The business, which has 2,800sqm space across two bases in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and Paddock Wood, Kent, will undertake a two-stage training programme during the installation and integration of Prinect – an upgrade from its existing 2011 Prinect package – this month.
KNP has also switched all of its pressroom consumables and plates supply to Heidelberg and hopes its investment, totalling around £100,000, will boost its productivity by around 10%-15%.
The company also looked at workflow from its previous plate supplier, Kodak, but felt the Prinect workflow was more user friendly.
“We can seamlessly integrate Prinect with the latest Tharstern V6 MIS modules and we will be able to quickly and easily output to both our Speedmaster SM 74-10-P and Xerox iGen presses,” said KNP production manager Steve Omer.
“The increase in productivity this will give us means our customers will benefit from quicker turnarounds immediately.”
He added: “And when we implement the web portal, either at the end of this year or the beginning of next, customers will receive proofs quickly and accurately and be able to amend and return them easily. We will also offer templates to those wanting to load jobs online.
“We have been monitoring this for around 18 months for the consumer market. We already have a customer print-on-demand offering but we feel we now have to offer this to B2C.”
20-staff KNP provides a comprehensive range of services including in-house design, litho, online digital, on-demand digital printing, direct mail and signage, to B2B customers across a variety of sectors.
The business is next looking at investing in an additional digital press to run alongside its iGen. It has recently employed an additional iGen operator and is looking at taking on more finishing staff.
