Know When to Upgrade Your Collator

IT WAS two days before graduation at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Printing Services was in the process of collating 8,700 commencement programs when its 12-year-old Duplo 8000 decided to go on spring break.

“We had to hand collate about half” of the programs, recalls Manager Don Harty. The shop got everything finished in time, but the situation gave school administrators a scare.

“It served to back up my point to my boss that we needed to replace this thing,” says Harty.

Last fall the 13-employee in-plant did exactly that. It installed a 20-bin, two-tower Duplo 5000 collator with an inline stitcher/folder/trimmer. Here’s how it all happened.

The Decision to Upgrade

The Duplo 8000 had served the in-plant well for 12 years, but its age was definitely showing.

“We basically ran the socks off it,” laughs Harty.

When the board on one of its three towers went out, the shop learned that replacements were no longer on the market. They were forced to take that unit offline and use it for parts. This slowed productivity noticeably.

“We couldn’t afford the downtime,” Harty remarks.

There was also a quality concern. The in-plant printed some lovely work on its HP Indigo 3050, but the old collator always scuffed the printing on the bottom sheet. This was because the machine’s belts never stopped moving, even when the paper stopped.

“Our foremost concern was scratching on digital products,” emphasizes Steven Barrett, assistant manager.

Even when operators added an extra sheet to keep the good ones from being damaged, they had to take time to removed the extras later. On large jobs, this ate up a lot of time.

Requirements For A New Unit

Once the decision was made to replace the older collator, Harty directed Barrett to talk with the press and bindery operators, come up with requirements and look at equipment. He gave them a $100,000 limit.

The first requirement of a replacement model?

“We wanted it to be able to handle our digital sheets coming off the HP,” says Harty.

It also had to be able to insert envelopes into the middle of a book. Automatic changeover to preset job parameters was important, as was ease of operation. And it had to fit in the same floor space as the old collator.

Barrett started by asking other university in-plants about their collators.

“There were a lot of machines out there that had what we needed, but also had the extras that we really didn’t need because we weren’t a high-production shop,” he says.

Though the team looked into collators from a couple vendors, none were as cooperative as Duplo, Harty says.

“They were the ones that we really felt wanted to work with us,” he says.

Duplo pointed the in-plant to a commercial printer in Raleigh using a Duplo 5000, and Printing Services staff paid a visit, bringing some of its digitally printed media guides to test on the equipment. Staff quizzed the operators about the collator and watched it being set up.

When bid time came, a local dealer, Freeman Graphics, offered to let the in-plant trade in its old collator and gave it a good price on the Duplo 5000 system. Freeman won the bid.

Easy Installation

“The day their equipment showed up, we unplugged our equipment, rolled it to the delivery dock, moved the new equipment into place, and then the next day the vendor was there unpacking it, setting it, and the day after that they were training,” Harty recounts. “It went very, very smoothly.”

Because operators were already familiar with Duplo equipment, the two days of training allowed them to get more advanced instruction.

So far the in-plant is very pleased with the new collator.

“We have a lot more flexibility,” says Harty. The old machine didn’t like coated stock. “This new equipment handled digital coated sheets very well.”

And where setup on the previous collator involved a lot of time-consuming adjustments, on the new machine one button does it all.

“Now we can go from 81/2x11? to 11x17? in a matter of a minute,” claims Barrett. The same changeover on the old system took 30 minutes to an hour, he says—with a lot of trial and error.

“That is slick, and a time saver right there,” adds Harty.

Overall, by upgrading to a new collator, UNCW Printing Services not only shortened its turnaround times but bought itself some peace of mind.

“We have the confidence that the machine is going to be up and running when we need it,” he says. And come graduation time, that confidence will make everyone at the university breathe a little easier. IPG