The Gold Coast and Tweed area has seen three major Duplo finishing installations from Neopost in a short time, all different and tailored to each printer’s specific needs. Graham Osborne visited to see why printers in this growth area are finishing print with Duplo. Over the next three weeks we'll profile each go-ahead business. Kicking off is Trent Willoughby of Summit Press
Summit Press Printing started out from scratch 16 years ago, with business going particularly well over the past six years as the Gold Coast has expanded and Tweed Heads itself has grown in population. According to owner Trent Willoughby: “The last two years have been super and this past year was the best yet, so it was important we stepped up production.”
Willoughby decided early this year he needed to upgrade to keep pace. “Keeping up with Neopost technology is the key,” he says. “It has to be. There are a lot of printers in the area who have gone broke because they haven’t kept up – they haven’t updated their digital presses or installed good booklet makers.
“We’ve invested pretty heavily in recent months. We’ve just bought a brand new A3, 5-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster 52, a new Ricoh 9100 has also gone in and we’ve had the Duplo for three months now.”
“We had an older finishing machine that was slow and there were jobs we could print but we couldn’t finish so we were being forced to outsource work.”
After a thorough search to see what was on offer, Willoughby settled on the Duplo DBM-600i booklet maker/stitcher because of its speed and versatility.
The Duplo 600i is one of the fastest in the market and can run up to 5200 sets an hour on A4 jobs. It produces saddle, side, corner-stitched, and letter landscape booklets and suits printers who have both offset and digital capabilities because of intelligent multi-bin feeding from the DSC-10/60i tower.
60 second job change-overs
Neopost’s Queensland business development manager Blaise Masson says: “It’s a tool-free operation, all run through a Duplo PC controller, so a make-ready for a book can be completed in under 60 seconds. It’s literally that fast, and with that kind of ability to change over different jobs, you could be finishing a 10,000 run offset job, then pull that off and put on another, say digital job for 100 books and the changeover time is less than 60 seconds.”
“The Duplo is definitely fast,” confirms Willoughby. “There’s one job we do weekly and on the old machine it was four hours. On the new Duplo it’s two hours, half the time. I can now print jobs and finish them at double the speed with no more need to outsource. The Duplo also has the capacity to do a banner sheet, a six-page A4 brochure. It can hold and stitch that, and that’s massive for us. There are not many machines that can do that. Certainly no one’s got that in our area.”
“It’s easy to operate so basically anybody can jump on it with just with a little bit of training. You don’t have to be an expert. We’re now running a massive variety of jobs, everything from gloss stocks and satins to longer-run uncoated bond for newsletters and we also run a lot of carbon paper. So it’s not just a booklet maker.”
Willoughby says an important factor in choosing the Duplo was the installation and maintenance support available from Neopost.
“I didn’t have to do anything except organise the power. That was it. Neopost did everything else. They installed, they trained – and it’s continuous training. It wasn’t just a day or two; we’ve had it three months now and we’re still getting training. That kind of support is the biggest thing and it’s great to have.”