DIGITAL FINISHING: Go With the Flow

OPTIMAL WORKFLOW efficiency. It’s the ultimate goal in today’s cost-conscious graphic arts marketplace. Indeed, the ability to enhance the productivity and speed of book manufacturing while minimizing labor can be the difference between whether an operation is profitable or not.

This is especially true when it comes to digital book manufacturing. One of the more vital keys to success is embracing and maximizing the continually expanding capabilities of on demand digital technologies. But which digital workflow approach is right for you?

Should you opt for an in-line configuration, or a near-line one, or off-line? No particular approach is right or wrong for every situation. It depends on your mix of applications, and most importantly, the volume of products you produce. This article will provide insights about the workflow direction you might want to take to make your in-plant more competitive in the rapidly growing digital age of print production.

Near-line & Off-line: Subtle Differences

Although the industry typically separates digital workflow into the three categories mentioned above (in-line, near-line, off-line), there are basically only two because the actual flow of work for both near-line and off-line is essentially the same. The major difference is, near-line processing is more automated. With off-line, you have to set up almost every aspect of a print finishing machine yourself; for instance, each clamp, the nipping and the side glue parameters of a perfect binder.

On the other hand, near-line provides the advantages of being able to use an electronic interface (e.g. CIP4, UP3I, etc.) to make digitized connections among production equipment and perform such functions as sending data downstream to automatically set up binders and other print finishing machines.

Today, just about all finishing technology has automatic makeready capabilities, and as a result, near-line has become the more popular of the two choices. A near-line workflow makes sense, for example, in applications where you have multiple cut sheet print engines feeding a single finishing line or a couple of finishing lines. Or, you might have numerous finishing needs, perhaps with one or two print engines that are fed into finishing lines used for producing perfect bound books as well as stitched books and case bound books.

Keep in mind that much of the popularity of near-line digital workflow has been predicated upon the fact that digital print engines have, to date, been relatively slow—and thus a large percentage of work can still be handled by physically offset-stacking book blocks on a cart and then transporting the carts to a binder where they’re bound by hand. As you might imagine, this can mean work-in-progress issues involving the labor needed to handle thousands of unbound book blocks manually, not to mention the potential for additional spoilage and inventory carrying costs.

The winds of change are upon us though. Newer, higher-speed continuous feed printing technologies from companies such as Delphax, Nipson, Océ and Xerox, along with promising new developments in ink-jet technology from Océ, Kodak and Hewlett Packard, are on the horizon. These technologies should continue to increase the trend of digital book manufacturing to move away from near-line and off-line approaches—and increase the widening trend toward an in-line finishing approach.

In-line: Inevitable

Everyone in the graphic arts marketplace is quite familiar with the benefits of digital book production. Those benefits, to list but a few, include a nearly makeready-free environment combined with the ability to turn jobs around immediately and also optimize cost-effectiveness, particularly with respect to shorter runs.

An in-line digital book manufacturing approach goes against the traditional offset production tendency to separate printing and finishing into two distinct operations. Instead, the line operates all together as one, taking the fullest advantage possible of the above benefits by combining all equipment in an automatic operation.

With in-line, a roll of paper goes in one end, and a finished book comes out the other, manufactured with limited human intervention. Of course, the expense of manpower is diminished to a tremendous degree. Also, there’s the ability to readily and economically personalize or customize varied versions of a given book as a way of making each version target-specific for different markets. Moreover, what might have previously been an impossible deadline to meet can now become achievable simply because production is literally instantaneous.

The industry will soon witness the introduction of incredibly advanced digital printing technology that is as much as twice as fast as anything else now available. And as the speed of continuous-feed print engines gets increasingly quicker, it will no doubt become all but impossible to manually process what’s coming off those engines and still remain efficient and productive. Therefore, in-line digital finishing workflow is likely poised to become the number one workflow of choice in the very near future.

Finishing Flexibility

According to Gilles Biscos, president of Interquest (a market research and consulting firm covering the electronic printing industry), the North American market is experiencing 15 to 16 percent annual growth in digital book manufacturing. Furthermore, Biscos projects double-digit growth to continue annually over the next several years with the percentage of books produced digitally doubling by 2011.

He goes on to say that the migration to digital production encompasses all market segments, from commercially produced books, to educational books to professional and trade books. Translation? Printers and binders need to incorporate digital workflows into their operations now, or they’ll be on the outside looking in.

Whether you decide upon a near-line, off-line or in-line digital configuration, one of the crucial steps that should be taken is to invest in flexible digital print finishing technology that can enable you to make the most of each workflow approach.

Highly versatile and modular on-demand finishing systems are now on the market, addressing near-line capabilities immediately and also allowing you to easily scale up to an end-to-end in-line workflow when you’re ready to dive into the latest and highest speed continuous-feed print engines. What’s more, once your operation does advance to an in-line configuration, you’ll still have full utilization of a piece of finishing equipment as if it is near-line, even though it’s installed in-line.

As an example, when part of an in-line digital configuration is not being used (i.e., maintenance is being performed on the print engine), the complete line is not down because the operator can continue binding products by hand-feeding book blocks. This level of flexibility can substantially raise efficiency and productivity overall, and can deliver cost savings that could lead to larger profits.

Whichever workflow best fits your current digital book manufacturing needs, one thing is for sure: having a digital print strategy today is absolutely necessary for all book manufacturers.