Newham uses KAS Crease Matic to crease 5000sph

The London Borough of Newham in the UK has installed a KAS Crease Matic Auto 50 SRA2 suction-fed programmable card creaser from Ashgate Automation.

This follows a decision to take back its printing services from an outside contractor and to bring as much work in-house as possible.

The council had upgraded a printer, which prints penalty charges and other notices, from its mainframe computer to a Canon C6000 colour machine.

This machine prints business cards, compliment slips, posters and A5 four-page brochures and leaflets.

A creaser was required to crease the digitally printed brochures and leaflets to prevent them cracking.

Stephen Malyon, print services manager at Newham Council, said: 'I looked for a creaser that was easy to set up and could handle short run jobs.

'The KAS Crease Matic Auto 50 fitted the bill.

'We already had a KAS Mailmaster 465HS enveloper with a quick and easy set up, so we contacted KAS Paper Systems and they introduced us to Ashgate, its UK distributor for KAS creasers and bookletmakers, and it went from there.

'The Crease Matic Auto 50 is suction fed, which is important when creasing digitally printed stock with a lot of static.

'We like its flexibility - up to 28 creases per sheet can be programmed with 99 memories - and the ability to crease up to 480-micron board, which means that we may produce our own folders at some stage.

'We also like the fact that we are able to perforate using the same machine.

'It can operate at up to 7000sph using a bottom-feed suction system for continuous production.

'As our runs are anything between 2000 to 5000 sheets, we don't run it at top speed,' he added.

The deployment of the system has saved Newham Council time and money.

It now has control of all the jobs in-house, meaning the council can quickly carry out urgent tasks.

Creasing by hand is time consuming and does not give the professional finish the council requires.

In addition, sending a job out to be done takes about five to seven working days.

Malyon continued: 'If the C6000 prints a 2000 run of a four-page A5 brochure on SRA3 paper, we can save more than one third of the total cost of a job compared with sending it outside.

'We are confident that the Crease Matic Auto 50 will pay for itself in no time and make us money.

'In the first week, we creased 15,000 sheets and as word gets around about what we can do, the speed of turn-around and the quality of our work, I am confident that we will win a lot of new work,' he finished.

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