A Christening at Our Printing Plant

Thursday, 2 June 2022 saw the christening of a new Heidelberg printing machine at POINT CZ’s production plant in Medlov near Brno. This event marked the end of phase one of the company’s investments into a robotised Industry 4.0 future.

POINT CZ is currently engaged in an extensive investment project with the aim to expand and modernise its production site to meet the needs of Industry 4.0. The trigger here was the year 2017, when the site reached the limits of its production capacity and a decision was made to expand it. In 2019, a new packaging hall was constructed, and new production technologies and software were purchased in the years after that. In 2022, the year-and-a-half installation process culminated in a grand christening party at the Medlov production site.

“We officially christened our ‘youngest’ printing machine, the last to be installed – in April 2022. This christening was a thank-you to people from banking houses, technology and materials suppliers, customer representatives, and our employees who helped us with the implementation,” said POINT CZ’s owner Michal Sázavský.

Machines from the Swiss manufacturer Bobst for cutting, folding and gluing packaging were installed in our packaging hall. The bookbinding hall has been supplemented with a new cutting centre, a saddle stitching production line and a folding line. A new Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 106-8-P+L was added to the printing hall, replacing the former Heidelberg SM102-10-P. The printing site ran uninterrupted throughout the installation of the new machines.

“The most difficult part was the replacement of the printing machines. We installed the new twenty-four-metre Speedmaster, which came here in six lorries, and replaced the old one with it in less than five weeks. We succeeded thanks to careful planning and cooperation between all of our company’s departments, customers and suppliers, and the use of three-shift weekend operation,” noted the Medlov plant’s director Tomáš Blažek.

The official christening marked the end of the first phase of the modernisation project. Its second phase involves the construction of a high-capacity storage hall with a fully robotised conveyor bridge that is 47 metres long. The hall will be completed in 2025, and the warehousing space will increase to over four times its current size, from 1,500 to 6,300 pallet locations. Work on the construction of a photovoltaic power plant is ongoing at our site, as well as work on a new transformer station with a high voltage connection. Another phase in this project will be the construction of a new, modern administrative building connected with a biotope. The architectural project is the work of Ing. Arch. František Šmédek who “fathered” the existing buildings on the company’s premises as well.

The company is financing this investment project through both loans and a subsidy programme for Industry 4.0 innovations from the EU structural funds. “The greatest thanks belong to our colleagues who were involved in the installation of the machines. In other companies this would likely be the “topic of the year”; we did feel some limitations on our production, but everything went so smoothly that many people didn’t even notice the installation work,” noted Vladimír Sázavský, another owner of POINT CZ.

Text: Markéta Švábová