By connecting its Creo computer-to-plate system to the automated KBA Rapida 130a 51-inch six-color sheetfed press it purchased recently, McCowat-Mercer Packaging, Inc. has enjoyed dramatically higher throughput, according to Jon Butler, the company’s vice president and plant manager.



Working with turnaround times that are rarely longer than two weeks, this Jackson, Tenn. , carton printer now expedites runs from 5,000 to 50,000 for customers.



“We rerun lots of jobs with more sophisticated designs and more parameters and we can keep all of that data in memory to recall quickly when we need to reprint the job,” Butler adds.



The new Rapida 130a was installed in December and was running live jobs by mid-January. It runs in tandem with a sister Rapida 105 41-inch six-color double coater sheetfed press. The two presses are operated on two 10-hour shifts four days a week with overtime work completed on Friday.



Although most of the firm’s work is printed on boxboard, customers also send jobs to be printed on foil and other substrates.



The Rapida 130a is equipped with KBA’s Logotronic management system, which guarantees multi-system digital data communication.

Once plates are made, CIP3 data are automatically assigned to the job via hot folder. The CIP3 files are also converted into preset data for the press. When a job is rescheduled to another press the preset data are automatically recalculated for that press. This ensures that the latest job data, including preset data, are always available at the control console.



For more information on McCowat-Mercer, visit www. mccowat-

mercer. com. For more information on KBA, visit www. kba-usa. com.