The company went from 30 plates a day to 90, with room to grow.

PHOENIX, Arizona – For Phoenix-based Wholesalepocketfolders.com, the CRON-ECRM 3632 has had a huge impact on their business. They took delivery in April 2015, and have been impressed with how much more productive they can be with upgraded equipment.

“Basically, we went from a machine we were manually hand loading every plate, with a prepress guy running back and forth between prepping jobs and feeding plates all day, to him being able to walk into the room and reload the tray 1-2 times a day on average. There is a lot less going in and out of the room and babysitting the machine,” said Kyl Blankenship, production manager for Wholesalepocketfolders.com.

Wholesalepocketfolders.com is using the CRON-ECRM 3632 to feed its RMGT 9 Series 8-up press, also purchased in 2015. “They were the first U.S. site with a straight five-color configuration of the RMGT 9 Series LED-UV with simultaneous plate changing,” says Kian Hemmen, Sales Director, Print & Finishing Solutions, the Western US distributor for CRON-ECRM.  “The CRON-ECRM 3632 was a perfect match for that press as it can produce larger format plates, whereas with other CTP units they would have needed to purchase an 8-up CTP system. Today, they are producing anywhere from 100 folders in a single run, up to 250,000 folders in a run, although they noted the sweet spot seems to be in the 1,000-5,000 run range.”

Using their old equipment, Wholesalepocketfolders.com was producing an average of 30 plates a day. With the CRON-ECRM 3632, however, they are producing 90 plates every day, and, noted Blankenship, the plates are perfect and ready to go. And a fully automated CRON-ECRM 3632 has the smallest footprint of any CTPdevice on the market today, allowing the system to be installed in the existing space, which would have been impossible with an automated 8-page solution from other vendors.

One of the big draws for this machine was its flexibility and that it has quite a bit of room for growth. Right now, they are running it with 32 diodes — it goes up to 90+ diodes. “We could get it down to a plate a minute with that many diodes,” Blankenship said. “That would be ridiculous. We could plate everything we needed for the day in an hour and half at our current workload at that speed.”

Growth is the name of the game for Wholesalepocketfolders.com. According to Blankenship, they have grown around 30% every year for the last 2-3 years  — and plans to focus on continuing to grow, recently adding services such as spot colors to their list of products. They are also working to trim their turn-around times even further, with a goal of introducing a standard one-day turn-around time for most of their jobs, with no extra rush fees. “And equipment like the CRON-ECRM platemaker and the RMGT press is what we need to have to be able to do that,” said Blankenship.