Stahlfolder TD 94 and Stahlfolder TD 112

Located in Kampenhout (Belgium) and Rijswijk (the Netherlands), the four companies making up the Artoos Communicatiegroep offer a truly integrated approach. With Automate, Create, Print, and Send operations, the marketing service provider with roughly 160 employees covers web-to-print, print-on-demand, other digital offerings, creative services, sheetfed/web offset and digital printing, finishing, and a full range of mailroom services. Since last year, postpress operations in Kampenhout have been boosted by a Stahlfolder TD 94 from Heidelberg. The folding machine's new concept - with landscape processing in 3b format - enables Artoos to achieve a throughput around 50 to 60 percent higher than with conventional feeding in portrait format. As a result, folding is no longer the bottleneck in print production it used to be.

"Although our company was originally a small newspaper publisher, it is currently by no means a typical print shop. Our corporate concept is now much more about customers' marketing needs," explains Filip Coosemans, Technical Director at Artoos. "Whatever the requirements of a customer's marketing department are, we meet them along the entire value added chain," he adds. The fact that all services are provided in-house enables Artoos to find the optimum production process for any job and eliminates the losses that occur in conventional job processing models - for example at the interfaces between customer, agency, print shop, and photographer. As Coosemans explains, the aim is to provide as many services as possible, but also to generate print jobs - always in the form of a customer-specific solution. "Delivery times, budget, and quality determine the production method, and it is not unusual for us to use sheetfed offset, web offset, and digital printing to produce a print product. Our customers do not view the different printing methods as completely separate worlds and therefore neither do we," he says.

The majority of Artoos customers, including many international manufacturers of branded goods and EU ministries, are based in Brussels and the surrounding area. Many jobs involve relatively short runs and have a small number of pages. They meet high quality expectations and are printed on a wide range of materials. "It is increasingly throughput times that determine who gets a job. As we see it, print-on-demand has long been a reality," Coosemans continues.

In the Artoos production concept, other key factors determining the production method include the type and efficiency of postpress operations. "Under our concept, each postpress technology is assigned to a specific press. This specialization also enables us to cut throughput times and waste in postpress - an important part of our sustainability strategy," the Technical Director stresses.

Since last year, Artoos has been working with the Stahlfolder TD 94 from Heidelberg. Together with a new ten-color press in 3b format, it is used virtually exclusively to produce 16-page A4 brochures and catalogs. In 2009, the company also purchased a new Polar cutter and a Stahlfolder TH 82.

Oblong feeding doubles the folding capacity
According to Coosemans, the decisive criteria that led the company to opt for the Stahlfolder TD 94 were the machine's high folding quality, minimal makeready times, and maximum throughput. "We have been working with Stahlfolder machines for ten years in two-shift operation, and our good experiences naturally also played a key role in our decision. We were impressed by the new folding concept of the TD 94 at a product demonstration at the Ludwigsburg plant and decided it was just what we needed," he explains.

The sheet is normally fed into the folding machine lengthways, but on the new Stahlfolder TD 94 with pneumatic twin lay system, it is rotated 90° for oblong feeding. The pneumatic twin lay system after the first folding station transports the sheets to a twin lay at the second folding station where two sheets at a time are processed in parallel. As a result of the sheet's shorter feed length at the same machine speed, output is increased by around 30 to 40 percent based on format alone.

"This has resulted in a significant increase in postpress capacity. With the TD 94 and the pneumatic twin lay system, our throughput is around 50 to 60 percent higher than with conventional processing. What's more, we benefit from consistently high quality. The average throughput with a single operator is around 12,000 sheets per hour, but the machine can also operate reliably at 14,000 sheets per hour. Folding quality is consistently high, too," Coosemans states. Initially staff were a little dubious about the new machine, but the Technical Director puts this down primarily to the new folding concept. "It didn't take long for the high output to win over our operators, though," he reports.

No more bottlenecks
As Coosemans sees it, the machine fits in perfectly with Artoos' corporate philosophy of using the ideal machine for each basic product. "The TD 94 is perfect for high-throughput standardized products, in our case 16-page A4 brochures. Using this equipment makes these products much more profitable. If a universal folding machine is what's needed, though, the fully automated Stahlfolder TH 82 is a better solution," he states.

It was necessary at the prepress stage to adjust the folding layout for oblong sheet feeding. Coosemans is therefore of the opinion that the Stahlfolder TD 94 with twin lay system is of greatest use to print shops that are able to adapt their prepress data preparation accordingly. "In this configuration, the Stahlfolder TD 94 is a high-end machine that effectively removes the bottleneck at the folding stage," he concludes.


Picture 1:
Heiko Feyerabend (Heidelberg Postpress), Filip Coosemanns (Artoos), Piet de Schepper, and Guido Goedefroy (both Plantin) at the TD 94.

Picture 2:
Filip Coosemanns, Technical Director at Artoos, examines the pneumatic twin lay system of the TD 94.

Picture 3:
A detailed view of the twin lay system on the TD 94.