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A1 Security Print has recently invested £160K in new digital printing equipment. Birmingham based A1 purchased a Nipson DIGI Flex digital printer to increase their personalisation capacity in order to deal with the growing demand for the personalisation of secure documents.

Project Manager, Peter Vernon explained ‘We looked at both inkjet and toner based technologies. A number of inkjet suppliers made proposals, but as the specification was refined it soon became apparent that none of them were able to cope with the complexity that we required, because of the wide range of substrates we convert ’. The company therefore focused the search on toner based machines, but found that they all ran at much higher fusing temperatures than the Nipson, which would cause problems with the complex substrates and security features used with most documents.

The Nipson provided several additional benefits, which sealed the deal. The smaller footprint was a bonus, as was the continuity provided by being able to use the same files. The DIGIFlex  is also approved for cheque E13B codeline creation, giving the C&CCC accredited cheque printers an alternative route for some of their cheque manufacturing.

The Nipson DIGIFlex provides much improved print quality and increased productivity over the previous generation of Nipson 7000 press that A1 had. The web-fed machine has vastly increased print resolution, producing crisper text and graphics. It provides a 50% speed improvement, but further productivity boosts from dust extraction and air cooling means that the new machine will be close to matching the output of two of the older generation machines. Finishing Manager Craig Barnett was delighted to see the machine up and running on the day of installation. ‘Minimal operator training was required, and the increased speed and quality will see us close to doubling the output of the machine it replaced’.

Managing Director Jim Richardson said “our business has evolved dramatically over the last five years. We were originally a cheque printing business, the first to be accredited to the then APACS standard, but cheques only represent 15% of our turnover today. We have provided variable personalisation for documents for some time now, but demand for this to be done in a secure environment has increased. It’s not just about the security features in the document anymore – it’s about how secure the data is and how secure the factory is. We have worked hard and invested heavily in our infrastructure and because of that we have won some high profile contracts. In 2016 we added to our sheet-fed digital capacity and now we are increasing our reel-fed capacity. We have plans to expand the department further in 2017”.