Offset Printing
Haines Printing Moves Digital Jobs Back to Offset with RMGT 9 Series Press
Wednesday 18. October 2017 - The press has opened up capacity and costs savings far beyond what the shop originally anticipated.
Haines Printing, based in North East, PA, loved their Ryobi 755 they had been running for years. So when the time came to replace another, older offset press, they knew they wanted to upgrade to the RMGT 9 Series press. Before installation, Haines Printing had maxed out the single shift they were running. Today, on that same single shift, they have opened up new capacity and are now focused on adding new clients and jobs.
“We can be very competitive now,” said Jeff Haines, President of Haines Printing. “We can run twice the sheet size, with half the number of plates, sheets, signatures, etc. We are moving more work, and we have more time we can fill with additional jobs now.” In fact, the press is so efficient, Haines Printing has begun shifting work back onto the offset press from the digital they had begun switching to.
“We put in a digital press last December, and work was starting to migrate that way, with our digital runs getting longer. Now, with the RMGT, it has started moving back the other way. Our RMGT 9 Series caught up to the efficiencies of the digital press and then surpassed it. So it is once again more efficient and economical to move even some shorter-runs jobs back to offset.”
“We purchased the RMGT 9 Series with a coater and 1-over-4 perfector,” said Haines. “We were looking for something with the larger, 16-page signature sheet size, but 40″ presses had too large of a footprint and plate cost were about 20% higher. The RMGT had a smaller footprint and the perfector something we couldnt do without.” On one job alone, run quarterly, they are producing a 12-page book where the cover is printed 1-over-4 and has over 200 black versions on the cover, and the inside pages are printed 1-over-1 and they need to produce 300,000 copies. “On this one job alone, we are saving about 75 working hours every quarter. We cut the run length of the inside pages in half, and for the covers, were running twice as many versions on a single sheet and running them in one pass instead of two.”
And, noted Haines, they arent sacrificing quality for speed. On another job, he said, they won the work away from another printer, who was running on competing technology. They were able to do the setup and runs faster than their competitors because of the larger sheet size, and the client came back “just totally amazed at the quality,” said Haines. “It was so much cleaner than the work they had gotten in the past, and they just couldnt get over the quality difference.”
Haines Printing purchased their RMGT 9 Series from GE Richards, one of the distributors that make up the national Graphic Systems North America (GSNA) sales and service for RMGT in the United States. Haines noted that he has been purchasing from GE Richards for more than a decade, providing high-quality products and service. “They have treated us well, and stood behind us the entire time we were getting the RMGT 9 Series up and running,” said Haines.