PCL Digital eyes 20-30% turnover boost following Duplo investment

03 July 2015

Post-press

PCL Digital has bought two pieces of Duplo equipment to boost its productivity and increase its in-house service offering with the aim to increase turnover by 20 to 30% in the next 12 months.

The Birmingham-based business took delivery of an FKS PrintBind KB-4000 perfect binder and a DC-646Pro slitter/cutter/creaser in the second week of June.

Both machines are new additions to the firm’s 372sqm unit, which also includes a six-colour plus white ink HP Indigo 5500 and finishing kit including folders, laminators and guillotines.

The DC-646Pro is a fully automated multi-finisher that offers up to eight slits, 25 cross-cuts and 20 creases in a single pass.

It has a top speed of 30 sheets/min and can handle sheets from 370x999mm down to 210x210mm, with a minimum finished product size of 48x28mm. It has a stock range of 110-350gsm.

Director Nick Westley-Smith ?said: “Due to the nature of printing a lot of short runs we can get held up with jobs like business cards at the guillotine stage.

“The idea of buying the DC-646Pro was to free up time for the finishing department and increase productivity. Since we’ve had it we can run jobs, trim and crease at the same time.

The 200bph PrintBind KB-4000 is a single clamp binder for on-demand work. The machine can run both PUR and EVA hotmelt glues.

“We bought the KB-4000 because we’re getting more demand for short-run booklets that have too many pages or are too thick for our bookletmaker and need to be PUR bound. But the cost of sending them out was too high,” said Westley-Smith.

“We are the only PUR perfect binders in Birmingham that will offer the really short runs of fives, tens and fifties competitively priced and we needed to capture that increase in demand.

“There are a few jobs that we’ll now be able to bring in-house with these two machines. We’ve won a contract for some voucher books, which we wouldn’t have done without these machines. And on the back of the KB-4000 we’ve won work such as tender documents of four, five and six copies.”

Westley-Smith added that the investment was partly secured with Regional Growth Fund (RGF) funding and that extra work won as a direct result of taking on the new kit will safeguard one job and allow the firm to take on at least one more employee in the next 12 months.

PCL Digital currently has seven staff and a turnover of £500,000. It produces business cards, flyers, postcards, leaflets, brochures, menus and posters for customers including trade printers, print buyers and design agencies.