Colourfast Financial has installed a Horizon HT80 at its factory in Brentwood, with the safety of its staff very much to the fore.
The company specialises in printing and binding overnight investment reports for clients in the City. These are printed on a bank of Konica Minolta presses and have been bound on Horizon BQ270 and BQ470 perfect binders. It has used an HT70 trimmer and had no doubts that when it wanted further automation, that IFS, Horizon’s UK distributor, would provide the answer.
“We have had Horizon systems for many years,” says managing director Darren Bacon. “They have grown as our business has grown. We started with a single-clamp Horizon BQ270 perfect binder following advice from a customer. We later added an Horizon HT30 three-side trimmer and second Horizon BQ270 before expanding capacity with a Horizon BQ470 four-clamp perfect binder and a Horizon HT70 three-knife trimmer. As we are a 24-hour operation we kept one of the BQ270s just in case we needed it, but we never have.”
The big driver for the move to the HT80 has been the safety of staff in the face of the continuing challenge from Covid-19, whichever variant. Fewer people are needed to operate the machine which is useful in the restricted space that the business has when trying to maintain social distancing. Bacon explains that return investment is important, but it is not paramount.
He says: “More important was choosing a system with a high level of safety functions that also allowed us to ensure socially distanced operation. We have quite a small production space and with the automated Horizon HT80, less people are required to complete the work. We also know what it would be able to do and how it would support greater efficiency and productivity.”
The trimmer can be set up as a standalone unit or can operate inline with binder and press, as was seen during the recent Horizon open house in Japan. A touch panel is used to enter parameters for the job and start the automated set up sequence for books up to a 51mm thickness.
