Trade Bindery Takes Inside/Outside Track

Welsh Bindery Inc., New Berlin, Wis., has, since its founding by John Welsh and his wife, Betty, 23 years ago, grown to become a key outsourcing asset for some of the largest printers in the country. The trade bindery provides perfect binding, saddle stitching, and other bindery services for a national customer base, including some of the largest printers in the country, such as R.R. Donnelley & Sons and Quad/Graphics.

"Printers like to be printers," explains John Welsh, who serves as president. "They don't buy enough bindery equipment to produce the volume of work they get. A lot of our work is overflow work that printers can't handle on their own. We've grown tremendously and we're especially busy from July through December binding mail-order catalogs and publications."

The three-shift shop, operating in a 135,000-square-foot plant, works five to six days a week providing a range of binding services, including selectively bound ink-jet printing. In fact, Welsh Bindery was the first and only trade bindery to offer inside/outside ink-jet printing on its saddle stitching line 15 years ago, says Welsh.

Full-time employees number 90 but the shop can employ up to 150 temporary workers during its busy season. Welsh Bindery specializes in three typical run lengths: very long run jobs that start at about 100,000 but can reach 14.5 million copies; short runs, considered anything from about 5,000 copies and up; and case binding work, which starts at just 1,000 books and goes higher.

Over the years, the shop has become much busier as publishers and catalogers have begun to offer selectively bound magazines and catalogs. In this approach, a single, identical long-run product is not sent to the entire circulation list; rather, the magazines and catalogs are compiled from an assortment of parts according to a prospective client's past purchasing habits, residential locale, or other particular characteristics gathered by the publisher or cataloger.

Personalized ink-jet messages are printed on both the outside (along with the address) and the inside of the publications and catalogs.

Welsh Bindery also is asked to gather pertinent information on mailings for the post office and divide the publications and catalogs into distinct ZIP code for faster delivery. The shop, says Welsh, does all this while binding an assortment of publications from various printer clients in thousands of different run lengths and getting out a high-quality product in a timely fashion.

"We're unique because we can ink-jet print on high-volume jobs," says Welsh. "We get the big jobs from printers because we have this unique capability."

To this end, Welsh continuously upgrades and installs new equipment to ensure production of a high-quality product and maximize the amount of work being produced. Last May, Welsh installed a new Heidelberg 28-pocket Universal Binder 100 adhesive binder; it was preceded a year earlier by a Heidelberg 855 Pacesetter saddle stitcher with ST Trimmer.

"Our philosophy is simple: quality, then quantity," says Lee Lohagen, Welsh Bindery's plant manager. "We never sacrifice quality for productivity."

Two years ago, when Welsh Bindery realized that its customer needs were exceeding the ability of its controls, it decided to upgrade its three controllers with new ones from QTI, Sussex, Wis.

Welsh Bindery purchased QTI's File Management System (FMS) and Finishing Control System 1000 (FCS 1000). The combination allows operators greater control of job files, offers touch-screen menus to help them set up jobs easily and make midstream modifications without interrupting production. The products gave Welsh Bindery a user-friendly solution that created greater flexibility for meeting individual client needs.

Welsh converted all of its saddle stitching equipment over to QTI's systems.

"The QTI systems have given us versatility that we didn't have before," says Welsh. "For example, if we're running one job on two different binders with two different ZIP codes and a truck pulls up to take the job for one particular ZIP code, we can easily change gears using the QTI File Management System. We can download the data with the ZIP code that is needed without having to change a physical tape with the data."

He continues, "Everything is controlled up front and takes the control out of the operator's hands. We've become more efficient and shortened the turnarounds on our work."

The File Management System generates all of the information needed by the U.S. Postal Service. It tracks the count of how many books have been produced for a particular carrier's walking order and how many have been lost while they were being produced. "That [latter] feature is very important for us," says Welsh.

Welsh Bindery now utilizes five controllers—two 500 controllers on its perfect binders, three FCS 1000s on its saddle stitching line—and a fourth FCS 1000 on order.

Also, because the ink-jet system Welsh Bindery was using on its adhesive binder was not very portable, limited the number of ink-jet heads that could be used, and wasn't able to handle the tape formats it was receiving, the company began working with QTI on a simplified version of the FCS 1000 system.

Lohagen says the company has worked closely with QTI to develop a new controller that would offer all of these capabilities and be compatible with the FMS in an effort to standardize Welsh Bindery's equipment. The resulting FCS 500 is the ideal system to get started with ink-jet addressing if there is no need for selective binding.

Welsh Bindery has since received the first operational FCS 500 and recently purchased its second unit.

"Right now we can get either a tape or a disk from a client to use in the FCS 500 controller on the perfect binder," says John Welsh, "or we can receive digital data, which allows us to add more greetings on publications that we ink-jet print. If there's a problem with the data on the tape or disk, we can correct that problem internally by using our FMS system; this lets us cut down on the tape errors and correct them, which we could not do before."

Since Welsh Bindery installed its QTI systems, it has experienced considerable sales growth. "The QTI products has helped us increase our volume tremendously," says Welsh. "For each of the past three years, we've posted a 15% sales growth."