The machine, which was installed at the Milton Keynes-based company’s premises last month, was bought from AG/CAD for £90,000.
The business specified the SuperHead model with three tooling stations that can accommodate kiss-cut tools, routing, knife, creasing and pen tools.
The 1630C table, which has a bed size of 1.7x3.4m, will enable the company to work on a wide range of substrates including E-flute board, Foamex and Corex. The machine works with the Kasemake CAD suite with templates for boxes, folders and display units.
The Colour Crew, which has eight staff and a turnover of nearly £1m, produces POS, signage, outdoor displays, posters and exhibition graphics for blue-chip companies, small businesses, manufacturers, retailers and agencies.
General manager Nick Goodall said: “The cost of tooling to produce short-run POS work for customers – for dump bins, freestanding display units (FSDUs) and displays – was getting too much and the time it was taking was too long.
“This machine has improved our quality and turnaround times immensely and also makes us more competitive.”
The company had previously been die-cutting using a platen, hand-cutting or outsourcing finishing work.
“We’ve now brought most of our finishing in-house and the DYSS also allows us to do a huge number of things that we couldn’t offer before. We can make packaging prototypes, POS prototypes and our own packaging and we can also do one-off displays with complicated cuts,” said Goodall.
“We’re now approaching different customers and also getting different work from our existing customers.”
Goodall said the business, which also operates screen-printing equipment plus Canon, Mimaki and Epson wide-format machinery, considered alternatives from Zünd but picked the DYSS machine due to its robustness and reliability as well as its competitive price and the benefits of the Kasemake CAD suite.
“AG/CAD have been absolutely fantastic to deal with. The training given was excellent and so far when we’ve had any queries and problems they’ve been able to remote into the machine and help us out,” said Goodall.
Separately, AG/CAD has said its sales of DYSS machines have more than doubled in 2015. AG/CAD sales director Andrew Boulton said the firm sees the sales growth as a reflection of the improving economy and confidence in the UK.
“Companies are also looking to diversify into other markets as well as upgrading and speeding up existing processes, and our combined machine and software solutions are key to this,” said Boulton.
“We see 2016 carrying on in the same way and we already have a number of large installations of DYSS Cutters scheduled for the new year.”
