Sona Printers based in New Delhi, India is a well known name in the printing and paper stationery industry. The company was established in 1977 by Kishore Mittal together with his brothers, Ajay Mittal and Vijay Mittal. In 1983, Sona Printers entered commercial printing and after experiencing steady growth over a decade, they ventured into the paper stationery business in 1998.

Today, Sona Printers operates from a 50,000 sq.ft. printing facility at Okhla industrial area, with an employee strength of about 150. About 60% of its clients are corporates, while the others are educational institutions. They are strong across the production chain. In the press division, they run two to five colour offset presses in varied formats and their Postpress division operates with a Polar cutter and Stahlfolder equipments. Sona is one of the select companies which fully understand the importance of finishing and make it work to their advantage. It is no wonder that in 2009, Sona Printers installed the first Heidelberg Eurobind 4000, the predecessor of the actual Product, the Eurobind Pro, in Asia. Sona Printers' Eurobind adhesive binding line is equipped with an 18 clamp adhesive binder, a 16 station Eurogather and a Eurotrim three-knife-trimmer.

"Today, the printing industry is growing at a fast pace; we have to compete in aspects of performance and quality. And our recent installation, the Heidelberg Eurobind 4000 is the best in its class and means value for money," says Nikhil Mittal, son of Kishore Mittal who gained a B.A. Honors in Print Media Management from London School of Printing and joined the family business in 2005.

The Heidelberg Eurobind has a modular design that delivers exceptional flexibility and ease of use. It also helps to boost ergonomics and reliability in production processes. For instance, since the adhesive binder is fully encapsulated with large, wide-opening windows, users can visually monitor production processes on the fly and processing stations can be accessed quickly during setup.

The Heidelberg Eurobind 4000 adhesive binding line is equipped with a book block feeder for handling more than 16 signatures, a lining station to accommodate special brochures and is JDF-compatible for workflow integration. Operators can use the local touch screen concept to control the entire configuration during the binding process. This dramatically reduces operator movement between machines during the binding process, thereby reducing setup times significantly.

Various settings are identified via intuitive symbols that are used consistently in all Heidelberg machines, a feature which adds to the user-friendly credentials of the machine. The Heidelberg Eurobind 4000 adhesive binding line yields professional adhesive binding in the output class up to 4,000 cycles per hour with an average run of 10,000 copies. It reliably offers high productivity and consistently high quality especially with inline-finished products.

About the machine's features, Nikhil Mittal says, "The Eurobind 4000 is a fully integrated machine. There are no offline operations and it is inline performance at its best. There is absolutely no comparison between the Heidelberg Eurobind and any other equipment in this class. One of the most impressive factors is the quick job change from one job to the other at best quality. We have adopted such technology to take a major leap forward in enhancing productivity. With other equipment, job setting is the biggest hassle in binding. We have been able to have make readies and job changes done in about three minutes with the Heidelberg Eurobind, and are able to deliver varied sizes from A6 to A3 sized books."

Additionally, SONA has installed two other state-of-the-art equipments - the POLAR 115 XT cutting system and the Heidelberg Stahlfolder KH 78 folding machine.

The new POLAR 115 XT label cutting system with Compucut is the second installation of its kind in India. POLAR's best-selling cutting system prepares the material to be cut with great precision,  is loaded manually and unloads the labels automatically onto pallets to ensure a perfect flow of material in the cutting process. Almost 100 percent extra performances when compared to a stand-alone machine provide an excellent increase in efficiency.

Their Heidelberg Stahlfolder KH 78 has a unique configuration with a folding unit, gluer, pressing unit, stacker and bundling unit. The user-friendliness of the equipment makes it perfectly suitable for one-man operation. With state-of-the-art technology in place, Sona Printers is poised to consistently deliver high quality products and reach greater heights.