In Search of a Better Folder

LIKE MANY in-plants, Iowa Bankers Association's two-employee print shop had been getting by for years with old, inefficient folding equipment. Its friction-fed Baum folder had been around since Gerald Ford was in the White House. It was slow, inconsistent and could not handle heavy stock very well.

"We run a lot of coated stock, and it would pull doubles all the time and scuff the paper really bad," remarks Todd Palmer, print shop coordinator at the Johnston, Iowa-based in-plant.

So last fall, he made a trip to Chicago for PRINT 09 to see some of the latest folders on display there. He had a few requirements:

"It had to be air-fed, for the coated stock. It had to be automated," he notes.

He found a couple models he liked, and sent out a purchase order for one of them. Then he got some disappointing news: the folder he wanted was a prototype. It wouldn't be available for at least three months.

Since Palmer had also been impressed with the Baum Flexifold, with its small footprint and user-friendly controls, he talked with his xpedx dealer about it. What he most liked was that, unlike the prototype model he initially wanted, "it's been in the field and tested."

His request went before the association's board and president, and was approved.

"They knew that it was time," Palmer says.

In November, the new Flexifold arrived in his shop. The Installation went well, he says, with only a few minor issues for the technician to take care of. By December it was up and running.

"I'm pretty happy with it now," says Palmer. "This folder actually does a lot of the folds that we couldn't do before."

The consistency of folds from piece to piece is much better than what the previous folder could do, he says. The Flexifold is faster and can handle more sizes and thicknesses of paper too, so the shop no longer has to outsource any folding jobs.

It's also helping the shop save postage. Palmer was able to fold a banking brochure printed on an 11x17˝ sheet down to 5.5x8.5˝ to fit in a 6x9˝ envelope.

He likes that the controls are easy to understand. This is important because some of the designers and other Iowa Bankers Association employees who use it are not trained in-plant staff.

As for the old folding equipment, unloading it was not too difficult, Palmer says.

"We ended up just putting it on Craigslist and somebody came and picked it up and hauled it away," he says.

The shop also had a tabletop Baum 714 folder in need of maintenance, which they gave to a church.

New Envelope Press

The Baum Flexifold isn't all that's new at the Iowa Bankers Association in-plant. In January it fired up a new digital envelope press from PSI Engineering. Palmer also spotted this at PRINT 09. A cost analysis showed him that the association was being charged a lot of money for the small runs of envelopes it was outsourcing.

"We figured it would pay for itself over time," he says.

One way he hopes to hasten that is by printing envelopes for some of the association's member banks, an idea he recently pitched. The shop has already gotten some outside work because of the envelope press.

"We did a job for a commercial printer here—a four-color envelope," he says.

The printer wanted 2,500 of them. They sent a PDF, the in-plant returned a proof the same day, the customer approved it and the in-plant sent the envelopes the next day. IPG