The new system was installed in the first week of June. Telford managing director Peter Llewellyn said it was a choice between hiring a new member of staff or buying the new kit.
The move follows on from the purchase of a DBM-150 bookletmaker from Duplo, just over a year ago.
Llewellyn said: “We are exclusively a digital print company and what we were finding was that we needed to speed up the finishing process because our print capability was giving us a bit of a bottleneck and not being able to finish certain things as quickly as we wanted to.
“The finisher enables us to put SRA3 sheets in the machine and within one job it proved it could cut cards, slit cards, crease and do all of these things unattended. Once it is set up, you literally put the material in and, lo and behold, out come, for example, business cards.
“Within a few days of having it in, we were using it virtually all the time and it has since proved to be a very worthwhile acquisition.”
Llewellyn used the example of business cards, which previously had to be cut separately but can now be inserted in sheets of 21 and “drop out the other end, ready to go straight into boxes”.
The finisher is capable of up to 25 cuts and 20 creases in a single pass and has PC controller software and touchscreen operation.
Telford was initially unsure about whether to make the purchase, which was £25,000, but Llewellyn struck a deal with Duplo to allow them to use the finisher for a number of weeks prior to purchase to see if it would work with the business.
“We spoke to Duplo and said ‘If you are prepared to put this machine in for a few weeks’ trial, assuming it does everything that you say it does, we will buy it.’ So the understanding from our perspective was that if it ticked all the boxes we wanted it to tick, we would purchase,” he added.
22-year-old Telford Repro employs 11 staff. The £750,000-turnover business runs four Konica Minolta bizhub 1070 digital presses, which produce a wide range of print, from business cards through to full-colour exhibition graphics.
