Navigating Bottlenecks with Smart Finishing

It’s a common scenario: A printing company adds digital presses but assumes its old bindery equipment will handle the work just fine. When the bottlenecks come, the company adds additional bindery equipment and people to the situation. But in a digital world, where runs are getting increasingly smaller, this can quickly become a nightmare scenario.

“You get a lot of little jobs coming at you all day long,” Stefan McTee, COO at Sun Print Solutions, remarks. “The time it takes to set up a machine, run a small amount, and then switch it over is kind of ridiculous. So, the more automated the machine is, the easier the setup, the better your throughput.”

He acknowledges the Salt Lake City, Utah-based company learned this lesson from experience.

“For a while there, we had more press power than we had bindery equipment,” he says. “When you get a backlog and you can’t get things out on time, customers aren’t happy.”

As commercial printers make the transition from offset to inkjet, they are increasingly discovering that the fastest digital presses in the world can’t overcome the resulting bottlenecks in the bindery. Finishing equipment designed to be set up once and left to run for thousands of pieces just won’t cut it in the short-run digital world. Modern finishing technology is a must.

McTee says Sun Print looked for finishing equipment that could handle multiple steps in one device. For example, instead of the old way of doing scoring and perfing on a Heidelberg cylinder press then going to a folder, the 112-employee company now uses a Morgana scoring/perforating/folding machine to do it all. To automate setup for different jobs, the Duplo cutter reads 2D barcodes printed on the pieces and automatically switches setups between business cards and postcards.

“Automation is a fabulous thing,” he declares.

At Sun Print Solutions, Shawn Nelsen, mailing department lead, stands next to the MBO digital line he operates.

Sun Print originally had its HP PageWide T250 inkjet web press running to an in-line Hunkeler cutter and stacker, but after attending the Inkjet Summit and learning that many other inkjet users had moved to near-line finishing, the company invested in an MBO line, which includes an unwinder, dynamic scoring/perfing, plow folding, cutting, buckle folding, slitting, and shingle delivery, along with fugitive and cold gluing. The inkjet press now delivers to both the Hunkeler and MBO finishing lines.

“That press can feed two finishing lines, so why not just let the press do its thing?” McTee says. “The bottlenecks went away.”

Another printing company in the Midwest came to the same conclusion when it prepared to add high-speed HP inkjet web presses a few years ago. It determined that one finishing line for each press wasn’t sufficient. It now runs five MBO lines to handle the work coming off its three inkjet presses.

“One press will out-produce one bindery line,” the company’s director of planning remarks. “It’s 2:1. So we end up having two bindery lines for one press.”

Using a near-line bindery configuration means paper jams on the finishing end won’t slow down the presses’ productivity.

“When you try to tie the bindery into the press, you get ups and downs,” he points out. “That’s not good for your press.”

By and large, however, the company’s MBO web finishing lines can handle the volume from the inkjet presses without issues.

“The robustness of the MBOs allows one operator to operate [up to] three machines,” he says. “So there’s less labor.”

McTee is similarly pleased with the MBO line at Sun Print.

“We call that our Swiss army knife,” he laughs. On a recent job, the MBO line handled scoring, plow folding, cutting, tri-folding, and tabbing.

“Normally, those would be at least a couple different steps, so we figured we saved 40 hours of human time just by having it all on one machine,” he says. “That really helps throughput.”

Equipment Overhaul

Down in Montgomery, Alabama, Walker360 initially encountered a bindery bottleneck after it carried out a full shop overhaul last year. The 50-employee, $13.5 million commercial printer replaced every single piece of equipment in its 40,000-sq.-ft. facility. It swapped its Heidelberg presses for a SCREEN Truepress Jet520HD+ inkjet press to print all its books, magazines, newsletters, transactional documents, direct mail pieces, and general commercial work. The company also added a Canon iX cut-sheet inkjet press. While looking at inkjet equipment, owner Taylor Blackwell was also researching new finishing gear.

“While I understood that there would be efficiencies by switching from offset to inkjet, I also realized that if you can’t automate the finishing, you are just moving the bottleneck there,” he says.

At Walker360, Mike Stobert gathers finished booklets processed on the company’s Hunkeler/Horizon roll-to-booklet line.

The Inkjet Summit and Hunkeler Innovationdays provided him with invaluable information, and he ended up installing a Hunkeler Gen8 roll-to-cut/stack line, and a roll-to-booklet line featuring the Hunkeler unwinder and cutter and the Horizon StitchLiner Mark V saddle stitcher. Initially, however, Walker360 started with a combination line that could produce booklets, book blocks, or stacks in one system.

“I thought the finishing equipment would be productive enough to not bottleneck when we first did it,” Blackwell recalls. He envisioned the finishing line switching between cut work and stitched work.

“We found that if you are stitching a book, you couldn’t run cut-sheet at the same time and that was a bottleneck for us,” he says. “We just couldn’t put it all through one machine. The press would just bury the finisher.”

As a result, the company added the second finishing line in August. Now one line handles book blocks and cut-sheet work, and another line does stitching.

“That was a humongous change,” Blackwell says. “It’s enabled us to go after more work and turn the work better.”

Carla Green prepares the Horizon BQ-500 perfect binder to accept book blocks for binding at Walker360.

The company learned some lessons in automation when, after initially running a BQ-500 perfect binder separately from a trimmer, it decided to connect them for greater efficiency. Then it upgraded to a faster trimmer, and later added a Horizon LBF-500 automatic book block feeder to the process. Now feeding, binding, and trimming are all automated.

“That probably doubled our production,” Blackwell says.

The company has Hunkeler roll-to-roll winders on the Truepress 520HD+ press, but keeps its finishing offline, which Blackwell feels leads to fewer bottlenecks.

“The press is so much more productive than the finishing equipment,” he contends. “Thank the Lord we went off-line. If you’re having to change between types of cuts or sizes … you’ve absolutely got to go offline.”

In-Line Works as Well

Adi Chinai has a different view.

“For our need, we prefer in-line,” says the president and CEO of short-run book manufacturing specialist King Printing in Lowell, Massachusetts. “Everybody has a different philosophical approach.”

The 120-employee company has found that by running its HP, SCREEN, and Kodak continuous-feed inkjet presses directly into its multiple Muller Martini SigmaLine systems, it can keep pace with the high volume of short-run books it produces every day.

“It’s all about standardization,” he contends. Focusing on books has allowed the company to streamline its printing and finishing processes.

“If you’re trying to be everything to everybody, you’re going to find a bottleneck,” he insists.

The secret, though, is standardization combined with automation.

“Driving a solution with barcodes [combined] with meta data, we’re able to reduce the amount of makeready time that’s needed for ultra short-run production,” he says.

In its quest for more efficiency, the company recently installed the first Muller Martini Antaro Digital perfect binder in North America.

“We’re always, as an organization, in search of how can we do it better,” Chinai says. “This is just driving more autonomous short-run manufacturing.”

The Antaro Digital can bind 2,000 books per hour with fewer operators required. It features a continuously running swing clamp system, ensuring the smooth horizontal transport of book blocks through the machine. Its barcode reader ensures an exact match between book blocks and covers.

“The line really uses every single best-in-class component ... it’s like the best of the best,” he praises. “That was a no-brainer for us, so that we can then bring in more autonomous automation to handle the work that’s flowing through our plant.”

To eliminate bottlenecks, Chinai urges printers to look beyond the silos in their operation and take in the big picture.

“You have to look at the entire ecosystem and determine what equipment you’re going to use to help drive those bottlenecks out of your entire value chain,” he says.

Start With the Finishing

Commercial printers looking to add a digital press would do well to consider finishing equipment at the same time.

“The best way to do it is to build backwards,” McTee advises. “It doesn’t do any good to have a press that can go really fast and produce a lot of work but you can’t finish it. You really have to build the finishing before you put the press in.” Or at least have your finishing solutions planned, he adds.

The company did exactly this recently when it prepared to add a press in its folding carton package division. It added new gluing, folding, and diecutting equipment before getting the press.

“The new presses can just bury our old [finishing] equipment,” he says.

Bindery Brings in Business

For Walker360, adding additional finishing equipment to reduce bottlenecks has had the added bonus of bringing in new business. Blackwell cites a job the company produced for the gaming industry that included 300,000 personalized booklets.

“We could have never done that before,” he says. “We also do a booklet job for the healthcare industry where each personalized booklet has a different number of pages and contains information specific to the recipient. With the new configuration, the stitcher simply reads a printed barcode and is able to process the variation in pages on the fly. Again, this is an application we could not have done before.”

Walker360’s newly upgraded operation now features a SCREEN Truepress Jet520HD+ inkjet web press running into a Hunkeler RW8 rewinder.

Walker360’s finishing investments have not only reduced bottlenecks, they have sped up production without the need to add more labor. Blackwell gives one example of a perfect bound book job of about 100 pages that comes in every two weeks.

“We receive it between eight and 10 in the evening, we run it on inkjet during the night, and it goes to the Hunkeler cut-and-stack line and then Horizon perfect binder that same night,” he says. “By 8 a.m., we are driving that job to Tennessee to deliver it. It is truly amazing what we can accomplish now.”

With all the automation on the new bindery equipment, Blackwell says, “one person can do what four were doing before — and do it faster. It’s less touches, it’s quicker out the door, and it’s easier for them. I’m trying to get twice the work with half the effort.” Bindery automation is helping him get there.