Éxito! In-plant Travels to Spain to Find Ideal Press

Sometimes you have to search high and low to find what you want. For Doug Bekkering, press and quantity team leader at RBC Ministries, and Doug Eizenga, maintenance engineer at the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Christian publisher, their search for a press led them to Madrid, Spain.

Last year, Bekkering and Eizenga visited a commercial print shop in the Spanish capital in pursuit of an Akiyama JPrint JP-5P540.

“There are not many Akiyama JPrint’s here in the United States, since those presses are more common in Asia and Europe,” explains Bekkering.

They found exactly what they were looking for, and purchased the seven-year-old JPrint, with 56 million impressions, CIP3 capability and Closed Loop Color. The press was installed at RBC in January, and was in operation by the beginning of March. It did not get refurbished, but was assembled by engineers from Akiyama. The JPrint replaced a 30-year-old Heidelberg Speedmaster SM 102 press that was running with conventional dampening.

“The press would have needed some significant overhaul to keep it around,” explains Bekkering, “and that was not worth it for a 30-year-old press.”

What Bekkering likes about the new JPrint is that it has a 5-over-5 stack configuration, instead of a long perfector like a Heidelberg.

“It is really compact,” he says. “It also requires less transfers, less water and has less marking and scratching.”

Some of the projects the 60-employee in-plant is now producing on the JPrint include devotional materials, such as 4x6˝ stitched books and covers, as well as member cards, letters and letterheads. While the shop operates two HP Indigo digital presses—a 5500 and a 7000—Bekkering says that the addition of the JPrint was critical to produce a project that requires a half a million sheets every quarter.

“The cost per sheet would have been substantially higher running it through a digital press,” he explains.

Another benefit of the new press, Eizenga adds, is that the shop can now print long runs without adding excessive makeready time. The sheetfed press team was also able to go from two shifts to one.

As the in-plant gets up to speed with the new press, RBC Ministries foresees other benefits in the future.

“We have an [X-Rite] Intellitrax spectrophotometer with Closed Loop Color and CIP3 capability, so our makereadies should drop drastically,” Bekkering says. “We will also start moving some of our color work off of our Harris M1000 web press to the Akiyama. That would fill up that shift and bring it almost to capacity. This will also give our marketing group more options with the ability to change the layout.”