T8, a Moscow-based company that describes itself as Russia’s largest on-demand producer of books, has installed a fleet of Ricoh printing presses, including the country’s first Ricoh Pro VC20000 and Pro V20000 high speed inkjet systems.
The company, which has developed its own platform specifically designed to help publishing houses and online retailers transition from producing high-volumes to fast-turnaround, short-run print on demand, has also installed two Ricoh Pro V20100 high-speed inkjet mono printers and two Ricoh Pro C9200 colour sheet-fed presses. T8 said it identified the machines as ‘the most effective available solutions to create a fast, responsive, highly connected, and optimised production environment.’
Sergey Boev, technical director of T8, commented on the company’s investment. ‘We wanted to create uniformity in production and have the ability to flexibly plan runs,’ he said. ‘Our former solutions were all different so we had to prepare impositions for every system and it was impossible to transfer jobs. We had to cancel the job, generate a new imposition, and then move it. It was also not always possible to produce single copies of books in a highly efficient way which contradicted our production concept. Another factor was that over the past three years average run lengths have fallen from 200 to 30 copies and the number of orders increased. It was time to look for other solutions.’
Sander Sondaal, director of commercial print sales at Ricoh Europe Graphic Communications added, ‘The complex project was the largest in Russia in terms of the total digital print capacity installed by a single supplier. As a result, T8 has created a highly flexible and responsive production environment with its carefully considered combination of Ricoh solutions. Together they enable the operation to respond efficiently to an increasingly varied order mix.’
