Issue link: https://nbm.uberflip.com/i/1451382
2 2 G R A P H I C S P R O • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 G R A P H I C S - P R O. C O M "At that time, our Bentonville facility was completely full. ere was no expansion capabil- ity that wouldn't take a year or more to do. We needed to strike while the iron was hot," he says. He found another facility about 15 min- utes away in Rogers, Arkansas. Because of the Highcon's sheet size, Rapid needed to find another press that it could pair with it. "We needed a minimum three or ideally four lanes wide. at's when I reached out to Agfa. ey happened to have a machine where the feeding mechanism would allow for at least four lanes," he explains. Originally, Rapid had looked at getting another Durst machine, but it could only han- dle two lanes at the smaller sheet size. It also had a 12- to 14-week lead time to get it manu- factured and shipped to the U.S. from overseas. Agfa, which is based in Canada, had a new Jeti Tauro H3300 with ¾ automation available, and within four weeks of ordering the machine, it was on-site. e new facility was set up between Nov. 1 and the end of December. Since the addi- tion of the Agfa press, Rapid's corrugated busi- ness has grown from 100,000 square feet per month to over 750,000 square feet per month. With the Highcon, it's "able to take a lot more unprinted orders, just plain boxes, inserts for In the past two months, Rapid added a 60,000-square-foot warehouse that it uses for the pack-out and distribution side of its business. Supply chain problems have plagued the printing industry since the pandemic began, but Jack says that the materials Rapid needs are not necessarily hard to find; it's just hard to plan and ensure they don't run out.