Madhuri Prints has invested in a Duplo equipment and a Konica Minolta 1085 to boost its productivity and increase its in-house service offering with the aim to increase turnover by 20 to 30% in the next 12 months.

The Mumbai-based business installed the KM kit last month and a DC616 slitter/cutter/creaser a week ago.

Both machines are new additions to the firm’s double gala in the hustle-bustle district of Girgaon, next to Mumbai's greeting cards headquarters of Khadilkar Road, which also includes a Xerox and a Canon along with some basic kit. The 19-year-old firm caters to more than hundred walk-in clients between 9 am to 9 pm, daily.

The DC-616 is a fully automated multi-finisher that offers up to six slits, 25 crosscuts and 20 creases in a single pass.

It has a top speed of 10 sheets/min (300 pages per hour) and can handle sheets from 370x999 mm down to 210x210 mm, with a minimum finished product size of 48x28 mm. It has a stock range of 110-350 gsm.

The owner of Madhuri, Ashwin Chandarvarkar 
said, “Due to the nature of printing a lot of short runs we can get held up with jobs like business cards and cards and even hotel menus at the guillotine stage.

“The idea of buying the Duplo was to free up time for the finishing department and increase productivity. Since we’ve had it we can run jobs, trim and crease at the same time. It will reduce all our bottleneck issues."

“We are the only PUR perfect binders in Birmingham that will offer really short runs of fives, tens and fifties competitively priced and we needed to capture that increase in demand. There are a few jobs that we will now be able to bring in-house with these two machines. We’ve won a contract for some voucher books, which we wouldn’t have done without these machines. And on the back of the KB-4000 we’ve won work such as tender documents of four, five and six copies.”

The Bizhub Press C1085 can print up to 85 pages per minute (ppm) respectively, without compromising on the quality, delivering reliably accurate registration and colour consistency. In addition, flexible substrate handling and inline finishing options provide professional looking output while enabling more effective workflow management.

Madhuri Prints currently has a staff of ten. It produces business cards, flyers, postcards, leaflets, brochures, menus and posters for walk in customers including a few b2b customers. TechNova who are the official representatives of Duplo in India have notched up ten installations of the kit all over India. Of this, they have three Duplo 616 installations in India.

Three of TechNova's officials, who were present during the inauguration, said, "The DC-616 has a new end-trim air blade and a wider range of formulating modules, which ensures there is no slowdown in productivity in any applications. It is complemented by Duplo’s controlling software, which allows the operator to create templates, including barcode and image recognition."

They added the slitter-cutter-creaser will help open up new markets as it can produce products such as perforated tickets and coupons