Currie Group EFI Open House success

Currie Group opened the doors of its Hawthorn office to showcase the latest EFI wide format products from 14 -16 April.

The EFI Open House, which follows Currie Group’s recent appointment as EFI dealer, showcased the latest EFI wide format products, featuring a live demonstration of the latest EFI Pro 32r as well as the VUTEk 32h, Pro 30f and Pro 16h hybrid printers.

“In general, people have been really excited to get out and about, again. As much as we have done pretty well through COVID with remote video, you can't match the tangible sight of seeing something print, and picking up, feeling and touching applications, as well as having discussions,” said Paul Whitehead, Business Unit Manager Wide Format. “Certainly for us, it's provided a lot of excitement to encourage customers back into the showroom.”

Service is clearly a priority for Currie Group, and even more so since its recent partnership with EFI.

Marcus Robinson, Operations Manager ANZ, Currie Group, says of around 90 staff, 60 are engaged in service related functions. "65% of the time, we don't actually need to send in an engineer on site, we resolve it remotely. We are implementing what we've done on the digital printing side of our business to extend that into the EFI side of the business as well,” he says, confirming that Currie Group is currently going through a vigorous training schedule with its engineers.

This level of service was a factor in EFI’s attraction to Currie Group as a dealer. “What has become more important to customers is the question that, if something does go wrong, who do they call? And that's where EFI saw Currie Group really come into play when they were looking to partner with us. They needed to know that we could provide a good service infrastructure, because customers can't afford for their machinery to be down,” says Paul.

“In the past our engineers were specifically trained on certain segments of machinery. Because we offer end-to-end capability, we would have an engineer on site that could only look at one of the machines, but we had customers who had a range of machines. So we changed the business model and we've cross-trained all of our engineers which obviously helps the customer not waiting for an additional engineer - we now have our subject matter specialists across the board. We ensure that our field service engineers are cross trained on 95% of all of our product portfolio,” he adds.

Another strength of Currie Group is its versatility.

“We were able to maintain and sustain through last year on the fact that we're into multiple markets and multiple segments so we're not relying on one segment or one market to keep our service workforce in place. We can pivot into different industries and keep our infrastructure and are not reliant on one brand or one industry or one segment within that market which is important,” Paul says.

Paul confirmed that the open house attracted many different customers to the Currie Group HQ and notes that, as wide format has evolved from a niche type business to more mainstream, a lot of commercial customers are now diving into wide format cross pollination, and becoming extremely competitive as they are able to produce more volumes as the applications have grown.

“I think from purely an education standpoint Currie Group has a lot to offer those entry level customers to actually turn their wide format businesses from a bolt-on or a ‘must have’, into a real profit generator,” adds Paul.