'A More Professional Look' for Booklets

When Slippery Rock University installed a new Xerox 5000 last June, color copies jumped from 16,000 to 38,000 a month. “Everybody loves the quality,” says Sharon Isacco, manager of the five-employee in-plant, in Slippery Rock, Pa. Still, she knew the programs and brochures being printed on the 5000 could look a lot better if the shop upgraded its bindery equipment.

So Printing Services added a Duplo 5000 booklet maker, with a trimmer and spine compressor, along with a DC-645 slitter/cutter/creaser and a perforating module.

“It just made all the difference in the world,” praises Isacco. Pieces come out nicely trimmed, with no marks, she says. Staple lengths can be adjusted for thicker books.

“It gives a more professional look,” she adds. This, in turn, makes the university look better.

Jobs are also completed much faster now. “We do graduation programs now in a day and a half; it used to take us a week,” she enthuses. “It’s just like, ‘Woah! What a difference.”

The in-plant produces about a million booklets a year, she says. This wore out the shop’s old ISP Stitch’n Fold. With that unit, she continues, booklets had to be fed by hand. Student workers were hired to do it. But with the Duplo 5000, pages are loaded up and the machine does the rest. Student help is no longer needed for booklet making.

“If anything, we’re doing more booklets because people are seeing that nice trimmed look,” Isacco says.

Because of the new equipment, the shop can now handle new types of work, like sports programs and media guides.

“We just didn’t do that work here, and now we’re able to bring all that in,” she reports.

The DC-645 slitter/cutter/creaser has proven invaluable for scoring brochures to keep spines from cracking and for making smooth cuts on highly visible jobs, like invitations. It can process 26 sheets per minute and handle six slits, 15 cuts and 10 creases in one pass.

“It’s a wonderful machine,” lauds Isacco.