Like an In-House Service

In order to improve performance and availability while at the same time expanding its range of offerings, Lotos Poligrafia in Poland made substantial investments in print finishing – including an Alegro perfect binder and a Presto II saddle stitcher from Muller Martini.
 
Lotos Poligrafia set up shop in the suburbs of Warsaw more than 30 years ago. From the beginning, the family company – which is now run by Edward Dreszer and his sons Karol and Pawel – positioned itself as a full-service commercial printer. The father created a solid basis, and the two sons, who studied at the Warsaw University of Technology, are now working intently on adapting the company for the coming challenges. According to the two sons, the main challenges are improving the efficiency of the overall production chain and expanding the range of offerings.
 
With this in mind, they worked with Muller Martini to expand the company’s print finishing capacities by investing in saddle stitching and perfect binding. At Lotos Poligrafia, 60 percent of production involves magazines, with 20 percent for catalogs and 15 percent for books. The rest of production is related to calendars and, lately, food packaging.

Around 40 percent of the company’s products are exported. In particular, the books and magazines produced by Lotos Poligrafia are rated highly in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. “We view book production as an art, an art that we’ve been involved in for many years and that we will continue to uphold,” says company head Edward Dreszer.
 
The company’s 100 highly trained employees – 90 percent of whom have a graphic arts education – work with modern machines to carry out all of the work steps. Lotos Poligrafia has had a trusting collaboration with Muller Martini for many years. Because the company is located so close to the Polish office of Muller Martini, it’s like having an in-house service. “The collaboration with Muller Martini has been motivating for us and has served as a key driver as we grow our company,” says Pawel Dreszer.

Lotos Poligrafia took an important step toward expanding softcover production and raising it to a new quality level when it installed an Alegro perfect binder from Muller Martini. Thanks to the machine’s high degree of automation, the company doubled its output to 6,000 cycles per hour while halving the number of employees, needed to make the jobs done.
 
The maximum setup time for the Alegro is 15 minutes, which makes the production of short runs economical. “Combined with the Asir 3 automatic signature scanning system, the Alegro has helped us take perfect binding to a new level. And both our domestic and our international customers have responded positively as well,” says Karol Dreszer.
 

Lotos Poligrafia is a family business (from left): Karol Dreszer (Managing Director), Jacek Kobyliński (Muller Martini Poland), Edward Dreszer and Pawel Dreszer (both Managing Directors).

Following the successful commissioning of the Alegro, Lotos Poligrafia made its next investment just one year later, bringing its saddle stitching up to the latest standards with a Presto II from Muller Martini. Management appreciates that the Presto II has a simple and robust design and that it has an attractive price/performance ratio, which helps to ensure a quick ROI.
 
This is especially important, as the saddle stitching segment is under enormous competitive pressure. But Lotos Poligrafia has already thought ahead one step and is now considering entering the hardcover production segment, too.