The largest commercial printer in the Southwest calls Phoenix home. Prisma — on the brink of closing when Robert Anderson took it over 16 years ago — expects to do about $36 million in sales this year.
Anderson describes the business as “all-computerized and super-high-tech.” And the 75-ton printing press Anderson recently installed will help Prisma do more, faster. The new press is an eight-color Lithrone GL40 Perfector press equipped with Komori’s proprietary H-UV system. It will print 15,000 sheets of printer paper (which cut to 120,000 sheets at 8½ x 11 inches) per hour, both sides at once. Traditional presses, in comparison, print one side at a time, at 12,000 printer sheets per hour. Additionally, Anderson points out, “Instead of having to let the print air dry, it dries with an LED UV lamp.” The low-intensity lamps are low-energy, he notes.
“Client time-to-market expectations are now driven by companies like Amazon, meaning every job has fire under it,” Anderson says. “The amazing speed of this press simply does the impossible — it buys us time. With one pass and it’s done, we can experience efficiency like never before.” The massive installation took 39 days, and started with digging a two-foot-deep hole in the floor of Prisma’s facility.
Much of Prisma’s printing is supply chain-oriented, Anderson explains. This is largely in five verticals: restaurant, hotel/lodging, pharmaceutical, healthcare, and banking/financial. Some of the work involves data that falls under government regulation for compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), but Anderson says Prisma treats all data the same way. “Customers come because we protect their clients’ data.”
