South Australian company Arte Grafica has installed a new Konica Minolta bizhub Press C1100, which it says has slashed production costs on one of its biggest products. The company installed the digital printer two months ago to keep up with growing demand for on-demand digital work and free up some of its 14 staff for other jobs.

(l-r) Trever Thomas, Konica Minolta with Arte Grafica director De’Arne Cavaiuolo and Andrew Hoffman

Tony Cavaiuolo, director of Arte Grafica, says not only is it faster and more efficient, but the attached in-line saddle stitcher saves 50 per cent on production costs for books, which make up a third of the new machine’s work. Cavaiuolo says, “Because this printer costs us less to own and run, we can make a little more margin on each job. And because it is fast, we can do more jobs in the same amount of time. “A real highlight is the fact that we no longer have to take jobs from one machine to the next to finish them. “Now, the C1100 finishes everything, which frees up staff to get on with more value added work. All of these benefits contribute directly to the bottom line.” Arte Grafica says it made a big push into digital three years ago with a Konica Minolta C8000, to service a growing number of customers requesting projects that were small, urgent, and low-cost. Since then it has tripled sales on a range of products it had until then been producing on its A1 and A2 offset presses, such as books, posters, business cards and other fast turnaround commercial jobs. Cavaiuolo says, “Once we had that machine in place, the demand just skyrocketed. “Having a digital machine gave us the ability to do a wider variety of jobs, attracting more clients, and giving us more opportunity to expand the business. “Not only did we have the same clients giving us more work, we also had more clients coming in, both large and small.”

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