The investment follows the acquisition of Snap Print Management three months ago and managing directors Ryan Metcalf and Bob Rhodes, who founded the firm in 2005, are now looking to boost combined turnover of the two from £9m to £12m by the end of this financial year.
RNB will install a Konica Minolta bizhub Press 2250 and a 1250 within the next six weeks at its Leeds premises, and will have installed Imprint’s Direct Mail Business Control System (BCS) by September. The investment roughly breaks down as £100,000 for the two Konica Minolta machines and £70,000 for the MIS, although the MIS investment figure may rise if RNB decides to add full tracking on each of its machines.
The Konica Minolta machines replace a five-year old bizhub Press 1200 and have been brought in to support RNB's transactional mail offering, which Metcalf said now comprises around 50% of direct mail orders. The MIS will replace a direct mail MIS developed in-house by Metcalf and join an existing Tharstern MIS.
Metcalf said: “We’re always looking for investment and the reason for our growth is that we’ve always let ourselves be led by what the customer wants.
“The Konica investment is to keep up with and stay ahead of what we are currently putting through the machines. The kind of work we are doing these days has evolved to daily transactional work, on top of regular and ad hoc mailings that we were traditionally set up to do.”
The 2250 runs at top speeds of 250 A4ppm duplex at 1,200dpi resolution, using Konica’s dual-engine technology for front-to-back registration accuracy and image density adjustment. It takes paper weighing between 40gsm and 350gsm at a maximum size of 320x480mm. The 1250 prints at the slower speed of 125 A4ppm.
The MIS allows for full direct mail job tracking and has an estimating module that can handle multiple components of differing run lengths. Client supplied items can be tracked and traced using barcode location software and it also has a stock control module.
“We have some very good separate standalone systems at the minute and we are looking for something that can do any number of things in one go,” added Metcalf.
“We’ve grown so much over the last four or five years that we just needed to catch up with that, in terms of the software driving the business. It’s a very important part of what we do, communicating from one department to the next efficiently.”
Following the installation, RNB will run nine Konica Minolta digital colour laser and mono laser printers, along with a five-colour Komori Lithrone LS 529, envelope enclosing and polywrapping lines and a raft of finishing kit.
