KBA Rapida 106

摘要

Replacing four older presses with two 106s has transformed production at APS group, slashing makeready times and boosting capacity. Press installs come, for many companies, off the back of feeling their existing kit, while doing all right, is not quite competing anymore on the productivity and automation fronts. Most self-respecting print firm owners will start to get a niggling sense that their make-readies, for example, are taking a little longer than is ideal. But few will probably be able to express this with quite the specificity of APS Group. Thanks to impressively thorough KPI tracking, the company was aware that its average makeready time was, around the beginning of last year, 25-30 minutes. It had calculated from this that 27% of shift time was spent on makereadies. And that this equated to around 13 weeks a year. This then was the motivation for investing, in May and then September last year, in two B1 10-colour KBA Rapida 106 long perfector presses. Not that APS Group is all about pressroom number crunching and a sole focus on print production. The print facilities at its Cheadle Heath press hall are just one aspect of the business. Since being established as Allied Publicity Services in Manchester in 1961, APS Group's multi-discipline mix has expanded to include marketing communications, from creative services, digital publishing, data management and cross-media campaigns to logistics, fulfilment and project management.