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August 5, 2004
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August 5, 2004 |
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New press arrives at Antioch Co. When the five semitrailers carrying over 25 crates of printing press equipment arrived at The Antioch Company early last week, employees cleared a wide path for the shiny new machine that will secure their jobs in Yellow Springs for many years. Now mostly assembled, the $3 million Man Roland press is 53 feet long, weighs 100,000 pounds and can print 15,000 sheets of paper per hour. It will eventually take over all the printing at the company’s headquarters in Yellow Springs and allow for future growth. By last Thursday most of the press had been assembled, and people from other areas on the production floor kept sneaking in to get a peek at the newest state-of-the-art equipment the company has purchased in 20 years, Mike Boos, the printing manager said. “Everyone’s excited, it’s an awesome opportunity for the company and the people working here,” he said. “It shows everyone the commitment of the company to stay in the area.” Growth in the company’s Creative Memories business, which supplies the Yellow Springs plant with 90 percent of its orders, created a need for a greater production capacity than the Antioch Company’s two smaller Heidelberg presses could handle. With facilities in several other states, the company could have set up the new press elsewhere and eliminated the 175 local production jobs that support it, Carol Gasho, the local operations manager, said last month. But the company wanted to remain in town to retain its highly skilled employees, and when the Village offered a 10-year 75 percent tax abatement on the value of the press, the situation became mutually beneficial for both Yellow Springs and the company, Gasho said. The press will run two shifts a day at first, with two pressmen on each shift, Boos said. He and a few others will travel to Chicago next week for a week of training, and a Man Roland representative will come to Yellow Springs to train the others for two weeks. Boos said he expects to have the press running at full production by early September. In addition to a new printing press, The Antioch Company purchased a bigger and faster $250,000 collator with an attached shrink wrapper. The new collator can handle a 30 percent increase in production capacity and will also accommodate the growth the company expects to see, Dan Miller, the bindery manager, said. Once Creative Memories took hold about five years ago, he said, the whole company began changing and shifting toward expansion. “The press was a huge investment,” Miller said. “With the company making a new commitment like that, it tells me we’re going to be here for a long time.” |
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