Our DriveTronic Simultaneous Plate Changing (SPC) system has been in successful operation for six months and it has made a vital operational impact.

Where the changeover time on the standard machine might be 20 minutes, this can be reduced to just one minute on the new press with the SPC system.

In practice, it’s more likely to be three or four minutes but, since 60% of our throughput is multi-sectional work for relatively short-run magazines or books, this kind of saving is very significant.

In 2002, we identified a long perfector multicolour B1-format press as our next investment.

The eight-colour Rapida 106 proved to be a great success. Our runs are typically between 800 and 5,000 and often full-colour both sides, but the critical factor is turnaround times.