“Why put knowledge to waste?” With this rhetorical question on the title page of the company’s most recent brochure, which informs clients of the manifold possibilities of digital book production, CTPS has hit the nail on the head. Until recently, the minimum limit for softcover books produced in an offset printing process and with various binding methods was 1,000 copies per print run. “With our new SigmaLine, our objective is to have significantly smaller print runs,” underlined Gladys S. M. Lee, Deputy General Manager/System Director.
For John D. Currie, Global Business Director, there have been clear signals from CTPS clients for some time now “that they would like to avoid unnecessary stock levels and therefore seek to enhance short-run production. With SigmaLine, we are able to respond to this trend and we expect this market segment to grow in the coming years.” According to John D. Currie, CTPS considers itself to be a trend setter in the graphic arts industry: “We have a young CEO and continue to come up with surprising and new ideas.”
Naturally, before investing in SigmaLine, Gladys S. M. Lee and John D. Currie, wanted to see the digital book production system from Muller Martini live in action. Therefore, the two of them traveled to Europe to observe how SigmaLine works in production. There is an old Chinese saying, explained Gladys S. M. Lee: “‘Seeing is believing,’ and what we saw in Europe definitely convinced us.”
Premiere with 150 guests
The roughly 150 guests, all of whom were invited by CTPS, Muller Martini and HP to the Asian premiere of SigmaLine in Dongguan last spring, were also convinced. According to Finn Nielsen, the throng of visitors from China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia and many other South-East Asian countries could barely believe their eyes. “This was the first time they had witnessed an in-line solution for the production of digitally printed books live in action,” says the Managing Director of Muller Martini Hong Kong.
The visitors were able to see in detail how the SigmaLine works while it produced a sample of the ‘Greater China Newsletter’, as published by Muller Martini Hong Kong. The newsletter was first printed and finished in-line and then subsequently displayed at the Print China convention – also held in Dongguan – where it attracted a great deal of interest from the audience.
CTPS plans to use the new production system to produce three million books with print runs between 50 and 1,000 copies per year – mostly school and text books for the regional market and only softcover books. For its hardcover book production, CTPS, founded in 1964 in Dongguan and currently using 26 printing presses to print roughly 12,000 tons of paper each year, is implementing several Ventura thread sewing machines as well as two Diamant booklines from Muller Martini.
Box
“Connex tipped the scales”
HP T300 digital printing machine, SigmaFolder, SigmaCollator, SigmaBuffer, SigmaBinder, SigmaTower, SigmaTrimmer and SigmaControl – CTPS decided on a complete, digital book production system for its nearly 50,000 m2 plant in Dongguan, where a staff of roughly 1,000 are employed.
According to John D. Currie, the system’s centerpiece is the digital workflow system Connex. “The Connex system, which is just as easy to operate as the entire SigmaLine, was the USP that tipped the scales in favor of choosing a solution from Muller Martini,” says the Global Business Director of China Translation & Printing Service Ltd.
Connex guarantees a seamless interaction of all units. Connex communicates with all the machines involved: it ensures high levels of safety and transparency during production, generates job data for all systems and facilitates the sorting, grouping and planning of orders. These are indispensable assets, particularly given the trend toward increasingly short runs.