Options Multicolor books Heidelberg SM74

Hyderabad-based Options Multicolor Offset Printers hopes to triple its production capacity and slash makeready times with a brand-new Heidelberg SM 74 investment.

02 Mar 2016 | By Rushikesh Aravkar

The four-colour press is due to be delivered by the end of March 2016 to the company’s Saifabad site.
 
The new SM74 will fill in for the production gap formed when Options sold its five-colour Heidelberg MOV press last month.
 
Shovan Kumar Mazumdar of Options said, “We wanted to upgrade our existing infrastructure in order to bolster our productivity.”
 
The new Heidelberg will run at the speed of 15,000 sheets per hour, which is three times the speed with which we ran the older machine and, in addition, it will also trim makeready times from 20 to 30 minutes to between three and five minutes depending on the complexity of the job, he said.
 
Options has also invested in a new Polar 115 cutting machine and is planning to buy an automatic die-cutting machine.
 
The company runs two 12-hour shifts per day and provides commercial printing services to its corporate clients pan India.
 
The print firm consumes 200 tonnes of paper per month, of which 90 percent is coated paper. The plate requirement is outsourced. It produces promotional material such as brochures, catalogues, danglers, leaflets, coupons and books.
 
In 2015, Options installed Kodak Nexpress 3600 digital press in order to streamline its coupon production and cater to short-run bulk order jobs. 
 
Mazumdar explained, “For the high-volume jobs in which the order quantity runs into lakhs of copies, but the number of SKUs is higher; the run per SKU is short. In order to cater to such a kind of jobs, we use Kodak Nexpress. It has also streamlined our coupon production, by enabling two-sided printing plus serialisation, barcodes and all variety of artworks in one go.”
 
Established in 2002, the 5,600 sq/ft plant is set up at Saifabad’s Samrat Complex and employs 28 people.