Specialist Adds Miniature Booklet Unit

To accommodate more stringent regulations from the Food & Drug Administration such as the need for more information to be printed on product labeling, Pharmaceutic Litho & Label Company, Chatsworth, Calif., recently installed North America's first miniature booklet system (MBS) spotlighting an integrated glue-verification capability.

Pharmaceutic, which employs 85 people at its 28,000-square-foot facility, purchased in December a miniature glued booklet system from Vijuk Equipment Inc. The company is using its new piece of machinery as an integral element in the production of everything from inserts and product manuals to bottle and vial labels.

The company also offers patent-pending label options, including sling labels, expanded-information labels, and booklet labels (with or without slings) for different-size bottles. Both lithographic and flexographic reproduction capabilities are supported by a dedicated, in-house bindery department equipped for the production of custom-folded leaflets and booklets.

Say Pharmaceutic officials, the unique configuration of the machine at installation made it among the first anywhere to couple the gluing of miniature booklets with an integrated glue-verification system.

This high-precision laser scanning system helps to raise quality standards and limit rejects by continuously detecting the presence of glue on the spine throughout high-speed booklet production.

Bindery manager Diane Lammersen says Pharmaceutic selected the Vijuk unit after comparing it with a similar but much larger, more expensive system that would have required significant customization in order to meet its needs.

More importantly, she notes that the other system could not produce booklets as small or with as many pages as the Vijuk machine, a critical concern to any firm addressing the needs of the drug industry. The new system can make miniature booklets of up to 40 pages as small as 2 1/4 x 2" in size.

Pharmaceutic folder technician-MBS specialist David Fasanella describes the miniature glued booklet system's operation as a "one-stop process" designed to make booklets in a single, in-line configuration.

"The user-friendly machine is easy to set up and program," he states. "Parallel folds are made, and the glue is applied. Next, it is put into a knife fold, and then there's one last right-angle fold. The booklet then travels into an in-line, five-knife booklet trimmer where it's trimmed to the correct size."

"Before using the new system, the largest number of pages we could produce for a glued spine was 12," continues Fasanella. "Now we produce smaller booklets with more pages on our booklet labels."

He adds that the Vijuk MBS also features a special unit to crimp the pages and keep them from opening during label application. This, Fasanella says, solved the problem of booklets opening up during label application, resulting in misregistration.

Tom Moore, president of Pharmaceutic—which operates five Vijuk-G&K SVA 35 Series miniature folders (two of which are right-turn-angle models) as well as two Vijuk MV-97 outsert attachments for spot-gluing leaflets—stresses that the new unit has opened up exciting sales potentials for miniature booklet production.

Citing an expected 20% increase of this business for the coming year, he goes on to credit the MBS for solving a growing problem for Pharmaceutic's customers.

"The real value of a vendor is gauged by how well it meets a client's needs—especially the tight turnarounds common to this business," concludes Moore. "We've been involved in many of our customers' product launches, oftentimes working around-the-clock to help make their drug launches successes.

"In many cases, we find ourselves working with clients' engineers to solve design problems, including making sure a package is compatible with automated production equipment. This new piece of equipment helps us achieve our goals, as well as those of our customers."