Bindery - Finishing

Despite the sour economy, xpedx is investing. That was the message the company wanted to send when it showed off its new Cincinnati-area print technology center to graphic arts journalists last month. It is reportedly the only U.S. center demonstrating equipment from a variety of manufacturers.

American Thermoplastic Co. (ATC) received five awards in the 2009 Binding Industries Association Product of Excellence competition, including the two top awards for both multi-color screen-printing and digital printing of loose-leaf products.

To help you pick the perfect binder for your in-plant, and get the best performance out of it, we consulted the folks who know this technology the best.

On Monday, xpedx is set to open an 11,000-square-foot Technology Center in its metro Cincinnati headquarters. It will provide U.S. print professionals with a single location to learn about and test new equipment and technologies from top manufacturers. The exhibition center will spotlight technology covering all aspects of offset and digital printing, including creative, pre-press/workflow, press and post-press/fulfillment. Printers can evaluate new products, technologies and production techniques from major print industry suppliers in a live print production environment.

Xerox has honored 15 business partners for their contributions, chief among them Rochester Software Associates Inc. and C.P. Bourg. Xerox works with software and hardware providers to create integrated solutions that extend the capabilities of Xerox products. The awards recognize leading partners in two categories: workflow software and document feeding and finishing solutions.

The move to a digital, on-demand platform was putting T.J. Keesler’s bindery in...well, a bind. Keesler, facility manager at Georgia Correctional Industries (GCI) in Buford, Ga., had to accommodate his customers’ needs for shorter runs and quicker turnaround times. “We just started out digital, on-demand printing about a year ago, and we realized that a lot of our customers wanted coil binding,” Keesler recounts. “We were farming this work out, or we were doing it at a much slower pace with some antiquated equipment and also some hand work. I wanted to automate the process.”

When cosmetics giant Mary Kay Inc. departed from the trend of producing products overseas, Keith Hopson, supervisor of Mary Kay Printing Services, in Carrollton, Texas, had to move fast. The company’s decision to make its products in the U.S. included the printing and finishing of leaflets and inserts. “Our world kind of got turned upside-down in August of 2007,” Hopson recalls. “We struggled for about four months trying to keep up with the orders.”

For years, producing commencement programs was a cumbersome task for Appalachian State University Printing and Publications. Printed sheets had to be moved by hand between stand-alone collating, stitching and folding equipment to create about 15,000 programs. “We hired temp employees for that type of work,” says Joyce Mahaffey, director of the Boone, N.C., in-plant.

It’s tough to rely on a punch that can’t handle tabs and constantly misfeeds. That was the case with Frank Oliver’s old punch. “It wasn’t working very well at all,” says Oliver, print shop supervisor for the Delaware-Chenango-Madison-Otsego Board of Cooperative Educational Services. “I was just looking for a better machine that had the simplest approach to punching paper.”

Prior to 2005, Brigham Young University’s Print & Mail Production Center did its plastic spiral binding with simple, manual tabletop machines. Then the Provo, Utah-based in-plant sent some representatives to Print 05, in Chicago. There, they first laid eyes on the PLASTIKOIL Concept QS2 Dual Interline system, from Gateway Bookbinding Systems. It allows for the in-house manufacturing of plastic spiral binding, coupled with automated coil insertion and finishing. The idea of being able to manufacture their own coil and have it automatically inserted convinced them to make the investment in this system.