New Bookletmaker is ‘Twice as Fast’

After more than 10 years of service, the two-tower collator/booketmaker at Ken Maley’s in-plant was showing its age. Though it had served the Monroe Two-Orleans Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) very well, it was increasingly down for maintenance, and repair costs were mounting.

So in June, the nine-employee in-plant replaced the device with a new Standard Horizon VAC + SPF-200A collator and automated bookletmaker.

“It’s at least twice as fast,” observes Maley, digital printing coordinator at the Rochester, N.Y., in-plant. “The quicker we’re able to get things out, the less expensive it is for the school districts.”

The in-plant provides printing for nine districts in its BOCES and also does work for more than 40 other districts in New York, Maley says. It uses a four-color Sakurai and a two-color Hamada, as well as black-and-white and color printing equipment from Xerox. The new collator/bookletmaker is a great addition, Maley says.

“It’s a lot faster, so we’re able to get more jobs out in a shorter period of time,” he says. Those jobs include newsletters, calendars, booklets and student activity books, to name just a few. The Standard equipment can handle a variety of stocks of different thicknesses, he says.

“It’s more user friendly than the old machine,” he notes, with touch screen controls that make setup a lot easier.

The in-plant also got an optional envelope feeder, allowing it to insert return envelopes inside booklets.

“We’ve gotten requests for it in the past, and we weren’t able to do it,” he says. “And now we can.”

Justifying the new equipment was not difficult, Maley says, once he showed upper management the repair bills on the old bookletmaker and explained how a faster machine would save money.

“Since we’re able to cut our collating time...that’s cost savings back to our districts, which is what the upper management usually looks at,” he says.