According to President James Rutt, Keystone is aiming to move 50-60% of its high-end beverage, pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer packaging jobs to the Landa S10, which is the company’s first digital press.
“Over half of our jobs are in that run-length sweet spot that Landa handles so well,” Rutt says.
Keystone’s calculations show that the company will enhance efficiencies across production by moving the large number of jobs that run inefficiently on offset to the Landa, freeing significant offset press time. In addition, reduction in paper waste and elimination of thousands of aluminum printing plates per year will result in considerable cost savings while bringing sustainability benefits, too.
Rutt has been eyeing digital options for years, but he and Keystone’s vice president of operations, Bob Papa, were not satisfied with other solutions. “In Landa,” Rutt says, “we found a B1 press that we came to realize was designed from the start with folding carton applications, among others, in mind.” Conversely, Papa says that “other digital presses are too small or too slow, the caliper ranges aren’t high enough, they can’t achieve the color range Keystone needs, and the quality – especially for complex artwork – is suspect.” The bottom line, Papa says, is that the Landa S10 is the only digital press to meet Keystone’s requirements.
“The results Landa has achieved with Nanography® are nothing short of dramatic,” says Rutt. “Keystone is very confident that the Landa press will meet our high-performance criteria.”
Papa concurs, explaining that his evaluation of the Landa S10 included successful runs of a variety of real Keystone jobs, as well as visits to other Landa customers. Of those, he says, “We dug deep, following jobs in and out of production, and watched ground-level people managing the Landa. It was impressive and extremely valuable.”
The ability to make changes at the console, the range of color it can achieve, proofing on press, and the S10’s speed are a few of the other standout features that impress Rutt, Papa, and their colleagues. Rutt and Papa cite numerous examples that reveal the benefits Keystone will enjoy from the start. “If you only look at the extra ink we buy for our offset presses, it’s huge,” Rutt says. “We don’t have to do that with the Landa. The ink costs are not a guess with Nanography – we will know exactly what we need.
“When you get a printer such as ourselves with the confidence to put more than half its jobs on a brand new press platform, that says a lot,” adds Rutt. “This is how a technology begins to go mainstream.”
