Streamlining Book Manufacturing for Short Runs
Yurchak Printing was founded in 1998 with the goal of offering high-quality, short-run digital book manufacturing services. Yurchak also wanted to provide print on demand services. For that reason, Yurchak committed itself to adopting new technologies to adapt to changing market needs.
Since its inception, Yurchak has offered an array of finishing options to serve a wide variety of clients. As the book manufacturing market continues to move toward shorter runs, Yurchak needed a solution that would streamline job submission, imposition, and production, while reducing waste and growing capabilities to efficiently produce very short runs.
In the past few years, demand for increasingly shorter runs in the book industry has exploded. Today, customers are looking for short runs that can be turned around in a day, or even a few hours. With shorter runs, many book manufacturers look to take on a higher volume of jobs, but manually switching between those jobs and their various steps can be overwhelming and time consuming, and it introduces additional manual touch points.
“We have made our name on high quality short runs, and we did not intend to let the trend toward shorter and shorter runs interfere with that,” says John Yurchak, CEO, Yurchak Printing.
At the same time, three of Yurchak’s toner devices were nearing their end-of-life, so decision makers were looking to replace and upgrade them.
Solution
Ricoh’s (Booth 2022) InfoPrint 5000 continuous feed platform reliably produces high-volume, high-quality applications with small environmental and real estate footprints. With print speeds up to 420 fpm, and dynamic drop sizes to ensure speed and quality, the InfoPrint 5000 addresses the efficiency needs of operations of many types.
RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder software simplifies and automates short-run digital workflows by empowering users to set up rules based on a variety of factors, including run length and trim size. It “batches” like jobs to make the monitoring and management of high volume short run jobs easier, while helping to meet deadlines and more efficiently use resources.
Results
Shorter runs often introduce more manual touch points into book manufacturing. RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder enabled Yurchak Printing to automate and streamline key tasks, from ordering to finishing, helping improve accuracy and decrease turnaround times. It helps not only to automate those tasks and remove those touch points, but it also helps ensure the many jobs modern book printers often take on at once are monitored, managed, and executed simply and efficiently. As a result, Yurchak has reduced waste, increased accuracy and decreased turnaround times.
On the hardware front, by partnering with Ricoh to replace three aging toner devices with a single InfoPrint 5000 MP production print inkjet platform, Yurchak has increased productivity, quality, and reliability.
