B2 House Meets Changing Market with New Horizon

Rumbold Holland, the Swindon-based B2 litho commercial printer, has turned round its performance on saddlestitched books with an inspired investment decision: a Horizon StitchLiner system from GAE has been introduced to replace its conventional Muller Martini line.

Wayne Rumbold, Joint Managing Director, explains that the move was prompted by changes in customer demand: “Our work profile has changed from long runs to short-to-medium runs so we needed a machine that combined fast makereadies with a good running speed. Now job-to-job downtime is less than 20 minutes as opposed to two hours on our Muller.”

Operational flexibility, productivity and ease of operation are all reasons why the fully-automated collating, saddlestitching and 3-knife trimming line has become one of GAE’s top selling systems – this is the 100th UK install – with B2 litho houses now the leading area of uptake.

“It is more efficient and there is less marking,” says Mr Rumbold, “and the ability to interrupt work for a quick job is a great bonus… we can easily stop work put another job on and then go back to the long run job – it’s a revelation. Because operation is so simple, staff can be trained up very quickly and they can easily move from one system to another. It also means we don’t have to wait for more skilled employees to be available.”

As well as improved efficiency on its saddlestitching work, the company is enjoying a number of other benefits including collating 8-page sections for perfect binding and 2-page inserts – work previously sent to outworkers. The support service from GAE also helped the Horizon’s popularity: “Training and installation were excellent,” explains Wayne Rumbold, “and we were told exactly what the machine was capable of so we could understand how to best put it to good use.”

The JDF-ready StitchLiner features fully-automated makereadies and works from flat 4-page sections, eliminating the need to fold into signatures, so saving time and energy. It runs at speeds of 11,000 bph, has an icon-based LCD touch screen for easy set-up and job memory storage for quick job change over.

Bryan Godwyn, GAE joint managing director, says: “The StitchLiner is a unique hybrid system and its early success was among users of stitch/fold/trim lines looking to increase capacity who could see the benefit of eliminating pre-trimming and, of course, the genuine saddlestitched finish. Now B1 and B2 houses, already used to conventional saddlestitching lines, are beginning to appreciate it has a great deal to offer them, too, by eliminating the folding process and offering complete run-length flexibility.”

Tony Hards, GAE joint MD, adds: “We are delighted that Rumbold Holland has become the recipient of the UK’s 100th Horizon StitchLiner because it is becoming clear that, as run lengths shorten, the traditional saddlestitching sector is this system’s natural environment.”

Rumbold Holland has a wide variety of clients from the public, financial services and retail sectors. The B2 specialist works directly with clients or with them through third party companies including marketing agencies and print management facilitators.