Northumberland general commercial firm Robson Print achieved ROI in 18 months when it invested in Horizon SPF/FC-200A stitch/fold/trim line.

Neil McKie, Director of the firm that works with local, national and international businesses such as the home brew market and educational material for the UK and USA states: “It did exactly what we wanted it to do and more. We were able to bring work inhouse and it obviously saved on external supplier costs. Productivity went up, we improved our workflow. It also reduced our make-ready times and resulted in less wastage.

As for choosing the Horizon solution he states: “We looked at Duplo but felt the Horizon had more benefits to bring to the table. We thought the Horizon had a better trade name.  We don’t pigeonhole any of our operators on particular pieces of equipment. We like them to be able to operate lots of different systems and the Horizon fits in well with that. It was a lot easier to set up than the older machine and our apprentices were up and running on it very quickly.

“The programmability is very useful. It also offers extremely smooth operation which gives us more confidence to take on the bigger jobs. We can just set it up and let it run.”

Robson Print’s system included a 200-programme job memory storage for instant recall, an icon-based touch-screen for job set-up and two 10-station VAC-Turbo 100 PowerCollators: “Collating used to be a big bottleneck and the Horizon has made a massive impact. Going from 10 stations to 20 is saving us days at a time. There is no need to pre-collate now. We have also significantly increased capacity and we are getting through the work much quicker. We are getting a good throughput and work keeps coming in.”