Materials Handling in the Bindery — Moving It on Over

Call it paper kinesiology 101. The science of moving materials around the bindery is getting ever more digitized and automated, if not complicated. It is taking its cue from current automation trends up the production stream—although it can be difficult to automate the entire finishing process.

“Printers have picked the low-hanging fruit available to them by automating the prepress and pressroom areas,” explains Dennis Mason, president of Western Springs, IL-based Mason Consulting. “In many operations, the bindery remains a veritable beehive of activity, with people performing a wide variety of tasks. But it is this same incredible variety of tasks that makes it difficult for printers to remove labor through automation. Instead, a major trend in printers thinking about automation involves setting labor standards and making tasks uniform in order to increase productivity and throughput.”