Chris Matthews has joined Tecnau with a brief to support UK distributors IFS and Bowe Systec, as well as to work with press providers to provide a stronger alternative to Hunkeler’s dominance in what is forecast to be a growing market.
Matthews was most recently with Kyocera, helping to introduce its first production level press, the TasKalfa 15000C. He has also worked for Heidelberg and Xeikon, but this is his first berth with a finishing supplier.
“Tecnau does not sell direct, but through distributors and that will not change. But Tecnau has never had a person in the UK”, he says.
This has become necessary according to EMEA sales director Harm Jan Hulleman, because “over the last five years we have experienced growth in the market with projects which became more complex and go beyond machine hardware, involve workflow and the internet of things.
“There is a lot to talk about around IoT but there are huge differences among what systems can do and how customers can take advantage of this information to improve their operations and the return on investments. It is our task to help customers take those advantages and we are convinced Chris Matthews, with his background and experience, will help greatly in this process.”
The market to date has been around transactional printing and book production, spurred on by developments in high speed continuous feed inkjet printing. There are systems in Italy with full hands off production of book of one and UK printer Henry Ling also has a system. Tecnau has also supplied variable cut off sheeting to the Screen inkjet presses at Bluetree, where the delivery uses an offset style gripper system to avoid any risk of marking.
The company also has fully automatic reel handling and splicing unit which can switch from one roll to another, and between different types of paper, so avoiding any need to stop a machine to feed a new web of paper through the press.
Matthews will undergo an induction process, visiting clients and the Tecnau factory for training in the coming weeks. He will also be involved in an installation of Ricoh inkjet at a customer that insisted on using Tecnau equipment.
“Tecnau is present at the Ricoh customer experience centre in Telford, which is a great opportunity to train Ricoh engineers on the Tecnau equipment so increasing the familiarity with our technology. My aim is to build relationships with press vendors.
“I look forward to working with the printer partners and distributors to design the solutions to meet customers’ goals in terms of productivity, flexibility and investment level.”
