AURORA, Mo. September 11, 2007 -- MWM Dexter, Inc. specializes in short-run publications, calendars and church bulletins. With average run lengths of 3,000 sheets, these jobs demand ultrafast makereadies and quick turnarounds from the Aurora, Mo.-based commercial printer.
When the time came to retire a 40-inch press that had racked up 400 million impressions in 10 years, Chris Dale, president, was concerned about the prospect of disrupting production.
"Whenever you replace a press, you are sacrificing production efficiency," Dale said.
Complicating matters was the fact that calendar season is MWM Dexter's busiest time of year, and the printer was adding a new press right in the middle of the season.
"Mitsubishi dismantled the old press and had a new Diamond 3000S up and running in only two weeks," Dale said. "It was an amazing procedure. The installation was absolutely flawless."
The four-color press has been teamed with existing six-color, 40-inch presses (another Diamond 3000S and a Heidelberg Speedmaster 102) since August.
"Our Mitsubishi presses operate around the clock, six days a week," Dale noted. "We have a major account whose jobs are always 400 28-by-40-inch sheets. At 400 sheets, each of these projects is equivalent to a makeready."
To help streamline production and minimize costs, the $17 million firm added SimulChanger to the new press. Mitsubishi's exclusive simultaneous plate-changing system replaces old plates with new ones on every printing unit in a single operation in approximately one minute — a significant improvement over the typical 60-second to 90-second replacement time on each unit.
"With SimulChanger, we could conceivably schedule 50 makereadies in a 24-hour period," Dale said. "We expect SimulChanger to cut makeready times by 50 percent. We can put a lot more work through here in a lot less time.
In addition to printing commercial projects, MWM Dexter is the nation's largest nondenominational printer of church bulletins. The company occupies an 80,000-square-foot facility. Its staff consists of 130 employees.
"Ninety-five percent of our work is four-color or four-color with coating," according to Dale. "We do postcard work where our normal run length is 1,000 sheets. and we will do five or six of those forms a day. The new Mitsubishi press will certainly allow us to expand our niche production of short-run, four-color work."
To see a live demonstration of SimulChanger, visit the Mitsubishi booth (#617) at Graph Expo 2007, September 9-12 at McCormick Place in Chicago.