The firm’s purchase of the 3.2m-wide hybrid UV-LED inkjet printer makes it the tenth Vutek printer the business has bought from distributor CMYUK in a 20-year period.
Graham Pitts, group managing director, said: “They know us, we know them. We bought our very first printer from Jon [CMYUK group finance and operations director] twenty-five years ago.
“Buying the h5 was a natural choice for us. We’re so familiar with the Vutek family it made sense for us to stick with what we know.”
The new printer, installed in March at the firm’s Thundridge, Hertfordshire site, replaced two EFI Vutek GS3250 Pro printers and has allowed KGK Genix to increase the quality of its superwide-format output from 600 to 1,200dpi.
Pitts said: “We didn’t buy the h5 to increase volume, we purchased it to run at higher quality - and not lose any speed in doing so.”
KGK Genix is now able to jump from the three-layer work it was producing on the older GS model printers to nine-layer, single-pass printing, which imparts a textured, tactile finish.
Similarly, where once the business produced volumes of two-sided vinyl graphics in a two-step process, it can now produce double-sided images by printing to one side only on the h5 - cutting both material costs and on-site installation time.
By installing a single machine in the place of two others, KGK Genix has freed up enough floorspace to have a forklift navigate the factory floor, helping to speed production.
The two GS models that the h5 replaced, which are six and 10 years old, have been repurposed.
The newer has been transferred to the company’s Harlow site, and the older sold to a Polish print shop. Both, however, said Dave Pitts, group operations director, were still in good working order.
He said: “Because we’re a family business and a very close-knit team, everybody looks after the machines as if they’re their own because they know how important they are.
“Our printers are always really well maintained and no expense is spared on that side of things.”
KGK Genix’s investment has come as part of the firm’s strategy to bounce back after it was forced to close down its Tottenham site and make a large number of people redundant during Covid.
Graham Pitts said: “Our post-Covid vision is different to our pre-Covid one. It focuses more on the type of work we want to do and [quality of] service.
“It’s about operating in a slightly different way, being more decisive, creating greater structure, hiring the right people, and not over-expanding the workforce. It’s working smarter not harder, and the Vutek h5 is definitely part of that strategy.”
