Marcolor GmbH Co. KG is a young printing company, located in the small town of Speicher near Bitburg. In May 2016, the company emerged from a family-run business called Stuco – still located at the same address. Today, marcolor stands on its own feet with a brand new identity. The company is specialized in various print products and promotional materials made from non-absorbent materials – mainly plastics, but also metal, cork, and wood. The industry appreciates their profound knowledge, and many other printing shops have profited from it already.
The portfolio is enormous: From stickers in all shapes and sizes, point-of-sale marketing materials, bookmarks, door hanging signs, and business cards to more complex products like multi-part slide charts. Marcolor prints using the offset, UV offset, and silkscreen technique; however, their strengths lie in combining all of them. Most of the postpress processing is done inhouse. With good reason, as managing director Marc Thullen emphasizes. "We are always mindful to keep the agreed delivery times. Reliability is a crucial element of our brand, and that is why we need full control over our production processes." He proudly reports that not a single delivery was delayed within the last two years and added: "Rather sooner than promised."
Cutting machine was the bottleneck
To remain that way, Thullen recently invested in a POLAR high-speed cutter N 115 PRO with an automatic down holder in front of the knife. The machine replaces a more than 20-year-old model. "The cutting process used to be a kind of incidental activity here. During the last years, it developed to be a bottleneck in our production," Thullen says. "Most recently, the machine ran at full capacity. We had to react." He contacted the experts from POLAR-Mohr and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen. "Because of our unique print materials, there was not much of choice, " Thullen explains. "Naturally, we looked around and gathered information. However, pretty soon it was clear that POLAR was our favorite, taking into account the comprehensive functionalities, the exceptional quality, and the failsafe performance."
Still, Thullen did not want to commit himself without extensive tests at a cutting machine at POLAR-Mohr. The marcolor team spent an entire day looking at cutting solutions and putting them to the test with challenging materials and formats. Small piles, big piles, slim and wide piles, as well as ''problematic cases" like sticker foils. In the past, some materials stuck to the cutting knife. Thanks to the Anti-Stick knife and the down holder, the pile remains neat and tidy on the machine table.
Fully equipped by tradition
When choosing the equipment, Marc Thullen stayed true to the company's principles: "It was always important to me to invest in machines that offer a great bandwidth of possibilities. This is the only way to react to the market's development." The well-structured and straightforward programming of the POLAR format program enthuses Thullen: Speeding up the format changes substantially reduced make-ready time. Productivity has increased with higher performance. "POLAR's service and excellent support have helped us a lot," Thullen praises the cooperation.
Source: Grafische Palette 01/2020 | www.print.de/grafische-palette
January 2020
