Adelaide printer Arte Grafica has slashed production costs on one of its biggest products with the install of a new digital production printer.
The company installed a new Konica Minolta bizhub Press C1100 two months ago to keep up with growing demand for on-demand digital work and free up some of its 14 staff for other value-added jobs.
Director Tony Cavaiuolo says not only is it faster and more efficient, 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.
“Because this printer costs us less to own and run, we can make a little more margin on each job. And because it’s fast, we can do more jobs in the same amount of time,” he says.
“A real highlight is the fact that we no longer have to take jobs from one machine to the next to finish them. We used to have to hand-collate jobs.
“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.”
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Arte Grafica 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.
“Once we had that machine in place, the demand just skyrocketed,” Cavaiuolo says.
“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.”
Cavaiuolo says the C1100 has helped the business keep up with demand and improved its quality from the first job, a run of 500 high-quality saddle stitched books.
“The improvements in printing half-tones and screens, which are traditionally difficult to produce on digital presses, was beyond our expectations,” he says.
“Speed and quality is the key to keeping up with the trend towards on-demand printing and electronic publishing. This new machine is significantly faster than our previous printer, from its short warm-up time to its consistent output rate.”
The machine prints at 100 impressions a minute and the in-line finishing can handle up to a 200page/50 leave booklet and trim. Arte Grafica is running it around the clock.
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