John Patrick Publishing Installs a Smart-Binder for Church Bulletin Production

John Hartmann, CEO, John Patrick Publishing Co., holds a sample of a bulletin that was produced with a Smart-binder SB-3 'Plus HS'.

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. — December 8, 2016 — Continuing its momentum in serving the needs of church-bulletin printers, IBIS has installed a Smart-binder SB-3 'Plus HS' at John Patrick Publishing Co. (JPPC) in Trenton, N.J.

Founded in 1992, JPPC provides various weekly bulletins and publications for more than 500 churches throughout the United States. In addition to weekly bulletin printing, JPPC provides many other printed communication products for the parishes and website development.

Last year John Hartmann, CEO of JPPC decided to convert weekly bulletin production from offset to digital printing. In doing so JPPC followed the general trend within the bulletin printer segment to move to high-speed inkjet. The requirements for weekly parish bulletins are almost a perfect fit for web inkjet printing. The format is around 8-1/2 x 11', and page counts are generally between eight and 16 pages. Average run-lengths are less than a thousand bulletins.

The move from offset to digital print enables the number of different bulletin jobs per hour to increase from a handful to dozens. A single digital web press (with a finishing system) can replace multiple offset presses since there is no set-up time between different jobs. Parish bulletins have an inflexible production deadline with a relatively short time window between receipt of print files and the delivery of finished bulletins. For this the digital print process is ideally suited.

JPPC therefore took the plunge with an HP 'T"-series Pagewide web inkjet press, Tecnau web processing equipment and a near-line IBIS Smart-binder SB-3 'Plus HS'. The transition required planning and IBIS worked with the other vendor partners together to make this as painless as possible. The result has been a revolution for JPPC, with virtually seamless non-stop bulletin output.

"We recently installed a Smart-binder system at our plant in Trenton, N.J., for the on-demand production of Church bulletins, containing typically eight to 16 pages. Paper rolls printed on our HP web printer(s) and unwound and cut into sheets by a Tecnau web cutter from where the sheets flow directly into the Smart-binder," says John Hartmann, CEO John Patrick Publishing Co.

He continues, "The Smart-binder is a heavy duty, fast saddle-stitcher which allows for frequent changes in booklet pagination and is well suited to meeting the requirement for on-time delivery of our short-run Bulletin documents."

Source: IBIS.