In at the Finish

Just as trends toward shorter runs continue to propel on-demand printing's status as the industry's fastest-growing segment, advances in engineering and automation on the finishing end have translated into quick, easy set-ups, making bindery additions more appealing as more systems are driven by the output devices' digital front ends.

"In the print-on-demand market, the place to go now is not just peddling more engines; it's really solving customers' end-to-end needs with integrated solutions," says Pete Perine, vice president and general manager for Xerox Corporation's worldwide graphic arts business publishing segment.

He continues, "As the economy has contracted, commercial printers have lost print pages and, rather than have their presses idle, they'll lower run lengths, at which point the price of short-run black-and-white and color printing becomes a commodity. While early on in the on-demand world it was simply a matter of cherry-picking easy jobs, growth now becomes more about offering good prepress, finishing, and fulfillment."

Among predictions made by industry leaders in the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation's (GATF) Technology Forecast for 2001, Heidelberg USA's Larry Tanowitz, senior vice president in charge of postpress, states, "As personalized direct mail and variable printing become more predominant, the 'finishing on-demand' market is expected to explode."

"Finishing and fulfillment has a very big—and growing—place in the market because it's an area that's not under the same competitive pressure as cost per impression," assesses Roger P. Gimbel, director of worldwide marketing for New York City-based Global Document Solutions Corporation, a large on-demand printer that specializes in one-to-one variable-data financial document pieces.

"In one-to-one, we're dealing with single deliverable items, and if I'm doing a job that consists of 500 single deliverable items personalized to each person, that adds a much greater demand to the bindery," explains Gimbel, who also serves as chairman of the International Print Network.

He adds, "But those demands have revenue attached. If, for example, I tell a customer that the cost for perfect binding is $1 per item, the client is not going to make a decision based on the fact that I'm 20% higher or lower in price in the bindery. Rather, customers will ask how much it's going to cost to make 40,000 digital copies in color, and then compare that figure to those from other printers. Bindery costs usually are not the major factors that clients use in their overall analyses of print jobs."

Gimbel explains that the main reason special bindery services are so important to printers and outsource providers is that most companies that purchase such services do not have these capabilities internally. "They might be able to produce copies but have no way to saddle stitch or perfect bind the documents," he says. "So when they want a professional-looking finished product, they must go to one of their suppliers."

Recent vendor introductions reflect a rush to offer both off-line and in-line finishing solutions for the on-demand realm. Despite a general leaning more toward in-line solutions, ongoing debate continues regarding which avenue is better.

"With in-line, you have greater set security and a minimal investment in personnel, but you give up potential flexibility and productivity in terms of feeding multiple printers," explains Rick Trapilo, executive vice president and general manager for C.P. Bourg. "Some printers with two or three Xerox DocuTechs in a room would rather feed output manually into the perfect binder and/or automatically feed it into the saddle stitcher."

C.P. Bourg manufactures off-line stackers for companies like Heidelberg and Xerox to finish collated sets either in saddle stitchers and/or perfect binders. The Bourg BookFactory, developed jointly with Xerox and Roll Systems, enables off-line perfing, rotating, and folding using Bourg's BPRF perfect binder module. An entry-level equivalent to the BookFactory, the BookShop, also developed with Xerox, offers pushbutton automation and the ability to handle padding and scoring applications.

A.B. Dick's off-line finishing system comes with an automatic BookMaster staple, fold, and trim solution. Available with five bins, the offering can make booklets from pre-collated sets, or can be used as a regular collator for batch-printed sets.

While Challenge Machinery's bread and butter for more than a century has come from the manufacture of paper cutters and paper drillers, the company made a significant contribution to on-demand finishing recently with its CMT 330 three-knife trimmer, recognized for its full digital control of the trimming process through servo-motors that control all adjustments automatically.

The CMT 330, which can be used in line with perfect binders or off line in a manual-feed mode, can store 99 jobs in memory and change jobs in 20 seconds, says Challenge's vice president of marketing and sales Robb Gould.

For entry-level on-demand print shops, Challenge also offers the Morgana EZ, a two-plate, vacuum-feed folder featuring electronic plate changes for different fold configurations, a full register table, and an anti-static system. "When documents come out of a photocopier they tend to be curled and static-laden," explains Gould. "The EZ's suction-feed system is designed to overcome these conditions."

Duplo USA's DF-520 suction-feed automatic-setting tabletop folder features six pre-programmed popular folds in addition to unlimited custom folds. The folder requires no manual adjustment for paper thickness and accepts paper in a wide range of sizes. A unique jam detector automatically stops the folding process when something is blocked.

Duplo offers a full array of bookletmakers, collators, cutters, and trimmers, plus finishing systems designed for in-line production (for example, stitching, folding, and trimming), near-line use (sheet feeding, or bookletmaking and trimming), and off-line solutions (bookletmaking, set feeding, folding, or collating, folding, and inserting).

GBC's automated tabletop perfect binder, the PF 3200, converts from binding to padding with the push of a button, and features a double pass of the inner sheets over the roughening cutter for improved glue penetration in notching, says the company.

At the Print 01 event in Chicago, MBM Corporation debuted its entry-level tabletop suction-feed folder, the CAS35, featuring built-in scoring and perfing capabilities using electronic controls and an onboard computer.

Roll Systems made a significant extension beyond its DocuSheeter line of roll-feed systems last fall with the introduction at Print 01 of its Signature Stacker and DocuSheeter input grain rotator option, designed for use with high-speed DocuTech 2000 publishers. Signature Stacker, a key component of the Signature Folder/Stacker marketed by Xerox, stacks folded signatures from the Bourg BPRF perfect binder, offset-positions the book blocks, and creates finished units that are available immediately, making it desirable for off-line or near-line bindery operations.

Says the company, the grain rotator option allows printing from rolls of two-up perfect-bound books by producing grain-long book pages for the DocuTech. The rotator unit, placed after the cutter, automatically reorients sheets at a right angle to their entry direction, presenting grain-appropriate sheets to the DocuTech.

On the in-line finishing side, true automation for a single continuous production path was put on display at the Océ booth at Print 01 with a combination perfect binding and bookletmaking system.

The line, in order, consisted of the Standard Hunkeler UW4 unwinder, the Océ DemandStream 8090 printer, the Standard Hunkeler CS4 wide pinless cutter/stacker and its TS4 transfer station for automatically choosing output to the saddle stitcher or perfect binder, the Océ Digi-Stitcher, and the Müller Martini Amigo Digital (which made its U.S. debut at the Chicago trade show).

The on-demand Amigo, rated at 1,000 books per hour and designed to be run by a single operator, separates itself from the rest of Müller Martini's family of Amigo systems by being fully automated in line with every feature set from the upstream machine.

"The operator need not make any adjustments for different books since eight adjustments set by the upstream machine take care of all thickness, length, and width settings of any book entering the binder," states Andy Fetherman, Amigo Digital product manager. "As a result of this, think about the workflow efficiency savings based upon printing, gathering, binding, trimming, and cartoning: no work-in-progress, no inefficiencies of material handling. We think this is a tremendously powerful concept."

Horizon International and Standard Finishing Systems used Print 01 to demonstrate the forthcoming Standard Horizon ColorWorks HZN-2000-BM, a document finisher designed exclusively for in-line operation with Xerox DocuColor 2045 and DocuColor 2060 digital color presses.

Slated for release this quarter, the compact and automated ColorWorks system offers integrated head and foot trimming capability for the bleed trimming of posters, brochures, or booklets. Further, say Standard officials, in-line scoring helps improve fold quality and avoid image cracking induced by the use of cross-grain stock.

Corner-, side-, and center-stapling functions are possible as well with booklet-folding and face-trimming functionality. Finished booklets are delivered to an integrated vertical stacker for space efficiency.

"With this bookletmaker, we are now staking out a territory: the intersection of feeding and finishing," says Standard marketing manager Mark Hunt. "We're bringing our application expertise in bookletmaking, perfect binding, and stitch-only applications to the digital color world, meeting its very specific requirements."

Also notable, states Hunt, is Standard's new array of integrated feeding and finishing solutions for both the cut-sheet and continuous-feed arena.

"On the Xerox DocuTech, for example, we have rolled in at the back end sheet-feeding with in-line perfect binding, in-line bookletmaking, and in-line three-knife trimming to create what I call the 'Swiss Army Knife' of digital black-and-white finishing," he explains. "This same level of functionality is now pushing up into the continuous-feed arena. Whether it be a high-speed IBM, Océ, or Xerox print engine, we're talking about managing paper flows at 250 feet per minute, which is quite a bit more challenging than doing it at the Xerox DocuTech's 180-page-per-minute level."

At a print on-demand conference session during the recent Seybold Seminars New York exposition, Howie Fenton, senior technical consultant–digital technology for GATF, singled out for their unprecedented levels of automation at high speeds Standard's new 15-clamp perfect binder with in-line three-knife trimming, the Scitex VersaMark digital print system, the Océ Digi-Stitcher 2000 saddle stitcher, and the Bielomatik Bookmaster 360.

The VersaMark, said to produce a completely bound 360-page book in under eight seconds, is available with various finishing set-ups, including roll-to-bound book configurations that can print, cut, stack, and bind books, all in line.

Océ's stitcher, designed specifically for just-in-time bookletmaking on Océ DemandStream webfed digital printing solutions, automatically binds different paper weights and thicknesses without any machine stops, claims the company, adding that barcode recognition of individual sheets guarantees page or set integrity.

The Bielomatik unit can case-bind 360 hard- or soft-cover books per hour without adjustment or set-up time modifications. Says Bielomatik project engineer Adrian Nalichowski, every 10 seconds the system can manufacture a different-size book, from 105x148 mm to 250x320 mm in format, with spine heights of six to 60 mm.