New Slitter/Creaser Reduces Pain Points for Cherry Creek Schools

In the past, printing perforated tickets for the Cherry Creek School District was a big to-do – just not exactly in a good way.

Edward Bicker, output and prepress specialist for the Aurora, Colorado-based in-plant, explains that his shop’s old Duplo DC-445 could produce perforated tickets, it just wouldn’t be cheap.

“The old machine required you to take the module out of the machine, take an Allen wrench, take it apart, move the wheel to where you want the perforation to be, tighten it down and then run a sheet through it,” Bicker says.

And if the perforation was off? You’d have to start all over. For a job requiring only 100 tickets, that process could get expensive.

Fortunately, that’s no longer the case. Earlier this year, the seven-person in-plant upgraded to a Duplo DC-618 slitter/cutter/creaser. Bicker says his team has gone from a 30-minute setup to do one perforation on one sheet of paper to a one- to two-minute setup.

Bicker knew it was time for an upgrade because the DC-445 was so old Duplo didn’t even carry parts for it anymore. The in-plant eventually landed on the DC-618 because it “Was everything that the shop wanted while still being well within budget,” Bicker says.

“The 445 was no longer supported by Duplo. We couldn’t get parts for it, and we primarily just did creasing and did single in-line perfing, but that was all we really needed for years,” Bicker says. “But the 618 definitely fit everything we needed. It's 50% faster than our old machine when it comes to things like creasing.”

Bicker says that before getting the DC-618, someone asked him “Why don’t you get one that can also cut business cards?” But the in-plant wasn’t really producing enough cards then to validate the upgrade.

“At the time, we maybe did 100 sets a year, maybe 200 tops. It just didn't seem worth it,” Bicker says. “But as we started doing things like greeting cards and tickets for plays and postcards, that’s almost half a million to 2/3 of a million cards a year, and now we can justify going to a newer model like the 618.”

The dexterity of the new device allows the in-plant to get creative with projects like perforated tickets, table tents, multi-perforated cards, and more.

“We can do things now that I’ve never thought of doing. We’ve only had the machine for three months and we’ve already ran 60,000 sheets through it – and that’s what we did with the 445 in a period of [three] years,” Bicker says.

Even though his team was excited about the upgrade, Bicker says there was a learning curve since Duplo products are in metrics – leaving room for conversion errors.

Luckily, this minor hiccup is easily overlooked because one major pro of the 618 is the fact that it can be combined with a PC that acts as a controller.

“From my PC I can remote into that machine,” Bicker says. “I can see what the status of the machine is. When I’m creating something custom, I can do it right there from my computer. I can have the document up and then the controller up and I can copy over the dimensions and things like that without having to constantly walk back and forth across the room.”

Though the DC-618 is still pretty new, Bicker is excited to explore all the things his in-plant can do with it.

“I truly am blown away with everything we can do on it. It's been wonderful,” he says. “I keep finding more and more things that I can do with it that I would never have just considered on our old machine.”