Temple Brings Booklet Binding In-house

Sometimes getting your new boss to visit your in-plant is all it takes.

For years, Temple University Digital Document Services reported to Business Services, and getting approval for new equipment was a challenge. Then a curious thing happened at the Philadelphia university about a year ago. After some restructuring, the in-plant was placed under the supervision of the CFO's office.

When the CFO came for a tour, Operations Manager Steve Gallagher nervously told him that he had been looking at a Duplo DBM-150 booklet maker with a DSF-2200 feeder so the shop could produce more of its booklets in-house rather than sending them to a local bindery. The CFO asked Gallagher what the return on investment time would be. A year and a half, Gallagher told him.

"And he said, 'Well, why don't you buy one?' " relates Gallagher. "So I put in for it, he signed off on it, and we got it."

The Duplo 150 system arrived in October, and the seven-employee in-plant has been busy stitching booklets on it ever since. Featuring a belt suction feed system, front and side air separation, an anti-static device and ultrasonic double feed detection, the new Duplo 150 system is saving both time and money for the university.

Booklets, Gallagher explains, used to be bound at Drexel Bindery.

"We were spending anywhere between $15,000 to $20,000 [annually] to do booklets," he says.

Turnaround time for a booklet job was about four days, he says.

"Now that we have the equipment here, our normal turnaround is like two days for, say, 250 books," he reports.

As a city in-plant, Temple Digital Document Services has some unique characteristics. Its Xerox iGen4 is on the 10th floor of Temple's Wachman Hall, while other equipment, including some bindery gear, is in another building a block away.

Fortunately there was room on the 10th floor to install the Duplo near the iGen4. One operator runs both machines. But since the shop wasn't able to afford the Duplo SCC (slitter/cutter/creaser) unit for trimming the 12x18˝ sheets coming off the iGen4 down to 11x17˝, sheets still have to be trimmed on an offline Procut 26.5 cutter. This means employees have to cart pages down the elevator and up the street to where the cutter is located, then bring them back up 10 floors to the Duplo 150.

"It's not ideal," acknowledges Gallagher. "But we're an urban university. Building space is at a premium."

The in-plant has also just taken delivery of a Standard Horizon CRF-362 creaser/folder, trading in a Graphic Whizard creaser. The in-plant's Baum 714 folder, Gallagher says, couldn't fold heavier stocks.

"We had students doing the hand folding for anything that was 100 lb. or more," he says.

The new CRF-362 can fold stocks up to 350 gsm.