The five-colour B2 Komori press was signed for in December and is currently being installed at the operation’s 10,000sqm purpose-built Kidlington factory, with testing and training expected to start on 29 March.
“We’ve been working on this investment plan for around 18 months,” said Oxuniprint managing director Ian Wilton, who said the spend was driven by Oxford University and a need for quicker turnarounds.
"We’ve done an increasing amount of work for the university over the last few years, and the last 12 months in particular,” he explained. “The university corporate colour is blue 282, they use a lot of uncoated paper and we were struggling to get the quality and drying times down so that we could produce stuff quick enough for them.
“Having the H-UV means that it’ll all come off bone dry and we can finish it straight away and that means their lead times will come down,” he added.
The Komori has replaced a six-colour Mitsubushi Diamond 1000 B2 press that was bought second hand in 2007. “We were nursing it through its later years really, and now we have just added about 50% capacity at the flick of a switch,” said Wilton.
Further investment in kit to support the added capacity brought by the Komori was likely, Wilton said, although they would have to wait for sales to kick in and to identify any bottlenecks that developed as a result of the new device.
“We want to service our customers as best we can and if we feel we need more equipment to do that we try to invest in exactly what we need,” he said.
Twenty-five staff Oxuniprint, which is a non-for-profit organisation, operates from two sites. Twenty-one employees work out of its Kidlington site where the new Komori is being installed alongside the firm’s other five-colour Mitsubishi Diamond and its digital devices: two Canon imagePress VP10000s and an Océ mono digital device. The Canon presses were installed in December 2015 and July 2016.
The remaining four staff operate an on-site copyshop at Oxford University Press, running two Canon imagePress C700s and the firm’s second Océ mono device.
Oxuniprint turned over just shy of £3m last year and Wilton hopes to push past £3m in 2017. Fifty percent of the company’s work comes from OUP while the remaining 50% is made up of printing for local magazine publishers, print work for numerous car clubs, contract work for Oxfordshire NHS as well as flyers and other stationery.
