Bindery Upgrades Save Time and Money for AEP

Printing about 4 million offset and digital impressions a year, American Electric Power (AEP) Workplace Services is a busy in-plant.

"The shop just keeps growing," remarks Office Support Supervisor Cindy Hohman. "Our numbers are up."

In addition to printing, the shop processes 285,000 pieces of incoming/outgoing mail a year, and oversees the design and order fulfillment of 4,000 company forms.

Among the most common items printed by the 12-employee operation are booklets. So when the in-plant's C.P. Bourg booklet maker began breaking down last year, this had a serious impact on productivity at the Ft. Wayne, IN, operation.

In September, Hohman started researching a replacement, eventually narrowing down her search to equipment from Standard Finishing and Duplo USA. She and one of her operators traveled to Columbus, OH, to see a Duplo 500i Booklet System in action and talk to the operator. It seemed a perfect fit.

So in December the in-plant installed the system, which includes the DSC 10/60i suction collator and the DBM-500 Pro booklet maker. With two 10-bin towers, it produces saddle-, side- or corner-stitched products at speeds up to 5,000 booklets per hour.

Hohman was most impressed with the device's eight-belt air suction feed system and air management system. Each bin comes with two fans, one to separate pages, the other to generate consistent suction. Feeding was a constant problem with the shop's previous machine, she says.

"We were really looking for a piece of equipment that was going to address that," she says.

The in-plant prints booklets two-up on 14x20˝ sheets, often with covers coming from a Ryobi press and inside pages printed on a Xerox Color J75. The Duplo 500i cuts them in half down the middle, then trims the edges, producing finished books.

"There's no gutter, so we save paper," she remarks.

Having all the trimming done inline on the Duplo 500i is a huge time and labor savings for the in-plant, which previously had to bring booklets to an offline cutter. This meant halting the cutting of inserts, "our bread and butter job," Hohman says. The new booklet maker has made life so much easier.

"They come right off the conveyor done," she says. "That's a huge deal for us."

It's also saving the company money.

"We're not running as much overtime because we don't have to pull people off cutting inserts," she notes.

Hohman expects the 500i to pay for itself in savings in less than a year.

Other nice features, she adds, are the intelligent multi-bin feeding function, which lets operators run a job from one tower while filling the other, and the system's ability to offset finished books in preset numbers.

"We don't have to count them," she says.

The Duplo 500i isn't the only new item the in-plant installed. Early last year it replaced its 30-year-old cutter with a Challenge 370XT programmable cutter, which has a 37˝ cutting width. Side air tables let operators keep stacks of paper ready and easily move them into place.

In May the shop upgraded to a Xerox Color J75 digital printer with inline booklet making.

"We love it," Hohman remarks.

Also new is Rochester Software Associates' WebCRD software, which was installed at all nine of AEP's in-plants across the country.