Sherwin Rivers upgrades with Horizon SPF-200A

Print Solutions

Stoke-on-Trent based Sherwin Rivers has invested in a Horizon SPF-200A highly automated bookletmaker with two Horizon VAC-1000 collating towers from IFS.

The system replaces a 20 year old Horizon bookletmaker and managing director Steven Stanley commented: ‘We ran the old system for many years and it had very little downtime. That made choosing another Horizon easy. We only made the decision to upgrade because we had started producing a 72 page booklet and we didn’t have enough collator capacity. We were collating a section and then dropping it on which was time consuming.

‘Since we installed the bookletmaker the 72 page job takes half the time. In the first three days we completed almost 11,000 booklets. It sets up in three minutes as opposed to 15 to 20 and it is so easy to change over book sizes.

‘We were used to running a five day week on the old bookletmaker and now we only need to run a four day week. That means we have much more capacity and can start looking for new work.’

The operation was founded in 1911 and became Sherwin Rivers Ltd in 1969. Today, it produces a wide range of services from leaflets and brochures, to stationery, banners and signage. It runs Heidelberg litho presses, Xerox digital presses and Roland wide format systems.

The highly automated Horizon SPF-200A is capable of producing 4500 booklets per hour. The JDF ready system offers instant set ups via a large icon based colour touchscreen for user friendly operation. The screen can be used for on the run fine tune adjustments as well as the store and recall of up to 200 jobs.

The Horizon wasn’t an automatic choice as Steven explained: ‘We did look at other suppliers but we kept coming back to the Horizon’s build quality. It is also simple and fast to set up. The fact the old Horizon was reliable for so long was another big plus for us.’