Offset Printing
PPG PRINT INSTALLS KOMORI LITHRONE S1029P TO MEET DEMAND
Monday 01. December 2008 - PPG Print in Portsmouth has installed a ten-colour B2 Komori Lithrone S1029P to enable it to keep up with the demand for work. The new press will replace one of three existing five-colour Komori 528s.
The company started life as a design and prepress company and, as managing director Phil Payter wryly observes, “we watched our margins disappear”. Nine years ago he decided to move into print, bought his first press a brand new Komori 528EM and has not looked back. “There may be a recession,” he says, “but right now we are struggling to get work out the door fast enough.”
A scientific approach was taken to expansion and Phil analysed six months worth of job bags, looking at run lengths, time taken, cost and profit. He then made a conscious effort to hunt down larger jobs and reanalysed the job bags before coming to the conclusion that a new ten-colour press combined with the two existing five-colours was a sound business decision and started looking at presses.
Although the company had always had Komoris, it was not an automatic choice when it came to the new press. “We did look at other manufacturers, but I wasn’t convinced,” says Phil. “Komori presses are very quick when you know how to use them, and the makereadies are blindingly fast.” Another important factor was automation, including fully-automatic plate changing and the KHS system, which uses profiles to control the ink, deinking at the end of one job and setting up the ducts for the next.
“Komori presses are fantastic at one-pass productivity,” says Phil. “You put paper in at one end and you get a job out of the other. The advantage of having a ten-colour rather than two five-colours is that you only need one minder, which saves money.” Phil puts his company’s success down to keeping an eye on the cashflow. Remote data capture analyses the jobs: “We know when we’re making money and when we’re not”, he says. He would rather do jobs that cost £10,000 to produce and sell for £12,000 than those that cost £40 and sell for £140. “I tend to look at the pounds rather than the percentages,” he says.
Phil shrugs off suggestions of tough times to come, having run the business for over 28 years and come through several economic downturns. “We have tended to do quite well in recessions,” he says. “When things are down you just have to kick out and work harder, but you have to accept that you will do a load more work for the same profit. We really work our machines hard: the five-colour Komori that we have replaced had done over 140 million impressions and was still printing faultlessly. Price will be the game for the next six to 12 months. There are interesting times ahead and I’m going to be there, kicking away.”