New Five-color Press Keeps UTHealth Busy

For many in-plants, short-run digital printing is the key to their future growth. Not so at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Long runs of magazines, newsletters and brochures are what bring home the bacon for UTHealth's 20-employee Printing and Media Services department. Cranking out these high-volume runs for the past two decades has been the in-plant's six-color, 29˝ Heidelberg Speedmaster perfector, aided by a small arsenal of two-color presses.

That all changed last month, though, when the in-plant fired up a brand new five-color Heidelberg SX74 with a tower coater, more than doubling its output speed from 7,000 to 15,000 impressions per hour. Thanks to all of its automation features, notes Donna Horbelt, director of Auxiliary Enterprises, Printing and Media Services, the days of hour-long makereadies are over.

"I can makeready a four-color process job in about 20 minutes," she boasts.

The installation follows the addition of a five-color 24x29˝ Komori Lithrone SX29 press with a coater at The University of Texas at Austin in January. And with the Texas Department of Transportation's February installation of a four-color Ryobi 754G XL with aqueous coating, 2015 is looking like a pretty good year for offset in the state of Texas.

An Easy Decision

UTHealth's decision to trade in its six-color press, plus a pair of two-color Heidelbergs, for a new five-color press was not difficult, says Horbelt.

"It was actually one of the easiest decisions we've made here," she reveals.

At 20 years of age, the six-color was breaking down frequently, she notes.

"One year I spent 65 grand on repairs," she says. "My down time last year was about 65 days."

Retiring the press was obviously a necessity, but did Horbelt ever consider leaving the offset business, like many of her in-plant peers, and focusing her attention on digital work?

Not for a second. Offset work, she says, makes up an impressive 68 percent of the in-plant's revenue. And because of the faster makeready times and coating capabilities of the new press, she expects that revenue to climb as the shop grabs more work that it previously couldn't handle.

Don't be misled, though; UTHealth's in-plant still does a lot of digital printing—more than 350,000 digital color impressions a month. For that reason it replaced its Xerox iGen4 in October with a new iGen4 90 Diamond Edition with a 14.33x22.5˝ sheet size. Still, Horbelt stresses, the iGen4 can't handle jobs like a recent order for 15,000 copies of a 24-page magazine.

"That's a big run. That's not something you can do digital," she says. The shop printed it with ease on the new press.

Coating Brings Many Benefits

Horbelt is confident the Heidelberg SX74 will stay busy, both from UTHealth work and jobs insourced from state or non-profit clients. In fact, 56 percent of the in-plant's revenue comes from outside customers, including the MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose designers have a particular affinity for coated pieces. Because the in-plant's old press couldn't coat, many jobs from both UTHealth and MD Anderson were bypassing the shop.

"I bet I lost 40 or 50 jobs every year just because I couldn't do coating," Horbelt laments.

Already she has lined up several jobs requiring coating, and she expects many more to come. But coating has brought more than new work to the in-plant. It has streamlined production tremendously due to one very helpful feature of coating.

"The sheet comes off dry," Horbelt says.

With the old press, sheets had to sit for a day or more waiting for the ink to dry before they could be cut or folded, seriously slowing production. Now sheets can go immediately from press to bindery.

Also enhancing productivity are the press's automation features. It boasts an automated feeder with central suction belt, automatic plate changing and automated wash-up. The Prinect Prepress Interface automatically sets the paper size and presets the ink fountain settings for color density on the press. Settings are saved and can be called back up when the job is run again.

"It adjusts all the ink fountains and everything so the consistency from job to job is going to be very high," Horbelt remarks.

Consistency during the run is ensured by having operators pull sheets and scan them with an integrated spectrophotometer. Then the press automatically adjusts the ink settings.

Faster makereadies also mean less waste.

"Where I was needing 700 and 800 sheets to makeready a side, now [it takes] about 300," Horbelt reports.

Digital Upgrades

Despite the revenue that offset brings to the in-plant (and to UTHealth, since the in-plant turns all profits over to the institution), offset jobs make up only 19 percent of the shop's workload. To better handle the other 81 percent, the in-plant upgraded its digital black-and-white and color printers in October. Its Xerox 4127 was replaced by a Xerox D136, to handle a heavier production load; and the Xerox iGen4 was traded in for an iGen4 90 Diamond Edition featuring Matte Dry Ink. Its 14.33x22.5˝ sheet size lets the shop run more multiple-up jobs as well as posters.

"The matte toner is beautiful," Horbelt praises. "The work that comes off that machine is exceptional."

Still, she surmises that the iGen4 could see less work now that the five-color Heidelberg has entered the scene.

"Now that I have my new press, I really think my digital clicks may go down," she says. "Some of the work that we were intentionally doing digital because of time frames, I'm going to be able to go back and do offset."

Longer-run jobs with tight deadlines that would have taken too long on the old press were being done on the iGen4. Now the new press can easily handle them—and for a lower cost.

"My goal is to save the client money," she insists.

This, however, will only account for a fraction of the new work Horbelt expects the SX74 to generate.

"I'm hoping the new press is busy doing new work that I didn't have access to before," she says.