There are probably more screens at Solopress than in the average branch of Currys. They are mounted it seems on every wall of the sprawling business and in addition are those on desks and the vast screens on the end of the latest press investment, a ten-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster XL106P which is taking the company into the next chapter of its story.
That screen is used to monitor and manage the press, those at the desks of account managers and call handlers are there to interact with customers and with the workflow software whose work in directing jobs to the most appropriate output option is largely hidden. The wall mounted screens, and especially the screen on the desk of managing director Simon Cooper are there to drill into the metrics, the data that shows how the business is performing, month by month, week by week, hour by hour if needed as well as by product, by machine and probably by inside leg measurement if requested.
The screen cycles between the numbers of jobs passing through, how many are on time, how many are ready to ship and so on. Cooper can pull more figures and graphs to his screen to show how the company is performing against any number of KPIs, against previous years and forecasts. Solopress is a data driven business as much as it is a printing company.
This is the continuing evolution of a company that was once a hard working trade printer and is now a key part of a pan European business with ambitions to hit €500 million in sales. There is some way to go, but the senior management team that now includes Cooper is confident that a combination of acquisitions and organic growth will deliver the target.
Currently Solopress is about the organic growth. As 2022 ends Cooper can look back on a year of substantial investments. The Speedmaster is the largest element of that and the last to arrive, but is by no means the only increase for the business. In the 12-month period it has installed an HP Indigo 100K B2 press, a Motioncutter 23 laser cutting device, two highly automated Horizon folders, an HT300 three-knife trimmer linked to its BQ500 perfect binder, three Kodak Magnus 800 platesetters and high speed Pitstop creaser. There has not been much change from £5 million. “It is all about improving quality, increasing productivity and reducing costs,” says Cooper.
This follows on from previous investments: replacing Jetrix large format printers with Agfa machines has boosted capacity in the large format arm of the business. Large format accounts for £5 million of the £32 million in sales that Solopress contributes to the OnlinePrinters group. “The Agfas have been brilliant,” he says. An HP PageWide printer handles demand for posters.
Solopress installed an MGI JetVarnish 3DS in the same year followed in 2020 by the first HP PageWide T250 to run with the latest Brilliant Inks in the world.
According to Cooper, the inkjet press has been “a game changer”. It runs reel to reel with reels taken to the next room to be loaded on the two Hunkeler CS8 finishing lines for slitting, creasing, cutting and stacking ready to be packed. The operator has only to lift the pile of flyers from the delivery table, swivel 180º to wrap it for packing, applying the label from data retrieved from a scanned barcode.
A print ready job can arrive via the Solopress web portal, pass through prepress checking and on to the press within a minute. Five minutes later it can be running through the inkjet arrays.
When the reel is finished no more than 20 minutes later, the job is on the Hunkeler along with any number of other simple jobs. Five minutes later the job has been cut, neatly stacked and is ready to be boxed for shipment. The journey through Solopress has taken less than a hour. The inkjet operation, which can handle a quarter of the jobs the company receives, is run by a team of five. Moreover both quality and performance have been remarkable to those used to the sometimes unpredictable availability of electrophotographic presses. “Its productivity is astronomical,” says Cooper. “And it is the press that results in fewest customer complaints and reprints.”
The game changer for the technology has been the Brilliant inks which cope with all the papers Solopress uses and the high ink coverage that some of the work requires. The only issue is that the drying power on the T250 is limited, so with high ink coverage Solopress cannot run at full production speed.
It is installed in a room where the top of the press has little room to spare beneath the ceiling and a central pillar divides the space neatly. Once the first press was bedded in, the plan had been to double up with an identical installation of a second inkjet web press.
That hasn’t happened. For two reasons. Firstly HP has developed a new press, the Advantage 2200, which is the platform for machines over the next few years and would solve the drying and running speed issue. This is simply too big for the space at Solopress, even though it might have been one of the first users. “I had a heads up that it was being developed,” Cooper says. “It is the press that HP ought to have had when introducing the new inks.”
Secondly the arrival of Covid prompted a rethink of strategy for not just Solopress, but the group. What had been separate businesses in Neustadt an der Aisch close to Nurenberg, LaserTryck in Denmark and Solopress in Southend, now acts more as a conglomerate with a decentralised management structure. Head office for example takes care of group marketing, the Danish operation which has grown through bolt on deals, leads on mergers and acquisitions, while Cooper has a group role over operations and procurement. The group’s buying power has helped this year, both to secure paper supplies and to do so at advantageous rates compared to smaller printers.
There is a greater exchange of work between the three sites and a fourth operation in Poland. Currently that supports Denmark to the north and Germany to the west as well as its own customers. It will also take on more work for the UK as Solopress develops sales within publishing as Poland has strength in binding, especially in hard cover binding. Solopress has eyes on book work returning from Asia.
There are also plans to offer the operational strength of the group to large print management companies and brands that can leverage the network. “Apart from Cimpress, we are the only online print company in Europe to be able to print close to the point of use,” Cooper says.
Conversations with this customer base are “in their infancy” but the appointment of the highly experienced Philip Foster to open up business with large customers bodes well. Solopress wants to attract volume jobs as well as the small jobs it is highly efficient at. Because of the lack of manual intervention and the power of job ganging and automation, “we can make money on a £15 print job”, Cooper says.
That needs volume and sometimes it has proved a challenge to push these small jobs through the B2 litho presses because they have been printing longer run work than is ideal. This is where the big litho press comes into the equation. It can swallow these jobs, freeing up the two smaller format presses for shorter runs where versatility comes into play.
Cooper is interrogating the numbers to show the impact of Covid on the business, how 2020 sales were immediately depressed then came back to life thanks to safe distancing signage and in different sectors as the economy revived. “We are now running ahead of where we were in 2019,” he says. “We did not suffer capacity issues in 2020, then towards the end of 2021, we started to have capacity problems.” These were eased by the wave of infections at the start of this year which slowed orders, followed by steady growth since. “We knew we would have capacity issues at the end of 2022.” It would need to invest.
This is backed up by data showing the average order value has been increasing likewise turnover per capita, indicating that Solopress has been attracting longer run work, possibly from companies that have reduced their production side and are placing work with trade suppliers. “A job could end up on the XL75s with a run time of 12 hours. On the B1 press because of the greater efficiency of the larger sheet, combined with a sub-three-minute makeready compared to ten minutes or so, the same job can be completed in four hours.”
As well as the larger sheet size, the new machine runs at 18,000sph with the latest in Push to Stop technology. Despite being a 2018 machine, the press has the full Drupa 2020 specification. It has Autoplate 3 to change plates and wash blankets and cylinders in less than a minute. The goal is 75 waste sheets per makeready to match capability elsewhere in the group. The press will also use Intelliline, Heidelberg’s system to indicate the status of each unit through coloured lights. There is an inline coater which can appeal to certain customers on certain jobs, but is not a high priority.
In the past Solopress has preferred to buy used machines for the financial edge provided. This press is also pre-owned, but it was a choice driven by expediency. There simply wasn’t the time to order and install a new machine before hitting peak season towards the end of the year. And Solopress needed the capacity.
It sits in a separate factory on the same industrial estate and is known as Unit 4. Unit 1 is the original warren of a factory, Unit 2 is a few hundred yards along the road and houses the company’s main finishing department, Unit 3 is next to Unit 1 and has Cooper’s office while Unit 4 is a further out on the estate.
It is a large airy space compared to the older buildings, high enough to accommodate a mezzanine. The new press sits comfortably along one side of the factory floor with a brace of new Horizon folders, both with ICE network connectivity, and two guillotines along the opposite wall. Between them are the pallets of paper, just four types, that Solopress uses. In a side room is the Kodak Magnus 800 platesetter that was needed with the move to the larger format. Two other new B1 platesetters have replaced four Magnus 400s back in the original unit. One is a pallet fed device and can produce 80 Kodak Sonora plates an hour, each taking 40 seconds to image. The second is fed from a cassette delivering 65-70 plates an hour. The first Magnus 800 delivered 20,000 plates in its first month of operation.
On the first floor of this unit, Solopress has a Konica Minolta C14000 press along with a Motioncutter 23 (another UK first) and MGI JetVarnish 3DS. Solopress is expanding the range of foils handled from gold, silver and rose gold to included green and blue foils. The Motioncutter makes it far easier to handle labels and stickers than previously as well as producing other fine cut out jobs while providing additional flexibility and allowing customers greater creativity as there is no need to print over fixed pre cut sheets. Now the software can calculate the most efficient route to deliver the labels of any size and shape.
There has been a sharp rise in demand for labels, says Cooper. The next investment is likely to be a dedicated rollfed label press together with inline die cutting. Labels and flexible packaging, another area being considered for expansion, are already worth €7 million in sales to the group. The C14000 is the company’s only dry toner press, it having replaced a fleet of iGens with Indigos even before the 100K came along. “It is,” says Cooper, “an easier press to run” so suits less experienced operators. It will also feed and print on envelopes which is a frequently overlooked space for marketing messages. This is a capability that its B2 and SRA3 Indigos do not have.
On the ground floor is a space dedicated to small format and instant finishing with Pitstop creaser, small guillotines and booklet making. Anything more sophisticated and in need of longer runs is taken around the one way system to Solopress’s Unit 2. This is the finishing hub for the business and the pick up point for over night delivery each evening at 9.30pm. The unit houses older MBO folders along with newer and faster to makeready Horizons. It also has a Stitchliner MkIII and BQ500 perfect binder from Horizon. This has replaced a BQ470 and is connected to an HT300 three-knife trimmer to finish books automatically and reduce the need for manual cutting on a guillotine. Likewise a Moll folder gluer, installed this year, has reduced the need for handwork in finishing folders and so on.
The real benefits of automation currently lie in the flow of information from the shop floor into the business management system, and marrying this with sales data, either from online customers or from customers that prefer to talk through jobs. Cooper says that 40% of sales come from jobs that are placed online, the remainder retain a traditional human interface.
Talking about a new large client, he says that Solopress was asked whether all work would be submitted through the portal. No, was the answer. But if at some later date and for some jobs, placing work through the portal would be more convenient, then Solopress could accommodate that. It is about flexibility.
“We have a large client recently come online and place a £7,000 order at 9pm,” he says. That would not have been possible before, nor would that customer have had the confidence to do so.
It is building bespoke portals for these larger customers with rules built in, to ensure that the correct fonts and colours are used in a job and to give the users greater visibility over their work. This will support those customers wanting to manage a pan European spend.
A white label version of these portals can be offered to larger trade customers so that they can attract orders to the ultimate benefit of the Solopress capacity.
The door step delivery venture, where Solopress arranges delivery of leaflets in a campaign for customers has started well and attracted print orders from other printers for the convenience it offers.
Cooper does not mind where the work comes from. What is more important is that the work keeps flowing, that this can be produced as efficiently as possible and that its venture into B1 litho printing pays off.
As it does, then the graphs and charts will prove it.
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