Page 70 - Print21 Nov-Dec 2019

Installations
Double-sided print made easy
When it needed to find a new solution for fast, accurate double-sided poster printing, Sydney-based wide-format printer Allprint turned to Starleaton and EFI – and found exactly what it was looking for, down to less than a millimetre.
Allprint’s Rydalmere office is located a few minutes’ walk from the scenic, slowly-flowing Parramatta River – a river which moves about as quickly as the company’s double-sided printing operations once did.
“We were doing a lot of double- sided poster work on a flatbed and then backing it up as cut-down singles. This was time-consuming, and caused a bottleneck in our production, so we had a demand for a two-sided solution,” Grant Cunningham, managing director, tells Print21.
The family-owned business, which has been around since
1960, and now with 33 employees, needed to speed up production of double-sided point-of-sale material. The company produces work for
fast food, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), supermarkets, and other markets – and, after a long search for a productivity-boosting solution, Cunningham felt he was on to a winner.
Above right
Breaking the bottleneck: Grant Cunningham (right), managing director Allprint, with Andrew Koraca, Starleaton
Above
Whole roll
in half a day: Christine Beby, Allprint
“We contributed in the webinar, asking questions and looking at the machine. Our samples were sent back to us and looked great, so we decided to make the purchase.
“Obviously it was a little bit of a risk purchasing a machine without actually seeing it, but we had a lot of faith
in both Starleaton and EFI as good, trustworthy businesses. We took them on their word and proceeded with the order,” says Cunningham.
Since the Pro 32r was installed in May, Allprint has seen a dramatic improvement in both the registration of its double-sided print work and
its productivity. Cunningham says, “The new machine is pretty much faultless for production, and quality and uptime have both exceeded our expectations. It is also backing up double-sided posters to within under a millimetre, almost bang on – we were prepared to go to probably a couple of millimetres’ tolerance, so it’s far exceeded what we were after.
“It has increased our throughput:
we had a major bottleneck getting this type of work through the business, but haven’t had a bottleneck in that area in the past two months. We are doing the equivalent amount of work – probably more – more efficiently and with less overtime. It is also freeing up our other machines to do flatbed work, leaving our roll-to-roll to the EFI,” he says.
Cunningham adds that installation and training went smoothly, and Starleaton service and support has been excellent. “Installation went well, everything
was set up nicely. Starleaton continues to support us well, preparing profiles for different media. They have been working with us to come through on the training, get us up to speed. Assuming it met our expectations, we would definitely buy from them again – the equipment from EFI is well-built, with great tolerances and quality,” he says.
Christine Beby, print technician at Allprint, says the Pro 32r is a simple machine to operate and easy to understand.
“It is a good machine to work with. I could start showing you how to operate the machine, and over several hours, you could probably learn how to work it yourself,” she tells me.
“In the training, they show you what to do – as long as you follow the instructions, you will be fine. I was shown how to do maintenance as well, and we got a detailed manual on how to do the maintenance. Once you have a set step-by-step list, it’s the same all the time – it’s pretty good.”
Beby adds that the machine’s double- sided capabilities are “fantastic”.
“We have been doing 200-metre rolls, and backing up is exact as long as you set it up how you have been taught. We can print a whole double- sided roll without any worries at all.
“It has saved us heaps of time and labour, especially for double-sided. We can do a whole roll in half a day, where previously it would have taken us about a day and a half,” she says.
Now that’s a real selling point for point-of-sale. 21
“We are doing the equivalent amount of work – probably more – more efficiently and with less overtime.” – Grant Cunningham, Allprint
“I happened to ring Starleaton in about February of this year, and they told me the EFI Pro 32r roll-to-roll machine had just been launched. It met our requirements for price point and the ability to do double-sided in register – we were excited about that, arranged to meet with them, and the machine ticked all our boxes as far as specs went,” he says.
Cunningham and the team signed up for an EFI webinar, where the manufacturer took them through the Pro 32r operation, and ran a sample job for Allprint live on camera.
70 Print21 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019