Offset Printing
Eight-colour Rapida 106 creates reserves for urgent jobs
Friday 02. October 2015 - Shoei Printing in Japan boosts productivity with KBA sheetfed offset technology
An eight-colour KBA Rapida 106 perfector for four-over-four printing has been in operation at Shoei Printing, a well-known Japanese printing and media house, since the beginning of the year. It is the company’s first sheetfed offset press from Koenig & Bauer and the second Rapida to be fired up so far this year in the greater Niigata region.
Shoei Printing was founded in 1959 and today the company has several offices in Japan as well as subsidiaries in Vietnam and China. 130 employees work at the headquarters. Until now Shoei Printing only operated printing technology from Japan which included two eight-colour medium-format presses. One of them is only a year old. However, CEO and President Sakai Masayuki realised that it doesn’t deliver the gains in productivity agreed. Together with his team he therefore carried out print tests on sheetfed offset presses from various manufacturers. Attention focused on printing speed, makeready times, substrate handling and operation. The Rapida 106 stood out from the crowd with regard to printing speed and makeready times in particular. “KBA not only met the performance parameters stated in its product brochures exactly, but it even exceeded them,” says Sakai Masayuki.
On the basis of this, he ordered his first Rapida 106 from KBA. It is equipped with a high-speed package for speeds of up to 18,000sph in perfecting mode as well as a raft of automation modules. These include DriveTronic SPC simultaneous plate changing plus Plate Ident, Data Matrix Select for automatic plate recognition and loading job data, CleanTronic Synchro for parallel washing processes, ErgoTronic ACR for register setting and many others. The press also features QualiTronic Color Control inline colour control system for both sides of the sheet. Furthermore, the Rapida 106 is connected to the company’s MIS via a LogoTronic CIPLinkX workstation. The press also receives presetting data from pre-press via CIPLinkX.
“The press installation was carried out quickly in an extremely professional manner,” says Sakai Masayuki. “Whereas replacing a press with a newer model in the past only resulted in moderate increases in performance, this all changed with the Rapida 106. We have seen huge gains in productivity. Jobs that took 24 hours in the past with our existing technology, now only take 16 hours. This means we save a third of the time. This makes production planning easier and creates reserves for urgent additional jobs,” says Shoei Printing CEO about the increase in flexibility. “I can definitely say that the Rapida 106 delivers the shortest ROI of all presses known to me.”