No Cracks with New Creaser

When cracking appeared in a Christmas card that his in-plant produced for the university president, John Keating knew it was time to bring a new creaser on board.

Located in Marquette, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the Central Services department at Northern Michigan University had installed a new Xerox Color J75 Press last February. As requests for jobs with 100 percent coverage increased, so did the frustrating cracking issues that can occur with toner-based digital printing.

Keating had previously seen demonstrations of the Morgana AutoCreaser Pro 33 and was impressed with its capabilities. He was determined to bring one on board.

"I saw the Morgana several times over the last several years and I was impressed with the machine," says Keating. "I knew it was a quality product. I actually had wanted to purchase one for quite a while, but didn't have the funds."

To solve that monetary issue, Keating sold the in-plant's old two-color Heidelberg GTO press that was no longer seeing much use. With the decrease of two-color jobs and a desire to improve the quality of its digital output, Keating says swapping the Heidelberg for the creaser was a logical move.

With the creaser now a few months into its time at Northern Michigan, Keating says it has been instrumental in improving the appearance of many of the college's marketing materials. Some of these include mailings to certain groups of people that the school would like to impress.

"One mailing to one critical group—whether it's donors or if you're recruiting students—that quality look could make a difference on whether somebody decides to come here or make a donation," Keating explains. "That's why you try to do quality printing."

While the creaser has been a welcome addition to the bindery, Keating says that if he were doing it over again, he would have submitted a proposal for the creaser in conjunction with the shop's upgrade to digital. That way, he says, the necessary combination of a digital press and creaser would have come as a package.

"Anybody who's considering [toner-based] technology…should look at including a creaser in with their proposal they're submitting to their supervisor," he suggests.

As the Northern Michigan in-plant continues to improve its technical capabilities, Keating says there's another exciting addition on the horizon. Previously, the in-plant had used EFI PrintSmith Site as its Web-to-print solution, but will soon be transitioning to EFI Digital StoreFront. While there are multiple reasons for making the change, one of the biggest draws Digital StoreFront had for Keating was the ability for his customers to see a proof before it gets printed.

"A lot of times in the proofing process somebody sends something in and it's not what they wanted," Keating explains. "They'll come over and take a look at it and we do another proof. That part's going to save some time."

Another major contributing factor leading to the switch, Keating says, is that customers will be able to see their job's price up front. With the in-plant's current system, pricing is assessed at the end of a job, but with Digital StoreFront, a job's pricing can be constantly updated.

"Digital StoreFront has the ability to do the calculations as you're building the job, and they can see the cost," Keating says.