On the drive to Micropress you pass numerous signs for Sizewell C construction traffic and get stuck behind big trucks helping to build the numerous solar parks coming to this part of the world. Suffolk is clearly leading the way to a green energy future. Micropress is already there.
Joint managing director Rob Cross opens his talk to a group of customers who have made that journey saying “On a beautiful day like today, the factory will be running entirely on electricity generated from the solar panels on the roof.”
As the business operates three long perfecting Heidelbergs, stitching lines, binder, guillotines, folders, wrapping line and an AMR robot, this is no small production unit. Micropress requires a lot of power.
As it happens the solar panels are just about the only element of the business that is not included on a tour of the factory which culminates in a demonstration of the UK’s first plate to unit Speedmaster XL106-8P. It is hardly surprising that nobody watching has seen anything like this before as there are fewer than ten installations in the world, not including that at Heidelberg’s Home of Print demonstration centre.
It is put through its paces loading a cassette of 80 plates into the bottom of what might be a service elevator. This lifts the box of plates to a point above the feeder. Plates are extracted in turn. A carrying gripper twists to accept the plate as it is pushed at an angle from the cassette along a slide. Once gripped, the slide retreats and the gripper jerks forward to bring the second plate gripper into position. The process repeats itself for all eight plates which then continue their journey along a gantry until stopped above the loading position on the press. The plates are lowered into position in the plate change unit ready for the current job to finish. When it does, the spent plate is lifted into the unit which becomes a unit to plate system carrying the used plates back to their starting position while the new set of plates is loaded. Around a minute-and-a-half after stopping, the press is back in action.
What make the demonstration even more impressive is that the press operator is not glued to the console during a job change: the plates are changed, the rollers drop on and as the press comes up to colour with no operator to make those decisions. As it does the machine begins to print in earnest running at 14,000sph on silk paper to deliver 900 good sheets into the delivery. Micropress has taken a step towards autonomous printing.
This is because the company is running as the beta site for Inspection Control and Intelliguide, the next step in Heidelberg’s automation journey that began with the Push to Stop concept. It is also the next step on a similar automation journey for Micropress. There are three MBO CoBo Stack robots for loading pallets with folded sections from B1 folders and a P-Stack robot which does the same from the highest speed Stahl TH82 folder. This stacker whirls so fast it has to be caged.
The company’s Canon iX3200 runs inline to a Tecnau BookStack unit and there is an autonomous mobile robot that takes pallets from the guillotines to folders. And this for joint managing director Rob Cross is just the start.
“Automation is the way forward – there’s going to be a lot of change in the next ten years,” he says. “And we want to be in front of that wave, not behind it. We know that in terms of the factory there will be fewer people working for us because we will have replaced people with automation.”
There will be multiple robots, not just one, scuttling around the factory in five years. AI, used today for generating quote requests, will be spread across the business.
The reduction in staff numbers will be a gradual process using non replacement as people retire or leave for other reasons. “At the end of the process I believe we will end up with a highly skilled workforce and the use of technology will be that much greater.
“We can implement automation anywhere if it can help us to be more efficient. If we can see a saving and we can get a return on investment we will consider the investment.”
Micropress is suited to this approach. “We have always been a technology driven business,” he says. That goes back to its earliest days. Micropress was registered in 1979 but Mark Cross had been printing having inherited a press from a deal as an estate agent. “In the 1980s we were big in repro and prepress, moving into printing in the 1990s and it has grown steadily ever since,” he says. Cross went off to university then returned to the business and has not regretted that decision since. He and brother James jointly run the business while Mark is chairman and remains part of the business with his own parking slot in front of the main entrance. “Dad enjoys being part of the business,” says Rob. “As his sons, we have the energy to push the business forwards.”
It is a steadily expanding business with a strong balance sheet, though Cross says that revenue growth has been steady in the last few years. The policy is not to chase turnover for its own sake, that aphorism that ‘sales is vanity, profit is sanity’ is at the forefront. In the last five years, the factory has been expanded, adding a paper store and then roofing over the yard between the main factory and paper store to give more space. The production floor is on the same level and is longer than it is broad. The movement of materials is along the spine of the building. The AMR truck is saving a lot of pallet truck trips.
The balance sheet allows the business to make the sort of investment in say Heidelberg technology that brings even more savings. And increases production capacity. Unofficially the new press is judged to be 30% more efficient than the other presses on site using existing jobs as a measure. In reality this is not a comparison that makes sense. The new machine is designated for short runs because it can move from makeready to makeready so effectively. It is going to handle the company’s short run work leaving the other Speedmasters to handle the longer run or rather the runs that they already handle because one purpose behind the new press is to be competitive on shorter runs of up to 3,000 sheets. All presses will hit their sweet spot.
“We think there’s still a real opportunity in short run litho. The new press take us into a new areas.”
The inkjet press is comfortable and competitive at up to 1,000 SRA3 sheets, litho takes over beyond this. The digital print area, also housing a Versafire, a Heidelberg badged Ricoh, and a Xerox press, is in its own extension tacked on to the side of the original building.
The inkjet machine has proved to be an inspired investment for the business. Before making the commitment, it had run the rule over every other possibility at both SRA3 and B2 formats. “The quality is as good as litho,” says Cross.
That in itself gives customers the confidence to place digital work with Micropress, which can then feed into the new litho press. “If it’s 500 to 3,000 copies of a magazine or a catalogue, this fits the new press and there is no better press for that type of job.
“With litho we can get the best deal across a selection of suppliers, while with digital there is a set cost each month and for consumables,” he says. “It is also easier to invest in digital as there is a small deposit and contract to pay for what you print.
“But it is a different matter to borrow £3-4 million to invest in a litho press. It’s a very different ask and there is much more risk that goes with it. This press fills that gap above inkjet and helps because in that 1,000 to 3,000 space is where we think we can be stronger.”
The choice of a new Heidelberg was not automatic. Before putting pen to paper on the order, Micropress went on what Cross calls “a big fact finding tour” looking at litho and continuous inkjet. The key fact was “offset is pushing back”, or perhaps that for Micropress, continuous inkjet is not there yet. It does work for the digital operation where a similar fact finding exercise resulted in the iX3200.
The digital operation has one key benefit over litho printing, at least at Micropress where the UK’s first Tecnau BookReady is all about automation. The Tecnau takes successive book blocks and separates them to left or right, making the task of feeding into a perfect binder a lot easier because nobody is needed to separate the book blocks and saving a huge amount of time he says. It is another example of labour saving automation.
The question now is about the next investment to meet the growing demand, whether is should be more of the same or perhaps inkjet on a larger sheet size. It is unlikely to be a continuous feed inkjet press. “You need a lot of volume for continuous inkjet,” says Cross, “then when you get to longer runs needed to fill the press you find that of a £1,000 job, £550 is spent on ink while costs for ink and plates on offset you are paying £300. Consequently we think there’s a lot of opportunity for litho in the short run market.
“The new press takes us into a new area for offset printing where we are able to compete on very short runs and still be profitable. There is a growing market for short runs in catalogues and magazines. Where a magazine had a print run of 7,000 copies it is now 1,000 copies because there are fewer newsstands for distribution.”
The quality of the inkjet means the cross over between the old and new technology is highly permeable. If the inkjet is busy, the offset can take on runs of 600, he says. No doubt the sharing can also go in the other direction.
The output from digital can go either to Horizon StitchLiners or to BQ500 binders. Its StitchLiner Mk IV has six collating towers, increasing the number of jobs that can be preloaded as well as digital feeder to take already collated books.
The output from litho, and so the longer runs, will be trimmed and folded – the AMR trundling the pallets of cut sheets from guillotine to folders – and then fed into one of two Muller Martini Primera MC saddle stitchers or an Allegro perfect binder. One saddle stitcher has roll feeders, a measure of automation that extends the time between an operator loading each feeder or a conventional hopper style feeder. The folders are each crewed with one operator for two machines. “He is there to check quality, it’s not about focusing on loading the paper,” says Cross.
There is a long Autobond laminator that is capable of spot as well as flood varnish and the application of variable foiling through inkjet heads to apply an adhesive polymer. A Sitma feeds inserts into magazines which are then wrapped in paper from the only paper reels in the building. If Micropress is not currently interested in a continuous feed inkjet press, nor is it interested in adding CutStars to the Speedmasters.
CutStars suit a company producing the same type of, say magazine work, all the time. There is minimal need to change paper between jobs and several sections will be run on the press before a need to change the reel. Micropress does have magazines that fit this description, but also an awful lot of commercial print work where a job on one type of paper will be followed by a completely different paper.
Part of the production management role is to schedule jobs to keep such change to a minimum, more so with the new press. It means batching jobs by paper type or format as much as by delivery date, or simply printing once a job has been signed off and its plates made.
The Micropress paper store is testament to this. There is pallet wrapped paper from across Europe and beyond, amounting to a holding of £1.5 million or more. It reduces the company’s reliance on paper merchants that may not be able to deliver the next day and enables it to take on an urgent job confident that it will have the paper type and style in stock.
A lot of paper is delivered directly from the Far East into the dedicated dock which allows Micropress to use a forklift trick to drive directly on to the container, representing a significant time saving in unloading and a significant cost saving through ordering in bulk directly from the mill, albeit with a UK merchant involved.
The challenge joint managing director James Cross says is being able to anticipate three months out what grades will be in demand. So far he has called it right, helped by limiting the formats of papers that are used. Most are 630x880mm or SRA1 which are stocked in multiple grammages. There is less demand for full B1 sheets as the majority of what is printed ends up in A4 products.
James is also in charge of the workflows around the new press. This he says is just as important as the technology on the machine itself. “The workflow is a big issue,” he says. “There is no point in having an automated press if you have to wait for plates or paper to arrive. It means that you have to change your workflow.
“Previously we would make plates as a job came in and was signed off. Now we are trying to go to plate in print order as we can fill the cassette for ten jobs which use the same format and paper. We have to be much more organised because we have to hit the schedules.”
Again this plays to industry wide trends towards shorter runs for brochures, catalogues and and longer run leaflets. “These are the sorts of products where we can create automation,” he says. Automation starts with job submission. Customers are able to direct files through to Micropress’ prepress team to manually check each job, or to trust the workflow by signing off via portal and submitting the print ready PDFs to the automated workflow.
Some of those jobs come from the sister publishing company, Countrywide Publications. This publishes its own B2B magazines in agriculture, forestry and leisure sectors, town guides and other titles as a contract publisher. This publishing side has acquired MM Media with Machinery Market as the lead title of the Bexhill company.
There have been no acquisitions for Micropress, though it has taken on staff from Barnwell Print when that company closed its doors. “We keep our options open on mergers and acquisitions,” says Rob Cross. “We would always ask ourselves whether anything like this would be a distraction.”
This is helped by installation of a Kodak Magnus platesetter able to output 80 plates an hour. This also feeds automatically from a pallet load of plates rather than being fed manually as its two Screen PlateRites are. In future Micropress will be coming down from three platesetters to two.
Plates from the Magnus are also directed automatically to a Beil automatic plate bending line with Bodoni PressSign Pro to measure colour to preset ink profiles. A QR code on each plate is used to identify job and colour so that a scanner on press ensures that the right plate is mounted in the right unit. Press automation requires automation ahead of the press as much as automation on press.
Micropress is pushing this envelope acting as the beta site for the next step towards autonomous printing. This is the latest version of Inspection Control integrated into press control software. It is about ensuring that what is printed on the sheet is what is wanted, in other words that print quality matches the designer’s intent. It is not the same as Inpress Colour which ensures that colour is consistent during the run by closed loop adjustments to ink keys.
This can be seen as the press switched between jobs. Once the plates are in place, the press adjusts for registration, then colour and finally for content. This was developed initially to meet the requirements of pharmaceutical printers to ensure that what is on the sheet matches the PDF that the customer has passed. This is vital in this sector as colour can be considered an anti counterfeiting measure and a missing full point can change the formulation of a drug and thus its use.
For Micropress this is a check that nothing has happened to the plate to affect print quality. If printing blindly from the plate, which is entirely possible, several thousand sheets might be printed before someone spots that a scratch in the plate’s surface or other fault has ruined the job. The system will pick up any kind of defect that affects quality.
When it does there are three levels of action: the press will ignore the problem because it will right itself or will not be spotted on a non critical job; it will tab the affected sheets and alert the operator that some attention is required and a decision is needed; and finally if the problem is severe enough, the press will stop.
Micropress does not want this to happen. It’s about keeping the press is operation as much as possible. “We are confident that print quality will be better,” says Rob. “Printing is going to become more autonomous – but will still need an operator if only to put the plates into the lift.”
Automation is clearly the way forward for the company. “It’s anywhere we think we can be more efficient, anywhere we can see a saving. If we can get a return on investment, we will consider it. Why wouldn’t we?”
