S Chand set to roll-out 2.5 cr books a year
“The two plants at Rudrapur and New Delhi together have capacities to produce books required today by the company. The plant at New Delhi is too congested for the current full production capacity of the KBA fleet of machines the company has. The plant has seven KBA sheetfed presses under one roof. The Rudrapur plant has our web machines with an integrated online binding unit. The current arrangements while serving the demands is good enough but has actually overstretched the limits. That&#
11 Apr 2013 | 4612 Views | By Rahul Kumar
The software is state-of-the-art and most of its machines are on CIP 3 control. In the pre-press, more than 60% of its books are produced through data moved from its main server to the CTP and the remaining 40% are in the process of conversion. The upgradation of the skills of manpower has been emphasised for the most sophisticated machinery it will use. In this plant S Chand will have two Fujifilm CTP solutions with a size of eight-up and as per an estimation by the company. The CTPs will use around two lakh violet plates per year.
On the printing presses front, the new plant will serve as an integrated book printing and binding plant manufacturing essentially for their in-house titles. The book production plant will be a combination of eleven multi-colour KBA sheetfed with a size of 28x40-inch with a printing speed of 15,000 impressions an hour; and two 4-Hi towers of Goss web offset printing presses with a cut-off size of 578 mm and a speed to 35000 impression an hour will also be part of the unit. The bindery will again be streamed in a way that it will have input from these two types of machines and a throughput of two-and-half crore books per annum.
“Since most of our machines are from KBA and are of high speed we are using selected ink from two vendors. As a rule we have standardised our chemistry on the machines and it is evaluated every operating hour,” added Gupta.
In postpress, the company will be have machines from Muller Martini, Welbound and Wohlenberg. S Chand expects to produce 5,000 books per hour, and the machines will roughly operate 20 hours per day.
The plant will have the capacity to produce around 1.75 lakh books per day. The plant is essentially for producing school and college books of all sizes and upto a spine width of 70 mm.
“ We can produce over 2.5 crore books per year by putting all three plants together. We intend to essentially double our capacity of current production,” concluded Gupta. The plant has a total production area of one lakh sqft with a manpower of 325 people.