Venn Holdings has confirmed an order for a new Speedmaster XL75 for JDP, its short run print operation that as John Dollin Printing Services was Venn’s first acquisition. A second deal is scheduled for completion this month and will deliver a further £3 million of sales for the rapidly growing business.
When Venn was formed by former colleagues at Heidelberg Andy Rae and Anthony Thirlby, the latter explained that the plan had been to replace the existing eight-year-old XL75-5. And the new machine will be to the highest specification possible, and as such a first in the UK for the B2 Drupa 2020 specification press.
It will be a four-colour press with coater and extended delivery (XL75-4+LX) with Inpress Control, Autoplate XL and Intelliline and will operate to the Push to Stop approach that Thirlby has been responsible for. On a standardised product, the company will be able to switch from signature to signature and job to job in just one minute.
It will run to 18,000sph, representing a 30% increase in capacity over the XL75-5 for every hour operated, says Thirlby. This amounts to 75 million impression a year running a 24/5 shift pattern. The company currently runs extended days.
JDP has pushed the existing press to 2.75 million impressions in June, bringing to the impression count in the lifetime of the press to some 50 million. It is equipped with Axis Control, for off press monitoring of colour compared to Inpress Control inline closed loop colour control.
The high speed makeready is suited to the target of shift run high pagination and versioned work, which can be switched between litho and digital, on the recently installed HP Indigo 100K and the Indigo 12000, for the same per-product cost for printing. “We have been trying to get the productisation right. We have three output engines and the same labour costs across them Now we have the choice of doing incremental scheduling to get the right infrastructure for the market,” says Thirlby.
That, he says, is changing as buyers remain highly sensitive to confidence in the economy. The business has been fielding inquiries and winning orders from across the spectrum. Initial orders can be down to 350 items to reduce risk.
“I have always believed that if the product portfolio is as planned, then we can easily achieve the same throughput as any comparable B1 platform. This investment allows JDP to continue its drive into being one of the leading companies in its sector,” says Thirlby.
The sale of the existing machine and financing arrangements for the new machine mean that 70% of the purchase price for John Dollin will have been repaid in nine months.
