Sheffield-based printer Northend has become the second operation in the UK to install a Horizon StitchLiner MKIII with VAC-L600H tower collators.
The investment was made in order to streamline production at the newly formed operation, which was created by the merger of Northend Creative Print Solutions (CPS) and My Print Partners (MPP) in April 2019.
There are 45 employees at the £5m turnover firm and it produces digital work on a Ricoh Pro C9100 and a Ricoh Pro C7100.
‘We took six months after the merger to review operations and see where investment needed to be made,’ said MPP production director Richard Green. ‘Our Muller Martini binding line was getting old and taking longer to make ready. The StitchLiner MKIII was the perfect solution. It ran quicker, was faster to set up improving planning and also used a smaller sheet size on magazines resulting in 10% savings on some paper.’
Northend’s 6000 sheets per hour system includes the new high capacity VAC-L600H collators and 130mm deep trays. They are more than double the depth of the 55mm trays on 10 station collators. The new collators can handle a wider range of substrates enabling greater flexibility and their intelligent operation allows them to feed digital work that has been printed in page order. It also has the option of Ultrasonic detection and a double length delivery stream.
‘When we did the first demos it completed five jobs in a couple of hours, previously one job took three hours on its own,’ Mr Green continued. ‘The fact we no longer have to fold sections saves us a lot of time freeing up capacity. It also helps us get the jobs out the door faster.’
The decision to invest in the StitchLiner was based on previous experience with Horizon solutions and working with IFS. Green says: ‘We have had Horizon systems before, in fact a Horizon SPF-FC200a was one of the few systems we moved to the new business. We know they can complete high quality work reliably and consistently with maximum uptime. We also know and trust IFS. When it came to replacing the Muller Martini we wanted something to match that and the StitchLiner was ideal.
‘We have a monthly job that was taking 20 hours to finish. The new StitchLiner will take just five. That showed us just how much of an impact it would have on other jobs. It will give us some production space and allow us to reduce overtime.’
