BUXTON PRESS HAS COMMITTED TO a £1 million upgrade of its finishing department ahead of the next phase of its investment in high speed perfecting presses.
It is buying a second 15 station City E6000 perfect binder, upgrading its guillotining area and installing two MBO K800 folders. “If we did not do this before installing new presses, we would be creating even more of a bottleneck in finishing,” says managing director Kirk Galloway.
THE COMPANY GREW ITS SALES 14% last year and is on course for a similar increase this year. At the same time perfect binding is increasing in popularity, both for publishers wanting to compensate for lower paginations and to give a better quality appeal to existing titles and to produce directories and catalogues as additional products around exhibitions for example. The cost differential between perfect bound and stitched products remains, but is less than in the past.
Galloway reckons that more than 40% of all titles are now perfect bound and the additional binder will remove the production vulnerability that dependency on single machine creates. “We want to be in a position of pulling work through to the finishing department not have the presses push work on to finishing,” he adds.
Space has been created for the expanded finishing department by the new 5,000sq ft paper store to hold reels. At the same time having two binders and high speed folders will reduce the number of pallets with work waiting for finishing as less will be backed up.
THE TWO FOLDERS WILL BE ADDITIONAL machines and will be the first that are pallet fed, everything previously has been manually loaded continuous feeding. Should they prove successful the company has pencilled in two further folders, which will then replace existing machines.
The entire £1 million package has been sourced through Friedheim International with Galloway saying: “While we’ve been delighted with the support of our current suppliers, we feels that Friedheim has the edge to accommodate our immediate business requirements.”
WHILE ONE IMPACT OF THE INVESTMENT will be to reduce unit costs, the company continues to grow so these are not intended to bring its overhead down, but to create more capacity for expansion Galloway explains. “We can’t afford for this business to stand still. This is going to cope with the additional new work that we are going to pick up because we have to continue to grow to keep up the reinvestments. It’s all about constantly striving to move up to the next level.”
Buxton’s existing stitching capacity is enough to cope currently and with growing demand says Galloway, though the business keeps a watch over developments.
