George Mason University In-plant  Gets Faster and Safer

By Chris Bauer

Cutting printed jobs with a 20-year-old cutter was making life difficult for the in-plant employees at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va. Senior Technical Manager and Field Engineer Hamid "Sam" Kasmai admits that he had been nursing the machine for the past few years.

So Kasmai decided last year that it was time for an upgrade in the bindery. He purchased a Challenge Machinery Titan 200 cutter, which has allowed the university in-plant to easily and accurately set up and program jobs such as business cards and booklets.

"My research showed that this was the best option," Kasmai notes. "One of the main things that I look for when getting new equipment is the service contract. We have a local dealer that services our other equipment, so that was a major factor, because we can get easy and reliable service."

George Mason University's in-plant is now able to cut larger quantities of jobs, faster and with more precision and accuracy, Kasmai says. The new Challenge Titan 200 allows the shop to take on more complicated cutting jobs than it previously was able to handle.

"There were some jobs in the past that needed a lot of cutting, and we couldn't do it with our old equipment," Kasmai admits. "Now we can accept more jobs and do it in-house."

The old Horizon cutter is still used for cutting pages out of textbooks, which later are scanned. The new Challenge cutter is used for the rest of the jobs the shop produces.

George Mason University's in-plant has 40 employees, including student workers. There are three campuses and each has a copy center. Kasmai manages the copy centers and all the school's walk-up copiers.

The new Challenge Titan cutter is located in the university's flagship copy center in Fairfax, which is also home to a Konica Minolta bizhub PRO 1050, a Ricoh Aficio 1100 and a Xerox 700 digital color press.

Kasmai says the Challenge Titan's optical safety features are an added bonus, since the old cutter's safety mechanism relied solely on the cut buttons.

"With the old machine, the only safety was pushing two buttons at the same time," Kasmai notes. "The new equipment has sensors around the cutter that shut down the machine in case a dangerous situation arises."