The three-staff outfit, based in Tyne and Wear, installed a 3.2m-wide Mimaki UJV55320 at the backend of last year, its first machine of that size, in a bid to move further into the large-format graphics market. The cutter came in last month.
The spend of £195,000 (£135,000 for the cutter and £60,000 for the Mimaki), including additional modules, is yielding positive results according to GPS managing director Malcolm Cairns who said the business is now aiming to double its £250,000 sales within 18 months.
“We were printing medium-format stuff for retail stores and banners but the idea behind the Mimaki was that there was a section of work we weren’t getting from our existing custome base because of the larger size.
“The Mimaki then imposed restrictions on the finishing, which is where the cutter came in, and we opted for a cutter of the same width as the printer but also with roll-feed so that as well as doing rigid boards it enables us to process rolls of banner material and vinyl.”
The two machines were initially due for installation around the same time but lead times meant there was a three-month gap in installation, which led Cairns to halt advertising of the new Mimaki to his existing customers until the cutter came in.
“It did put a squeeze on things for a while,” he added.
However, now that the cutter is fully operational Cairns said GPS has enjoyed an influx of large-format work, along with short-run prototyping work from litho printers.
Cairns said: “We are now starting to attract some new customers on both sides, both on large-format but also on finishing. We’ve had a number of jobs in from litho printers for short-run stuff that doesn’t warrant making a dye and we’ve done the cutting for them.
“Everything was getting finished by hand before, this was where the bottlenecks occurred. Twenty-minute cutting jobs were previously four hours, so we are seeing massive savings of time on existing work and are opening up new streams of work.”
The cutter, which handles the likes of acrylic, Dibond and rigid PVC, has been installed with a number of additional tools, including a routing head, knife, creaser and reciprocator. It runs K-Cut Vision Pro software and was supplied by AG/CAD, who Cairns visited for “extensive trialling” of the machine before purchase.
Along with the Mimaki and the Dyss, GPS runs two 1.6m-wide Mimaki solvent roll-to-roll machines, along with an Inca Spyder flatbed, a Mimaki vinyl plotter and two laminators.
