The press was installed to replace three aging Manroland presses and has allowed the company to achieve printing speeds of up to 18,000 sheets-per-hour, printed both sides.
Chris Scully, sales director, sheetfed presses at KBA, said the award was in recognition of the impressive throughput the company had already achieved. "The APS pressroom is a true commercial print operation within a 21st century marketing communications business. The speed at which they swap between jobs is phenomenal. It’s not section work but it could be. There’s no doubt this machine is doing what it says on the tin and those guys can make it perform.”
Regarding how the Rapida 106 has performed so far, Darren Ingham, APS quality and compliance manager, said: “It’s so fast we’ve had to consider how to make sure all our other systems keep up, things like having multiple paper deliveries each day and thinking about how paper is processed through our warehouse and transported to the press. We’re huge advocates of Six Sigma lean manufacturing and have made sure all our staff are educated to make production as efficient as possible.”
Also shortlisted for this year’s award was Tunbridge Wells-based Mastercolour, in recognition of the 10,268sph average and 11 minutes average make ready time achieved this year on its KBA Rapida 75 B2 6 colour. Commended was Glasgow-based Bell & Bain for its work on its KBA Rapida 142.
The 1814 Production Excellence Award is awarded annually to commemorate achievements by UK printers using KBA presses. The award commemorates the printing of the 29 November 1814 edition of The Times, on the first ever power-driven press, designed by Friedrich Koenig and built in conjunction with Andreas Bauer.
KBA’s Scully said: “This year was very good for entries. They showed the diversity of KBA technologies now out there in the field.”
Picture left to right: Andrew Pang, managing director, KBA (UK), Gareth Jones, lean manufacturing supervisor, APS Group, Darren Ingham, quality and compliance manager APS Group, Chris Scully, sales director, Sheetfed Presses, KBA (UK).
