Bakergoodchild is going into the new year on the back of a £2 million investment led by a brace of Ricoh IP5000 continuous feed inkjet presses, a pair of Böwe Fusion Cross inserting lines, Criterion sortation machine, Duplo booklet makers and one creaser, topped by the launch of a new website which is due to go live today.
The first of the Böwe lines was delivered to the Birmingham printer last week, the next arrives this week. And it is at a time, says managing director Paul Brough, that the company has experienced a strong uptake in work.
The company looked at all options before deciding on the Ricoh machines as its first moves into continuous feed printing. “Prior to this we were just cut sheet with Xerox and Konica Minolta machines,” says Brough. It is not their first experience of inkjet, as Bakergoodchild was one of the first in the UK to install a Xerox Baltoro. Ricoh offers an upgrade path to the VC60000 and VC70000 presses should demand increase, Brough points out. “Going to an HP web was too big a step at this point.”
The investment is part of the strategy to expand the business, including growth through acquisitions. It demonstrated this with the acquisition of Send DM to provide a second site for Disaster Recovery. Machines are being moved between the sites to better focus the business. Further acquisitions remain possible, says Brough.
“We have moved from three strands to the business: print, mail, postage to eight strands. “We want to be able to produce more work at a faster rate and with greater efficiency. This kit enables us to do that, including a move into the continuous feed market,” says Brough.
The web presses will expand capacity to produce transactional print, sitting alongside the Xerox Baltoro, which is the first generation machine lacking the additional dryer to open up printing on coated papers. Xerox is talking to Bakergoodchild about this option, though the current profile of work does not need the extra capability.
“The investment gives us new options and lots of capacity. Some of the work we have produced on cutsheet we can now do in one-fifth of the time,” he adds.
The Böwe machines will have the same impact on production, being much faster than the ageing Kern line being replaced.
The Duplo equipment was the first element of the investment package to arrive. It comprises a DBM600 booklet maker configured with trimmer and the DSF2200 digital sheet feeder, a DBM 350 booklet maker with trimmer and a Multigraf CF375 creaser folder.
