Just-In-Time Finishing — Finishing Touches
BY SCOTT POLK
Eighty percent of printing jobs need finishing work, according to Duplo USA Vice President of Marketing Peter Tu. With customers demanding quick turnarounds and quality work, the bindery plays an important role in the overall printing process. This is especially true as commercial printing continues its digital revolution.
"Print-on-demand has become increasingly popular among printers today," Tu notes. "It offers many benefits such as waste elimination, versatility and cost savings. It's no secret that the widespread availability of on-demand technology has expanded the capabilities of printing operations. Printers are always looking for ways to keep up with technology while maintaining reasonable costs. They are now printing shorter runs and keeping pace with an increasing number of jobs."
There are a variety of finishing solutions available. For example, as a response to needs of the print-on-demand market, Duplo offers a range of in-line and off-line automated finishing solutions. Such items include an assortment of collators, bookletmakers, slitters and scorers.
Duplo's collating and bookletmaking System 4000 is said to be ideal for all printing environments. It is a vacuum-fed system that offers printing operations a complete finishing solution designed to maximize productivity. Comprising a heavy-duty collator, dynamic bookletmaker, face trimmer and precision stacker, the System 4000 is capable of producing up to 4,200 booklets or 10,000 collated sets per hour and features a state-of-the-art feeding system.
Extending Functionality
Compatible with various electronic printing systems, DBM in-line bookletmakers extend a printer's functionality in a production environment by allowing booklets to be produced directly from the printer's output. An exclusive feature of the DBM series is the DB-10C buffer/interposer. The interposer allows intelligent feeding from two different bins for cover or color insertion into the printing stream without slowing down the printing productivity. The DBM system offers the ability to create up to 3,600 sets per hour.
Like many aspects of the printing industry—and any business for that matter—keeping an eye on finances is paramount. Edwards Brothers, located in Ann Arbor, MI, has been in the book printing business since 1893 and made the digital conversion in 1997. Lee Mohr, digital book center manager, reports that the switch made the company reassess how it does business.
"You've got to run a real tight ship because it's very costly to do," Mohr admits. "It's hard to make money at it because the prices of digital impressions are so high—with all the click charges and metering charges from the print engine suppliers. The technology costs are a lot to overcome."
While Edwards Brothers purchased new machines such as a Muller Martini Amigo perfect binder and a flatbed cutter when it decided to enter the print-on-demand book market, it used some ingenuity and resourcefulness when acquiring the rest of its equipment.
"Basically when we started our digital book center, the cost of case binding equipment was very high, so we put together a system that would work well with short-run quantities," Mohr recalls, adding the company purchased an old casing-in machine.
Edwards Brothers does its digital finishing work off-line because, according to Mohr, its print engines cannot print fast enough to keep up with the finishing equipment. The firm runs three printing shifts a day, but only one finishing shift, and typically does runs from 25 to 500 pieces.
Eventually, the company plans to switch, at least partially, to in-line finishing. "We're looking at ways to go from the printer to the binder, but we want the flexibility of it not actually being connected to the printer in case we want to do some special things to a job," Mohr comments. "So we're looking at cross-training our operators to run the print engines and the binding equipment."
Troy, NY-based Integrated Book Technology (IBT) also does off-line finishing; however, it is different than Edwards Brothers. IBT was founded 10 years ago as a short-run, on-demand book manufacturer, making it an expert of sorts in the digital field. Its only offset press is for color covers.
IBT produces case-bound and paperback books, with the split being 65-35 in favor of case-bound. About half of the case-bound products involve stamping, and the majority of the company's work features covers that need to be laminated. IBT uses a variety of printing devices, including a Ricoh color laser printer for covers, a Tektronix Phaser laser printer and a Ryobi color press. It also has a D&K laminator and a variety of saddle stitching and drilling equipment.
Going Global
But what sets IBT apart is its international capabilities. Two years ago, it opened a facility in London and plans to expand even further with facilities in Sydney and Hong Kong, scheduled to open within the next two years.
"We can truly distribute-and-print on a global basis," notes Vice President and part-owner Bill Clockel. "Instead of printing books, sending them to a warehouse and shipping them around the world, we'll send the file to one of our facilities around the world and print it there. Time to market is reduced incredibly and so are the costs, because there is no shipping other than local."
Clockel, along with primary owner John Paeglow and part-owner Bob Lindberg, do about 10 percent of their business globally. Once the expansion plans are realized, they expect that number to go higher.
Toronto-based KIT Packaging opened for business in 1990 and went digital five years ago. It does $15 million in business, focusing primarily on direct mail. Its run lengths vary from as low as 5,000 to as high as several million and its primary customers are phone companies and financial institutions. "We take databases and information on a pre-printed, large-format sheet and then personalize the sheet," explains owner Brian Gagnon.
Spoilage and waste can be a problem with personalized, one-to-one marketing products, because a mistake in the finishing stage can mean the entire process needs to be repeated. But that is less of a fear at KIT Packaging because it does its finishing work off-line.
"Spoilage is so minimal when you do it off-line," Gagnon reports. "We've been led to believe that there is fairly high spoilage on webs when you have print head problems. We avoid that by going off-line because if a print head doesn't print, we only lose a sheet or two. It's become a non-issue for us."
New technologies should be available for the just-in-time finishing segment in the coming years. Some of these innovations include binding lines geared for digital, short-run manufacturers, with almost instantaneous makereadies featuring touchscreen pads. Also on the horizon are thermal stampers, which have no dyes involved and print the type with a foil on a case-bound book.
"We are in digital printing for the long haul," Edwards Brothers' Mohr asserts. "We understand it is the future and that's why we got in in '97. We learned the ropes early on; we plan to stay in it and we're excited about the future of digital printing."
