The company has installed an MBO T535 automatic buckle folder from Friedheim and a BQ270 single clamp perfect binder and Stitchliner 500 from Horizon since January to make its finishing operations leaner.
The finishing upgrade forms the final part of a £500,000, three-year investment programme during which it the company has brought in a five-colour Mitsubishi Diamond 1000 B2 press, a Canon ImagePRESS C7000VP and Duplo DC645 Production Colour Finisher.
It had outsourced all perfect binding and excess folding requests before the investment but decided to bring in the Horizon BQ270 from Intelligent Finishing Systems in July when short-run requests for digital book finishing increased.
Oxuniprint production manager Phil Newman said: "We were putting out a lot of short-run perfect binding work along with other jobs so we have had the Horizon machine put in to keep it in-house.
"We have never done perfect binding before so we still put out massive jobs but now we’ve got the flexibility to do up to 1,000-run ourselves."
The folder was brought in to replace a 20-year-old MBO 640. Newman said that set-up time had been a major problem for the Kidlington-based company in the run up to the installation but the semi-automated set up of the T535 had eased the issue.
Newman said: "We keep swapping between short-run jobs and do a lot of make readies. The T535 saves us a lot of time on that which allows us to do more folding. It’s ideal."
The company moved to its Kidlington site in 2007 after it outgrew its old premises and began the investment programme soon after to handle work for Dominoes, Oxford Council Council and Oxfordshire NHS. Oxford University still commands 65% of the capacity at Oxuniprint’s plant.
