Simon Eccles visits Capita’s £17 million all-digital white paper production site in Mansfield, home of the UK’s only two Impika inkjet presses.
Driving into Capita’s new Mansfield print and distribution facility feels a bit like how you would imagine visiting Fort Knox to be. The tall fence is made of strong steel bars and I had given my car’s number plate the day before so the gates would open, which they did automatically as I drove up. You are aware that this is both a high tech and a high security printing site, which handles a lot of sensitive work such as bank and utility company statements and passport correspondence. When you rejoiced at your council tax bill this spring, there is a good chance that it was printed here.
Once through those gates, things relax a bit. The staff are friendly, the coffee is excellent and the reception rooms are comfy. Through the big glass windows in the meeting room is the intriguing sight of the UK’s only pair of installed Xerox Impika inkjet web fed presses.
The Mansfield site went live last October and represents some £17 million of investment by Capita Document and Information Services. It is a completely new factory of some 8450 square metres, housing production hardware and admin and workflow software that is all either the first of its kind, or the first in the UK, or customised to the company’s particular requirements.
The result is a truly white paper operation, with no pre-printed work at all, allowing jobs from multiple clients to be ‘comingled,’ ie printed on demand and put into the same envelopes to save distribution costs. Even the reply-paid envelopes that go into the mix are digitally printed on the fly. The company boasts that it has the capacity to print enough pages per hour to send a letter to everybody in a city the size of Oxford.
‘Compared to conventional print, what used to take eight hours manually takes one hour now,’ said operations director Richard Hooper. ‘We have no stock holdings, no waste of pre-printed stock, and all changes to the print are dynamic and on the fly.’
Capita Document and Information Services has sales of about £115 million, split about 50-50 between public and private sector clients. At present the work is entirely transactional, meaning bills, statements and the like. There is provision for transpromo in future said Mr Hooper. ‘We will do direct mail in future, but not yet. As mailing and promotions come together on the same budgets, increasingly you’ll see them used together.’
Although the inkjet presses and smart finishing and mail sorting lines catch the eye, what is even more remarkable is the ability to track individual items of mail at every stage of the process, to personalise both the envelope and the letter in full colour within larger print runs and to print individualised sender, as well as recipient, addresses. This means that not only can recipients receive personalised information, but senders can select different response addresses within large, bulk mailings. Tracking is handled by a combination of 2D barcodes generated by the workflow system, with OCR to ensure data integrity.
To develop the workflow, Xerox worked closely with its partner suppliers GMC and Ironsides, said Jo Oliphant, Xerox’s European high speed inkjet manager. Capita also has its own developers who put a lot of work into specifying, adapting and integrating the software systems into their own data handling system.
‘What really came together is that Xerox is the vendor for the workflow components as well as GMC and Ironsides,’ said Mr Oliphant. ‘It wasn’t just a matter of delivering the printing processes, it was understanding what Capita’s intention was in terms of workflow, data and tracking. We all worked very closely together to produce a complete system that tracks every logical and physical object.
‘The easiest way to understand it is that the data comes from Capita’s workflow, and these are huge print files of comingled jobs; then GMC processes those jobs into logical objects and tracks them – they’re virtual documents at that point. Once they become physical objects, ie print, Ironsides uses cameras and barcode readers to tell you where all the physical objects are in the workflow. It joins up with what GMC is telling it in terms of tracking all the logical objects, so Capita has a view of where everything is at any given moment.’
The shop floor is a vast 7000 square metres, made even more apparent because only about a half of it houses the production lines. High levels of automation mean that there are remarkably few production staff to be seen either. Building in room for future expansion means there is a lot of empty space, only partly filled by the paper storage area where reels are left to condition for several weeks. ‘We have about 50 tonnes float of paper stock,’ said Mr Hooper.
The physical production line starts with the pair of Impika presses, running side by side. Both are twin engine CMYK duplex lines, with web turners between units. One uses Reference engines, currently running at 75 metres per minute (mpm) but capable of being upgraded to 127 mpm. The other uses eVolution engines, the fastest in the range. These run at 150 mpm today but can be upgraded to 254 mpm. ‘We are at the base levels at present for both, but they are field upgradable,’ said Mr Hooper. ‘When capacity needs it we’ll go for this. The Impika reliability is good with very few blockages. We’ve only needed two callouts in the past month, both for software. Continua, the Xerox service company, has an onsite presence. There’s been lots of aftersales support.’
Web widths and inks are the same for both press lines so they can be used interchangeably. Normally the faster eVolution prints the document inserts that go inside the mailpieces, while the Revolution prints the outer wraps that are later formed into envelopes. Documents are printed as 2×4 side-by-side on the rolls.
The HD inks let them run on plain papers. ‘The inks will work with litho stocks and we’ve even done Manilla paper,’ Mr Hooper said. ‘Our standard paper is 90 gsm Mondi DNS. The presses can handle from 60 to 160 gsm.’
Hunkeler pre and post handling systems were supplied by Friedheim UK. These include UW6 unwinders and DP6 dynamic perforators. A WI6 web inspection system uses two cameras to read both sides of the web, all the way across. ‘This is the first automatic integrity check,’ Mr Hooper explained. ‘It looks for multiple points of jet-out lines, ie blocked jets, and if the problems are serious the press stops. It also reads the 2D bar code for completion, and looks at the colour gamut and variations so everything matches on the run.’
The camera system sends a message to the Ironsides software to record that the mail piece is okay. If not it triggers a reprint. The cameras can also read text such as addresses. ‘If you have multiple utility bills from different suppliers in the same envelope, it checks that they are all going to the same recipient,’ said Mr Hooper.
After the cameras, the web goes to a Hunkeler RW6 rewinder. ‘We have slightly larger drums than standard to avoid curl downstream,’ said Mr Hooper. ‘We use special twin-roll trolleys to transport rolls between systems.’
The next system is a nearline Tecnau finisher running at 22,000 metres per hour. This was supplied by the UK distributor IFS and is fed by a Hunkeler unwinder. First it reads the 2D barcode which tells it how many pages to gather (two, five, 10 etc). It can also do inline inserts and make personalised stitched booklets. The line stitches, folds, accumulates and can insert from one of five hoppers.
Linked to the line here is a CMC VRE station that forms and inserts the prepaid return envelopes into the mailpiece sets. This has an Impika iEngine 1000 monochrome inkjet engine which adds the addresses.
Next the pieces reach the CMC JWR wrapping line where envelopes are formed and glued around the collected mailpieces. The wrap paper has been pre-printed on rolls by the Impika Revolution press, though windows are used so the address shows from the mail piece inside. ‘Unique to us, the line cuts proper end flaps so the envelopes look conventional to the recipient,’ said Mr Hooper. ‘In future when capacity grows we’ll put a four-colour head on the VRE envelope line and free up the second Impika press for documents.’
The tracking system becomes evident again at this point, he said: ‘We take an image of every envelope and date and time stamp this and keep it for 90 days. This means that we can prove it was printed if there are queries. There are 36 checks on the CMS lines so the status of the envelope is known at all times. At the end of the run, rejects are logged and an automatic reprint file is generated. We’ll then do a reprint run. Rejects are extracted on the fly and shredded.’
Passed envelopes go into standard Royal Mail tubs and are taken over to a Bell & Howell Criterion Apex sorting line. This is the first installation of this line in the UK. It consolidates the envelopes from multiple Capita clients into sets for individual sorting offices. From there the sorted sets go onto pallets which are then secured by a robotic wrapping system.
Finally the pallets are collected by Royal Mail or TNT lorries which drive straight up to the rear loading bays of the factory.
Xerox’s Jo Oliphant summed up the total system: ‘The fact that everything is white paper means that absolutely everything is printed there, exactly to the customers’ requirements. What really struck me as elegant was the workflow. It’s what makes it all look great. The fact that Capita can see at any given moment exactly what’s going on, and know where any job is at any stage of the production process, that’s a pretty powerful statement to make!’
