Picture Gallery: Repro India: A superstar among Indian book printers

Picture Gallery: Repro India: A superstar among Indian book printers

Kodak Prosper 1000, India's first, was bought in at Drupa 2012 along with the Hunkler finishing system. Repro started the commercial operations on the Prosper in February 2013

The Prosper contributes to 60% of the POD production; prints 22lakh impressions per day

Some of the titles printed on the Prosper

Infoprint 4000 was the backbone of digital book production, until the new entrant - Kodak Prosper was added to the digital armoury

Hunkeler book finishing line adorns the Repro's digital shopfloor

The operator loads the digitally printed reel on to the Hunkeler. The output is in the form of ready to bind book blocks

In the making: The POD book blocks stand ready for binding

The Horizon perfect binders at work

Unconventional in their ways, Repro has set up a conveyor belt that connects the Horizon binder to the three knife trimmer

On it's way to the final packaging

Sachin: The Story of the World's Greatest Batsman; one of Repro's short-run job sits on the same pallet with the other titles

The shrink-wrap ensures zero damage until it reaches the reader

According to Ganesh Khandare, head (digital operations), Repro's print-on-demand division produces 2,500 titles each month

The iGen3 investment earned Repro the title of being one of the first four companies in India to install the Xerox kit. All the covers of the digitally printed books are produced on the iGen3

The paper stock undergoes conditioning for the iGen 3

An alternative to elevator; sustainable and environment friendly

The spiral pathway driven by gravity, beginning at the BOD floor, stretches down to the dispatch area, making the movement of the produced books easier and quicker

Reinstating their belief in the digital technology, Repro's digital floor promotes books-on-demand

Multi-division and multi-comapny ERP solution, the EFI Monarch, is at the core of multi-locational book print firm

The EFI Monarch, which was under implementation stage for three years at Repro, integrates sales, marketing, estimation, planning, scheduling, production, stores, inventory, shipping and accounts department thereby helps the company to evaluate customer- or job-specific profitability

Rishi Kharalkar, at the helm of the procurement, planning and pre-press division, says, "Back in 2008, the vast physical and administrative processes that drove the company were unconnected and powered by various home grown products that did not work in harmony or allow a single job or client to be viewed as a whole"

Dattatray Jagade, GET at the firm, explained how the EFI Auto Count module gives the best possible job sheet specification details that are desired on the shopfloor. "Depending on the job and the machine, it specifies the wastage allowances, SKU id to pick up and other minute details"

The EFI's Auto Count software, configured with all the machines, provides real-time data on the handheld devices with detailed information on speed, no of jobs, quantity to go, time required etc

EFI's shop floor data collection module, Auto Count, the direct machine interface kit, was installed on all the equipment on the shopfloor right from presses to bindery kit. It integrates with the machine counter and the planning and scheduling modules automatically

At the crux of Repro's large-scale production is the pre-press set-up, which constitutes of two platesetters. One being from Agfa

Kodak Trendsetter 800, the second platesetter in the duo was installed at the Navi Mumbai unit early last year (May 2012)

Since the beginning: This Heidelberg machine has adorned the shopfloor of Repro since its foundation in 1984 and continues to churn out high output

Heidelberg SM 102, the company says, has helped reduce a significant amount of ‘make-ready’ time and significantly improved quality and productivity

The final output from the SM 102 is scrutinised to perfection

Accompanying the SM 102 on the shopfloor is Ryobi 920, which according to the firms is the only one to have a Fogra certification

The scanning colour measurement device from Techkon senses the print densities

One of the oldest equipment, the Mitsubishi 'continues to give an excellent output'. It has been recently upgraded with CIP3

The most recent addition to Repro's raft is the Indian manufacturer Pressline's Prima

One of the earliest web press Repro invested in, the four-colour Heidelberg Harris

The printed forms are stacked

The Muller Martini Acoro A7 perfect binding line is a giant among the raft of post-press equipment at Repro's

The Acoro A7 is a 22-clamp 24-feeder equipment

The printed forms are manually collated for perfect binding on a battery of Welbound perfect binders

At Repro's Navi Mumbai unit, one could sense the activities at the plant in the past few months by the abuzz despatch area

The Repro-Macmillan deal signed in July 2011 has translated in increased production capacity for the firm. Five years from the deal, The deal is estimated to translate in to a business worth Rs 250 crore in five years

RAPPLES, Repro's tablet-based learning solution is the latest initiative the firm is embarking upon. According to the company, this will position Repro ahead in the game of digital content delivery