One of the oldest and leading printers in Surat, Progressive Printing Press has aggressively upgraded its printing department over the last two-and-a-half years. Progressive specializes in printing fashion catalogs and brochures with customers mainly in the garments, textile and fashion industry. Under the management of father son duo Asgar Sanchawala and Latif Sanchawala, the print house has installed three brand new offset printing presses since 2015, replacing their old second-hand presses. Progressive currently has Ryobi 920, RMGT 920 and RMGT 760 offset presses on its shop floor, all installed in the last two-and-a-half years.
The latest addition, the RMGT 760 5-color with coater press, was shown to the wider printing world during an open house organized in June last year in association with Provin Technos, which is the sole distributor of RMGT presses in India.
The RMGT 760 is a fully loaded and automated press and boasts of features like automatic print density control, advanced dampening system for water and ink balance and fully automatic plate changing system that can be combined with Smart-Make function so that blanket cleaning, pre-set inking and test printing can be performed automatically for increased efficiency.
In the prepress section, Progressive has a Kodak Trendsetter and uses Kodak’s Sonora process-free plates; one of the very few in Gujarat to do so.
Modernizing the postpress
After having successfully upgraded the press section, Progressive is now moving towards modernizing its postpress department, which is currently dominated by manual and semi-automatic machines. The postpress section at present has two stitching machines, two folding machines, two perfect binders and semi-automatic hard case maker, among others.
“We will completely overhaul and modernize our postpress section in the next six months,” says Latif Sanchawala.
Progressive plans to add a multi-clamp binding machine, three knife trimmer, hard case automatic machine, among other machines during the first half of this year.
Latif explains that the main reason to opt for automatic and high-speed machines in the postpress section is to increase the overall productivity and efficiency of operations.
“We are not able to match our binding speeds with our printing speeds, which is creating a bottleneck. There is a huge backlog. We need to remove this bottleneck to fully optimize the capabilities of our state-of-the-art presses. In these fiercely competitive times, we cannot afford to lose our customers,” he says.
Attending the RMGT open house in Japan
Latif’s father Asgar Sanchawala attended the open house organized by RMGT in January this year. Talking about his father’s visit, Latif says that the main purpose of the visit was to see the latest technological developments at RMGT. He further shared that UV LED technology is something that was also explored during the visit.
“Although we have not decided anything yet, UV LED is something we may look to in the future. The technology is getting cheaper with each passing year. Although there are some limitations, there are many advantages of this technology such as quick drying, power saving, higher gloss, etc. We are definitely keeping an eye on this,” he concludes.
