New Four-color Press Sparks Shop Renovation

Two-color printing used to be fashionable, remarks Bob Tippins, manager of Graphic Services at Carleton University. “But now everyone wants four-color,” he says.

For an in-plant with a two-color press, however, this presented a small problem. The 23-employee, Ottawa, Ontario-based in-plant did some four-color work on its 25-year-old two-color Heidelbeg MOZP, but it was, Tippins admits, “very inefficient.”

“We farmed a lot of four-color out,” he says.

To bring that work back in-house, he made a pitch to the powers that be at this 23,000-student university.

“If we want to stay competitive,” he told them, “and we want to play in this market and serve our customers properly, we need to upgrade in our pressroom.”

Because the university recognized the in-plant’s stellar customer service and on-time delivery record, and the fact that it was bringing in a profit through insourcing, they gave his request their blessing. As a result, the in-plant just installed a new four-color, 29? Heidelberg PM74.

“The makereadies are unbelievably quick compared to what we were doing before,” Tippins says, thanks to features like auto plate loading, ink setting and blanket washing.

The shop will now take on high-quality four-color work like recruitment publications, view books and posters that were previously sent outside. It will also be able to bid on more work from outside the university. Insourcing already accounts for 25 to 30 percent of the in-plant’s work, Tippins says.

The press isn’t all that’s new at this Canadian in-plant. The shop has been totally renovated.

“We’re in a basement area, and it looked like a basement area,” Tippins remarks. After four months of work, though, the reception area has gone from looking “kind of dingy” to resembling “a nice medical office.” The counter was expanded and wire racks for finished jobs were replaced with new cabinets.

In the production area, storage space was removed and the digital area was expanded. The Kodak Digimaster was moved from the pressroom into the digital area. A wall was installed around the pressroom, ventilation was improved and it was repainted and retiled.

“It’s a quantum leap from what it was before,” Tippins says. “We’re quite proud of it.”