Trade binders, general commercial printers, direct mail specialists, print distributors, consultants, journalists and suppliers were among the 65 attendees at the PrintAction seminar titled "Time to Digitize The Bindery."
Held near the airport at the Toronto Board of Trade in early September, the PrintAction seminar "Time to Digitize The Bindery" was timed to give attendees a preamble to some of the equipment and technology announcements to be released at the Print '05 & Converting '05 trade exposition in Chicago.
The keynote address highlighted the groundswell of new finishing technology that was evident as early as Drupa 1995 and was overwhelming at Drupa 2004. Despite the worldwide printing recession of the new millennium, Drupa demonstrated the results of the continued commitment of 7-9% of revenues that suppliers have been pouring into research and development. The increasing proportion of the PIA/GATF Technology Awards issued for postpress innovations confirmed the practicality of this technology.
Creating Value
NAPL's Creating Value Survey, completed in early 2005, described the strategic areas of expansion that the 317 participants are expected to pursue in the near future. Attendees to this conference and others have heard of the interest in digital everything, plus fulfillment and mailing services for expansion in recent years. The clear objective is to distinguish your company and services from the myriad other vendors in your market.
Ironically, postpress and the finishing area per se don't seem to be designated among the specific arenas targeted for significant investment throughout the industry in this and similar surveys. On the other hand, isolated printers see the light and are investing in these postpress tools as part of their strategic vision to complete a computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) workflow. More and more of these leading-edge practitioners seem reticent about sharing their favorable results out of fear that some of their closest competitors might copy them.
Borrowing from MAN Roland's "life cycle management" concept, the total labor, spoilage (including uneven signature counts), spare parts, plant expense and consumables over 10 years is often five times the original investment of the latest postpress equipment. These latest-generation CIM-enabling resources will save more than 20% of those life cycle costs. An autocutter replaces 2-plus cutters in use from yesteryear, while an auto-make-ready binder is more productive and replaces two or three older units, and creates opportunity capacity.
Ralph Pasquariello, Heidelberg's vice president of Postpress Product Management, described more than 40% of make-ready savings that resulted from the servo motor integration on the 42 gap adjustments required for a new 4/4/4 folder roller configuration. Such an automated folder can switch from "an eight-page signature to an accordion fold map in 60 seconds," he said. Automated cutters have documented make-ready savings of 55%, while autostitchers lop off at least 50% of the old make-ready times.
Pasquariello said many printers investing in the latest bindery technology are "spending more clock time moving skids away from and into pocket feeder position" than the complete automated changeover of one job to the next. Some printers might think this limits the return they will realize from their investment. Other printers, however, are aggressively selling the reality of most signature products having not one but two deadlines. The first is an urgent requirement for office copies or advance copies, while the second is the deadline for entry into the postal stream.
Printers with old legacy binders treat both of these deadlines as the same date since they don't think about a separate make-ready for just 25 advance copies. Smart printers with automated stitchers and binders have a small hand truck with isolated stacks of 20-30 signatures (or whatever is dictated for the advance copy order). While partial skids from the just-completed job are moved out of the way, the advance copy person wheels in a hand truck and with the touch of a button sets up the equipment for a finishing run of just 30 advance copies. Again, depending upon the similarity of finishing specifications (trim size, pocket count needed), even two advance copy jobs can be run before the next full-bore job has its full skids moved into position.
Other signature (magazine or catalog) printers schedule the automated stitcher, including a break-in on an existing job if need be, to run advance copies the last hour of each day before the late-afternoon courier makes its final run to clients' offices or UPS/FedEx pickups. The actual jobs are scheduled to be run on the second or third shift, or even a day or two in the future. Plans for the Future Integration
Pasquariello moderated a panel comprised of full-service printers and trade binders. When asked what plans his firm has for implementing the full integration of CIP3/4 data into the bindery, Mark Fortier, executive vice president of the full-service PLM Group in Markham, Ontario, said, "We are monitoring (the technology) closely and looking to specific applications." A full-bore transition might be quite challenging, as "we're not sure what IT infrastructure (in the bindery) might be required," he said. Brian Gagnon, president of Tri-City Trade Bindery, said he expects to "concentrate on more specialty finishing while continuing to develop strategic alliances with printer clients." Rising labor rates and limited skilled labor were concerns, he said. "All key operators are being cross-trained. No longer are there dedicated cutter or folder operators. This is resulting in more sophisticated skills and (therefore) more key operators are being paid at pressmen (wage) level," said Gagnon.
"It is difficult to get part-time help in many locations," said Bob Smith, general manager of Battle Field. And Fortier added, "More formal apprenticeship programs are needed (so that) competitors won't keep pirating (skilled) people from one another." Gary Hughes, president of Muller Martini Canada, suggested that the leading finishing operations of the future will have management team skills and a commitment to a number of manufacturing excellence precepts proved outside the printing industries. These include, though are not limited to, total equipment productivity (TEP); "kaizen," or continuous improvement; predictive maintenance programs (PMP); statistical process control (SPC); and just in time (JIT) manufacturing. JIT will include process-mapping techniques, which result in a quantified capacity plan, bottleneck analysis and work-in-process (WIP) minimization. While the accounts receivable department might consider inventory to be an asset on the balance sheet, lean manufacturing enterprises know that having bulging pockets of WIP is not good.
Hughes described the TEP model being followed by the Saturn automobile plant. The measure of total equipment productivity is the result of multiplying availability, productivity and quality indexes as illustrated by this formula:
Availability x Productivity x Quality = TEP
80% x 85% x 98% = 67%
Saturn considers this 67% to be world-class manufacturing performance. One of the critical reminders offered by Hughes was that the building should be built to accommodate the work cell. Stated another way, the ideal work cell layout should not be compromised for an inflexible building. A prime example was a creative tandem designed pair of automated saddle stitchers. Two stitchers were located in tandem so that they could be operated independently of one another. And yet when this particular client needed all 15 pockets for a single title, they could be integrated to achieve this expansion without a double collection or pre-collection stage. The key is that the finishing area had to be large enough without interfering load-bearing pillars to accommodate the tandem design.
Hughes reiterated the frustration experienced by some investing in the automated assisted make-ready stitchers: "If material movement takes 30 minutes and the entire automated make-ready takes only 25 minutes, the potential ROI is reduced" by that incremental five minutes because the job is not ready to run.
The afternoon was devoted to discussions about the dynamics of information fulfillment and mailing service operations and how well these value-added services meld with finishing and digital finishing operations in particular. These are especially interesting to mailing houses that are increasing their amount of volume exported to the United States. The seminar concluded with presentations by the seminar sponsors of product offerings and equipment configurations that were later shown at Print '05 in Chicago.