Personalised printing company, PhotoBox, is supporting growth in its canvas production division by investing in an Esko Kongsberg XN22 digital finishing device and Automation Engine prepress workflow solution.
The need for a new cutting table was initiated by PhotoBox’s investment in a fleet of Epson 60 inch wide format printers. ‘We needed a cutting solution for the wider canvas media produced on these printers, James Lawrence-Jones, group technical innovation director explained. ‘We were also seeking ways to streamline the entire printing and cutting workflow for canvasses to accommodate increased print capacity. Whilst the process of manual cutting, by hand or with trimmers, was not a bottleneck, it did have associated labour costs. We were also keen to improve the accuracy of our cutting.’
Mr Lawrence-Jones expects last year’s record canvas volumes produced in one single day will be broken, as a result of the streamlined production enabled by the Esko solutions.
‘We broke the record at peak season, and I am confident that this year, with our newly streamlined and automated operation, we will beat it again,’ he said. ‘We expect to continue to see increasing demand for our canvas products as customer desire to personalise their homes continues to grow, and having the best-of-breed solutions, automated workflow and a very robust cutting solution will help us not only cope with the increasing demand but ensure we maintain our best of breed next day turnaround service levels and excellent product quality.’
Switching to Automation Engine was not part of the original investment plan but that changed after a detailed consultation with the Esko team, Mr Lawrence-Jones said, ‘Over the past 15 years, we have developed our own production systems in-house. Our canvas operation offers considerable opportunity for an automated production workflow, which Automation Engine has helped us achieve in a very short period of time. The software has delivered many benefits, including the ability to control production remotely, which has been highly valuable during recent peak seasons.’
Lawrence-Jones admits that the initial focus was on improving productivity, he added, ‘To date we are probably only using 20-30% of the potential functionality of the software. We expect to find many more ways to make our operation more efficient using the full capabilities of the solution, including export and import of XML files, error reporting and status reporting as well as remote access and scalability. And I’m convinced there will be even more to discover as we delve deeper into its broad range of capabilities.’
