IF ANTON ACHIEVES ITS PLAN TO DOUBLE ITS sales in the next five years, its vast factory at Laindon in Essex is going to become very busy indeed.

The company moved to the former Next warehouse from cramped accommodation spread across seven buildings at Shenfield less than two years ago and the feeling then was that it would have to divide up the space and rent some out. Now it is considering additional mezzanine space for storage as the work builds up. The engine room is a line-up of seven 12-colour Speedmasters, ably supported on the one hand by three Agfa Avalon platesetters generating up to 300 plates in a day, and on the other by 14 folders, four saddle stitching lines and eight envelope enclosing machines. Its digital areas has just installed a fifth NexPress. If that is not enough there is bench space for up to 50 hand workers.

The factory generates a steady volume of noise: not so much that conversation is difficult, but the noise of an enterprise at work. And the warmth from the machines means there has been no need to install additional heating.

It’s not just the production space that impresses. Visiting customers first check in at a gatehouse, and are then directed along the length of the plant to where they walk into one of the best entrance halls in the industry. A huge mural dominates the wall behind the desk where the visitor is welcomed by name and probably by a cup of coffee, ordered from the gatehouse. Chairs and small tables make the open space comfortable and lead off into a number of meeting rooms. Upstairs is the office of ceo John Knight, unmistakably his from the Spurs memorabilia on the walls, including a shirt signed by recent departee Dimitar Berbatov.

But if the investment in the factory has been impressive – £250,000 alone has been spent on a ducting system to take paper to an automatic compacting system – the amount spent on equipment has been equally so. At Drupa, Knight signed contracts for three 12-colour Speedmaster XL 105s and a three-year plate contract with Agfa that has also involved the third Avalon platesetter and a Delano customer relationship system. “We are still here because of what we have invested,” says Knight. “Since moving here we have spent £14 million.”

The first of the new presses will arrive in December. The plan was that it should replace one of the existing machines. However, work volumes are building and the second hand value of a 12-colour Speedmaster is not what it was. Consequently the first XL 105 will form the last part of a line-up of eight 12-colour perfecting machines, the biggest such line-up in Europe, all with CutStar reel-sheeters. Anton squeezed sales of £41.5 million from these in its last financial year and is aiming to reach £50 million this year.

Knight continues: “It is very tough out there and we are seeing people trying to buy in work just for the cash flow that brings. On the other hand we were busy during July and August, our quietest months, and we expect them now to have been profitable rather than running at a loss, which is very exciting in this market place.”

Paul Murphy is in charge of the customer facing element of the business looking after customers wanting fast response to direct mail campaigns, hence the concentration of presses and finishing equipment. Utility companies, supermarkets, finance organisations, all use Anton. All have been to the factory, impressed by the security aspects and by the welcome, which according to an internal Anton source, is better than the luxury car showroom where she used to work. “The people that are coming here spend a lot of money with us. They deserve to be treated well,” Murphy says.

The choice of blue chip clients has been a deliberate one that has paid off in the absence of bad debts over the last five years and the fact that there is no need to dedicate resources to chasing customers for payment. In turn Anton is assiduous about paying its suppliers, doing so through BACS. This means that the terms it receives recognise this. “People want to do business with us,” says Knight. Anton though has been loyal to Heidelberg on offset presses, Kodak on the NexPress, CMC on enclosing and Agfa on prepress. This concentration means too that the company is well looked after in terms of service. The finishing is more mixed with both Muller Martini and Heidelberg stitching lines, different folders, a Bobst cutting and stripping machine and Bilhofer laminator. Upstairs is a single large format Roland DG inkjet machine, strictly for one-off requirements a customer might have. As well as the NexPresses there are Xerox DP180 and 4365 printers and Digimasters for lasering work, though no continuous feed machines. Neither does Anton have perfect binding. However, “95% of work is handled in house as we are trying to make full use of all our machines and to keep the value added,” says Murphy.

The fact that the business is entirely in the hands of its directors makes for swift decision-making. There is no need to go to the bank or external shareholders if a piece of equipment is needed to ease a bottleneck for example. “You can do that if you are in charge of your own destiny,” says Knight. For more major and longer-term investments, the company does consult, by asking its customers what it should invest in.

This is happening now, following its visit to Drupa. Thirty Anton staff made the trip to Düsseldorf in three groups of 10, some of the shopfloor staff included. “We wanted them to see what was coming up,” says Knight. It was an opportunity to see the developments that might affect its business and most of all might affect the customers. Murphy for example came away impressed by technology on the Xerox stand which not only printed the statement for a consumer, but produced the envelope on the fly to suit that mailing, addressing the outside of the envelope and altering its size from DL to C5 according to the number of inserts. “It would mean that customers would no longer have to keep a stock of envelopes,” Murphy says. “Since then we have been going to customers, showing them what is possible and discussing how it might change their mailings. Many of the print buyers don’t go to Drupa and so don’t know what the technology is capable of. The response we have been getting has been good.”

For Knight, the impressive technology was the Kodak colour inkjet press, something to keep an eye on for future developments. While that technology is not yet mature, a bigger issue for digital print is that few organisations are structured in the way that they manage data about their customers. For Anton this means that it will receive different sets of artwork for a localised campaign rather than a single master piece of artwork with software used to extract the variable elements from a database.

On a more mundane level the black that the existing Versamark continuous inkjet head could print was admired. “It’s as good as lasering and makes the inkjet suitable for long run mailings,” Knight says.

Customer communication is an ongoing affair. If the new factory has been impressive enough to encourage more work from existing customers, the Anton attitude is also having an impact. “The most important thing is the customer’s deadline,” says Murphy. “We can chop and change between machines to make sure we never miss this.” The capacity is there. The plant can print 1 million sheets a day and mail out 1.2 million packs without having to run flat out he explains.

With the decision to concentrate on blue chip business, the sales force, led by Murphy, was reduced from 17 to five. “We are constantly working to understand our clients’ businesses, working to understand their end to end processes and how we can help them save money,” he says.

“If the marketing department designs a job and passes it to the print buyer, it’s then too late for us to make recommendations about how changing it slightly could save money, but we can make suggestions for the next time. With one customer we were receiving envelopes in one size of box and we had to transfer them to another box. This was unnecessary and the client has changed, saved a lot of money and it hasn’t affected our business at all. An important aspect is to be clever about how we get costs out of the job and clients are receptive to that.”

The drive for efficiency is constant, and was what lay behind the move to the Laindon plant. Ten years ago Anton was scattered across several factories in Essex with vans constantly shuttling plates around. The move to a single location, if multiple buildings, at Shenfield resulted in a 30% boost to its efficiency. The latest move has similar benefits. The overriding policy Knight explains is to be more efficient. The folders have Palamides strappers fitted, which has incurred quite an expense, but means that they can be single man operated and the spare staff deployed to take up extra capacity. Redundancies do not happen, instead staff are moved and retrained. For example as prepress became more automated, those people with their knowledge of colour and workflows formed the digital print department.

Likewise the CutStars are a boon to efficiency and productivity. While expensive to buy, the payback comes in terms of the 15% saving on reeled against sheeted paper; from the fact that the sheet is perfectly square and will not misfeed; and from being able to cut the sheet to the precise length for the job, rather than compromise by using a sheet slightly larger than ideal. “I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t have CutStars,” says Knight.

There is a continual quest too to find good ideas from elsewhere in the world. “When we came here we had a clean sheet of paper to set out the flow as we liked,” he says, adding that many of the ideas about this were borrowed from Heidelberg’s set-up in Germany.

The latest move has been to adopt lean management ideas. Areas of the factory floor are painted to indicate walkways where nothing can be stored, and red squares meant to be hidden by something. This square might be at the end of a press to show that a reel is needed or by the ink pumping system to show that a new drum is required. These are quickly delivered. Empty ink tins are quickly cleared to avoid confusion, waste containers kept in the same place on every press and tools stored precisely where needed. Vision in Print’s audit placed Anton in the upper quartile of efficiency even before the impact of its lean ideas had been fully implemented. Now the system is to be rolled out across other areas of the business.

What is more the 350 staff seem to have taken naturally to the concept. A works council that meets every six months has proved a useful body for communications, and Knight is considering an idea to have large display screens in the factory to tell staff which customers are visiting that day.

Even before lean ideas, Anton had achieved ISO 14001, though it has not made a fuss about it. Already material going to landfill has been slashed. It is also important for customers. “For some blue chips, this is now essential,” says Murphy.

For the future, the investment will continue with increasing levels of automation, but it is considered. “We have to get labour saving devices, there’s no way around that,” says Knight. He has looked at moving to a larger print format with slitters in the delivery to fit in with the finishing equipment. He was not convinced, preferring to see the technology proven in action before Anton buys. Nor will Anton grow through acquisition: “We are definitely not in the market to take over any other business,” Knight declares. “But we will keep upgrading. When we get to Drupa 2012, it will still be litho, but we will have to include any inroads that inkjet has made.”

By then Anton should be twice the business it is today, something that is more in Knight’s hands than any trophy Spurs might challenge for in that time.