow solutions, inks and other consumables, parts and service/support. 

Global installations have escalated in the past few years for its industry-leading digital inkjet, roll-fed Truepress Jet520 printing presses and Truepress Jet L350UV roll-fed inkjet label printing devices. Supporting the associated growth in supply chain demand for the presses currently in operation was one of the key drivers in moving to larger quarters. “We will use our existing facility in Rolling Meadows for warehousing,” stated Ingram. “This will allow our new facility, which is coincidentally housed on Innovation Drive, to be used to showcase new technologies, and benchmark and demonstrate new solutions for the markets we serve.”

Steadily growing interest in SCREEN’s highly regarded Truepress Jet line of high-speed inkjet technologies has resulted in a growing number of customer visits to its current Rolling Meadows facility. “That also played a major role in our deliberations,” Ingram continued. “As we projected demand in the next six to 18 months and beyond, and planned for new products in new markets, the need for a new Customer Experience Center became an additional focus.” 

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Its centerpiece, state-of-the-art Customer Experience Center will afford SCREEN Americas a comprehensive demonstration and training complex capable of handling future growth from the company’s planned launch of additional new Print on Demand (POD) technology offerings within the company’s portfolio of label and packaging solutions, as well as its high speed continuous feed solutions for the commercial print, direct mail, transactional, and publishing markets. “Customers will be invited to tour our new facility during our Open House, which will be planned later this year,” states Mark Schlimme, Vice President of Marketing at SCREEN Americas. “And in support of new and current customers, our sales and service personnel will be available for product training at this new facility.”

To support the company’s growth, SCREEN’s Service and Sales organizations will be expanded, including the addition of service and product support technicians working with dedicated sales and product manager teams, along with further capital investments in advanced service technology and delivery solutions. “This move will allow SCREEN to grow within the markets we already serve,” added Ingram.
“As we moved through the relocation planning and evaluation process, working in concert with SCREEN senior management in Kyoto, it became more and more clear that we needed to move all operations to a new, larger, modern, Class ‘A’ space,” Ingram concludes.