Eight new machines have been installed at the firm’s 11,100sqm facility over the past few months. The most recent additions are a Stahl KH82 pallet-fed folder and a Polar 137 Guillotine with full flow line handling from Heidelberg, which were installed last month.
This follows six pieces of Schmedt short-run, large-format case binding equipment, which were installed at the start of the year.
The company, which has won the PrintWeek Awards Book Printer of the Year award for the past three years, has also ordered a second KH82 due to the success of the first, which saw the machine produce over 1.3 million 16pp and 32pp sections in its first 120 operating hours.
Furthermore, a fully automatic Stahl TH82 with round pile feed option will arrive in the next month, which will enable Pureprint to save on costs.
Director Richard Owers said: “In a competitive marketplace, achieving greater productivity requires investment in the latest machinery and this investment has been a really good step forward.
“As with other new equipment we’ve installed in the last few years, it’s been really encouraging to see how much of a step change in productivity some of the latest kit has got over previous kit.”
The Polar 137 has replaced a Polar 115. Owers said the 137 achieved twice the cutting speed of the 115 in the first week of production.
The Schmedt semi-automatic equipment will enable Pureprint to case bind books with a trimmed page size of up to 440x440mm in-house. As a result, the business is able to provide cost-effective publishing for short runs from one to 1,000 copies.
“We were outsourcing short-run binding before but we’ve seen increasing demand for it as we’ve been producing quite a lot of relatively short-run books on our HP Indigo printers,” said Owers.
Owers said the business chose the new equipment following a review of various options available on the market but that an important factor in the decision was that new kit would feed directly into the company’s new Tharstern MIS, which is currently being installed.
Pureprint, which has a turnover of more than £58m and employs 400 staff, serves clients in the corporate, retail, creative and fine art sectors. Earlier this year it acquired a majority shareholding in Newcastle upon Tyne-based Imprint Group.
The deal was financed with part of Pureprint's recently announced £5.3m investment from Business Growth Fund.
