Moulton Printing has become the first UK customer for the Horizon StitchLiner MkIV after giving the step from horizontal collating to vertical collators a great deal of thought.
The new machine is replacing a Bourg Modulen system at the Blackpool company which director Cassie Moulton says “has been a really good machine”. She says the company knew it needed to invest, but was reluctant to move away from the capacity that the bins on the Bourg machine provided. “We held out for quite a long while,” she says, “because we could not find anything suitable.”
The solution has been to design the Horizon collating towers with extra depth bins that do not need loading as often for some of the longer run and higher pagination work that the company handles. In the event she says there was no need for concern. “It has made a significant difference to productivity already,” she says. “The makeready is really quick and the interface is very user friendly. The whole process, from installation through to day to day operating has been much more straight forward than I was anticipating.
“It also gives us much more flexibility in terms of our product offering as it enables us to do sizes we have not been able to do before mechanically such as A4 landscape, A6 and DL. Taking all this into consideration, as well as the increase in speed, we are really flying through the production of our books.”
The company runs a five-colour B2 and SRA2 two-colour model with digital represented by an Indigo 5000 and two Konica Minolta BizHubs.
The StitchLiner has given the business the ability to produce a 72pp product in one hit as well as boosting capacity though the additional speed.
The machine comes with Horizon’s ICELink technology, meaning that it will record performance into the cloud and can be connected through to an automated workflow. This is not needed at Moulton Printing at present. “I am sure we will use it in the longer term,” she says.
The longer term also includes thoughts about opening an online store to allow existing and new customers to order via the internet. “That is for the longer term. We need to get things set up correctly in the factory first and take advantage of the recent investments – the StitchLiner and the digital press we installed last year.”
The StitchLiner was purchased almost sight unseen. Investment in guillotines and a Horizon folder from IFS has given the company trust in the products and back up support. “We have a good relationship with IFS and trust them. We don’t regret the choice we made.”
