Sydney wide format production house Poster Graphics has doubled its print capacity and streamlined its finishing with the installation of a third Océ Arizona 250 GT flatbed printer and an Océ ProCut cutting table.
It has continued a remarkable success rate for the display graphics printer, which has seen a doubling of business each year since director Gary Miller first opened the company in a garden shed 12 years ago.
Now specialising in high end retail and quality cosmetics display graphics, Poster Graphics installed its first Océ Arizona 250 GT three years ago to pursue the quality market.
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| Gary Miller with one of his company’s three Océ Arizona 250 GT flatbed printers. |
“While we were seeking ways to improve the quality of our output, the Océ Arizona also gave us a way to reduce our finishing processes. The Arizona’s ability to print on multiple substrates of varying thicknesses meant we no longer had to painstakingly mount printed copies onto backing substrates,” he says.
“That manpower saving gave us the opportunity to go out and seek more business and we were able to use the high quality output and finish of the Arizona to develop areas of work that we hadn’t been able to pursue previously.
“It also enabled us to continue a remarkable trend that has seen us double our business each year. We bought a second Arizona five months after the first, in order to keep pace with the orders we were getting but, ironically this success brought us a new challenge.
“With the extra capacity provided by the Océ Arizona 250 equipment and the additional orders, we developed a bottleneck in the finishing department. It’s great to get orders for hundreds of mounted displays but they still had to be cut by hand with all the risks of making mistakes and damaging panels.
“One of the benefits of dealing with Océ has been that the relationship has always had the hallmarks of a partnership rather than a customer-supplier arrangement. We discuss ideas with them and they are usually able to suggest solutions. Their service technician in fact has a place of honour on our website, alongside our regular employees.
“They showed us the Océ ProCut cutting table and with them, we were able to work out the best way of eliminating the bottleneck.
“I must say it’s been an eye opener. We are able to achieve in one hour with the ProCut what would normally have taken more than an entire day cutting by hand and, of course, there is no damage through human error.
“By eliminating the finishing and cutting bottleneck we anticipated we could introduce additional capacity, so we installed our third Océ Arizona 250 GT to take up the slack. All printers are now feeding into the Océ ProCut.”
The Océ ProCut can cut, crease and route substrates on an 1800 x 2500 cutting table and gives a smooth cut throughout, using hard or soft foam board, plastic material, acrylic and styrene, or flexible media including paper, film, vinyl and fabric. It can be programmed to kiss cut, crease, V-cut, through-cut and most other types of common cut.
Says Gary Miller: “The Océ ProCut expands our options exponentially not only in profile-cutting but in straight cutting too, by vastly improving quality, reducing labour and increasing the speed of output.
“In the printing trade everything is about quality, convenience and speed and our new Océ equipment provides this.”
Océ recently celebrated the shipping of its 2000th Océ Arizona UV flatbed printer, which is the world’s number one selling flatbed family, outselling all competitors combined. More than 60 of the popular flatbeds have been sold in Australia.
Océ Australia
www.oce.com.au
