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Europe's Largest Sports Retailer Upgrades Paper Guillotines

Posted on - 5th June 2017

Established in 1982, Sports Direct is the United Kingdom's largest sports goods retailer and operates roughly 670 stores worldwide. They operate a dedicated print room for the production of all retail labels and pricing materials with over 1 million prints created per week.

The Issue

  • Streamlining their print and finish capability was an issue as during high demand periods, work was not being completed on time (Extra costs incurred for overtime shifts)
  • Overuse of current machinery was causing large amounts of fault calls and resulted in downtime
  • Only one paper guillotine onsite was capable of managing the new higher demand
  • Workload was also increasing and was expected to go up by around 1/3 before the end of 2018
  • The business is also expanding their operations through Ireland and Belgium
  • Very short production timescales

The Challenge

Our main challenge was to enhance in-house capability by offering a high speed, accurate and reliable solution for managing high volumes of work. This in turn would reduce or even eradicate the overtime spend. We also needed to apply principals of install here in the UK to Ireland and Belgium whilst enabling the business to integrate a contingency system.

The Solution

The  Finishing Point have worked alongside the retailer for over 8 years and have an established and trusted understanding of their requirements and demands. Over this period, the increase in workflow has been staggering. In 2004/5 they utilised two hand operated Dahle paper guillotines and were replacing these every 3-4 months, demand at that time pointed them towards an Ideal 5222. The Ideal 5222 was used in tandem with the hand guillotines and coped with early demand but as production rapidly increased, another guillotine was sought to replace the hand operated machinery.

The Outcome

  • Faster Production as cutting process could be split between two machines
  • Workflow was instantly streamlined as the warehouse could complete its own cutting
  • Back to a normal two shift working day
  • A higher quality of cut and higher cut capacity could be achieved in each cycle
  • Separate production in Ireland, still supported and serviced by The Finishing Point
  • Happy customer!

Customer Comments

"TFP along with our maintenance team fully understand our processes, requirements and areas of difficulty within our print and finish process. We have worked alongside TFP for near 8 years and cannot fault their knowledge or levels of engineering support, they have always been here when needed, even when that was out of hours! The new machinery is now all operational and making a huge difference to our daily production, more importantly we have happy operators producing good quality print."