Czech-based Colognia Press has achieved a 100% improvement in press uptime by switching to Asahi Photoproducts’ AWP water-washable platemaking system.
‘With the flexo plates we were using, we had excessive stop times to clean or replace plates,’ said Bohdan Holona, manager of Desktop Publishing, an in-house design studio at Colognia. ‘For long-run jobs, this meant half of the time printing the product was downtime. Even for shorter runs, we were not happy with the colour consistency from the beginning to end of the job. Changing or cleaning the plates can often negatively affect the quality of the product.’
‘After thorough research from our press team, we finally found the perfect solution,’ said Mr Holona. He reports how the company chose to implement the Asahi AWPTM platemaking system, ‘Now we can do almost any job, totalling scores of kilometers, without stopping. We even ran a 22-hour job with one set of plates, no stops, and with very consistent quality from beginning to end. It’s been amazing!’
Colognia Press uses a tool from Plantyst to gather real-time data about its operation. ‘This allowed us to see any machine’s production efficiency in real time,’ Mr Holona stated. ‘So we know for absolute certainty that these results are accurate. Our press uptime was 20% to 25% with our previous plates. Now we are seeing uptimes of 50% or more on most days.’
