Bindery - Finishing

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority in-plant's recent installation of a Heidelberg Stahlfolder Ti 36 eliminated costly outsourcing and streamlined the in-house production of tens of thousands of pocket guides.

THE BEGINNING of the college semester is always a bustling time for the employees at Azusa Pacific University Duplicating and Graphics. Located in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, the in-plant serving this private Southern California Christian university is usually busy producing course packs and other materials prior to students arriving on campus.

Tina Gray saw the end of a lease agreement for an older Duplo saddle stitcher as an opportunity to bring more automated technology into her in-plant. Gray, print shop manager of the in-plant serving the Oklahoma Department of Human Services in Oklahoma City, decided last spring to install a four-tower Standard Horizon VAC collator system in-line with a Standard Horizon StitchLiner 5500 saddle stitching system with integrated three-knife trimming.

Heidelberg has restructured its business, resulting in head of sales Jurgen Rautert leaving the company after nearly two decades. Overall sales responsibility has been handed over to chief executive Bernhard Schreier.

Take a quick tour of the PRINT 09 show floor with IPG Editor Bob Neubauer.

THOUGH PRINT 09 may have gotten off to a slow start, the crowds eventually showed up. And when they did, many of them headed right for the bindery equipment. Nowhere was that more true than at the Standard Finishing Systems exhibit, which was bustling with activity on the third day of the show, even as other booths appeared to be on siesta. Mark Hunt, director of marketing for Standard, thought he knew why.

CHERYL BUXTON is pretty up-front about the fact that some of the equipment in her Topeka, Kan., in-plant is older than the employees who run it. In June, the director of the Division of Printing and Surplus Property for the state of Kansas replaced a 30-year-old stitcher with a state-of-the-art Muller Martini Bravo-Plus saddle stitcher with AMRYS (automatic makeready system).

Though attendance was noticeably down on the first three days of Print 09, by Monday morning it was starting to look like a trade show again. Booths were packed with attendees, and vendors were busy giving demos, trying to capitalize of the sudden resurgence of interest after a lackluster weekend. IPG spent four days at the show, and the first three...let's just say we never had any problem finding someone to talk with at vendors' booths. Perhaps the beautiful Chicago weekend weather lured many to delay their arrival. (Or maybe it was the questionable wisdom of starting a trade show on a Friday.) Whatever the reason, though, by Monday morning, attendees arrived with a vengeance, including scores of in-plants managers.

Tucked inside a nondescript brick building at the edge of campus, the University of Delaware’s Graphic Communications Center has brought a lot of favorable attention to the university in recent years. The quality of its offset printing has earned the in-plant numerous awards, including two Best of Show honors in the In-Print contest. Now the 19-employee in-plant is bringing the Fighting Blue Hens into the spotlight once again by becoming one of the first in-plants to install a new Xerox iGen4 digital color press. 

After more than 10 years of service, the two-tower collator/booketmaker at Ken Maley’s in-plant was showing its age. Though it had served the Monroe Two-Orleans Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) very well, it was increasingly down for maintenance, and repair costs were mounting.