Sanford Health Adds Labor-Saving Solution Seen at PRINTING United

Lisa Stelter had a mission when she stepped onto the PRINTING United show floor last October in Dallas.

“I was looking for some specific pieces of equipment to help remove the hand work that was being done,” says Stelter, manager of Print and Mail Services at Sanford Health, one of the country’s largest integrated health care systems. 

In particular, the job of rounding corners on informational badge cards was taking her staff a lot of time using a hand punch. At times, the Sioux Falls, S.D.-based in-plant was producing 2,000 cards a week, and employees could only stack 10 cards at a time on the manual hand punch. 

After doing her research, Stelter discovered that several exhibitors at PRINTING United would have promising solutions on display. 

Badge cards with corners rounded.

“That was one of the specific things I was going there to look at,” she says. 

Stelter found what she was looking for at the Akiles booth, where she got a demonstration of the Diamond-7 corner rounding machine. 

“They were very, very helpful,” she says of the Akiles representatives. From them she learned the Diamond-7 can round a 2.75˝ stack of material (700 sheets of 20-lb. paper). It would have no problem slicing through a stack of 14-mil poly paper cards.

“So just by stacking a stack of them in there and pushing the foot [pedal], it eliminates a lot of that hand labor,” she remarks. 

Diamond-7 corner rounding machine.

She learned the Diamond-7 has seven interchangeable dies, a large work table, and a protective safety cover that would keep her operators safe. She was sold. The machine was installed in December 2019 and has been working hard ever since.

Stelter is pleased she was able to see so many solutions in one place at PRINTING United — not just the wide-format and production printing equipment she was also tracking, but smaller niche equipment to fit specific needs, like the Diamond-7. Going to PRINTING United should be something all in-plants consider, she says. 

“I think it’s incredibly useful,” she proclaims.