Colourtech Printing is a South African Printer specialising in books for the education sector.
Colourtech was established in the early ’90s by current CEO, Sonja Groenewald. Having become a lecturer and subsequently creating texts in South Africa, there was a need to get these printed and turned into physical books, and it was at this point, Colourtech Printing was born. Fast forward to today, and the company has 170 permanent staff members with far more sophisticated equipment. This summer, Duplo spoke to their Chief Operating Officer, Etienne Groenewald regarding their new Duplo iSaddle2 purchase.
The company started from humble beginnings on the family farm in Bapsfontein, South Africa, but why specialise in booklets? Etienne explained “whilst we don’t only do booklets, it’s for sure what we specialise in. My mother was a teacher and she needed to create some books after they were approved by the department of education, so that’s exactly what she did… She purchased some basic equipment and on our farm, began creating some books, and then more and more, and now, here we are today. So yes, we specialise in educational books, textbooks etc. probably because that’s where we started!”. Elaborating more on their work, Etienne says “we do work for many different organisations as well as the publishers attached to Colourtech, so whilst we do a lot of work with the sister company CredoBooks, we work with plenty of private customers”.
Colourtech now boasts multiple high production presses including a Screen Jet520 HD, Canon imagePress and Xerox Digital Presses, Etienne describes their requirement to be at the cutting edge of printing technology as paramount, “we make sure that the equipment being used is the best and most suitable for our needs, we’re a specialist in the bookmaking area, but we want to make sure that we are making the best product for our application and so that requires the most suitable machinery, and that’s why we went with the Duplo product”.
Further to their presses and multiple binding machines, Colourtech can now include an iSaddle 2 in their finishing department thanks to Duplo distributor, Altron Document Solutions. Their new iSaddle is proving to be as versatile as they had hoped: “the training period for the machine has been short, and now we are putting more books through it, but it’s handling some of the shorter run work for us for now, and we plan on growing on this”. When speaking about what type of jobs the machine runs Etienne said “we do some of the educational books on the saddle stitcher, but we’ve been putting the smaller run books through such as brochures, finance reports, but most of the work is made up with the educational books that do not need to be bound”.
When speaking about the iSaddle, Etienne explained the decision to go for a Duetto system, featuring the DSC-10/60i Collator and also a DSF-2200 sheet feeder – “due to the different presses we have here, we wanted something that would work well with everything, so handling collated and uncollated sheets from the inkjet machines”. Etienne elaborated on the machine’s agility, saying “we can go from job to job printed on different presses with minimal adjustment to the machine and then set these jobs up quite quickly too with one operator”.
After having had the machine for some months already, Colourtech continues to ramp up its usage and plans to continue ensuring that their books are created using the latest, most advanced equipment possible. This mindset has taken them from their far simpler beginnings and seen them through their first 30 years in business successfully. The company continues to grow and cement its position as one of South Africa’s foremost printers.
