In the pioneering days of digital presses, some early users noticed a problem. Their Indigos, Xeroxes and Xeikons could indeed produce short-run, fast-turnaround work, with no pre-press consumables and dramatically reduced waste, but it didn’t mean much if the finishing processes weren’t geared up to handle this type of work.

1st Byte in London was an early Indigo user, offering a same-day or 24-hour turnaround from the start. Managing director Lawrence Dalton soon became aware that his biggest bottleneck came from sending his print out to trade finishers. He brought his finishing in-house, taking a route that many other digital printers were to follow. 

He says that finishing manufacturers have responded to the specific requirements of digital, though perhaps not as quickly as he hoped. “People are starting to push the concept of everything being online to an Indigo. Our type of work precludes that but I can see that’s the way it’s going for others.”

Even if you’re not running variable data on a digital press, the ability to change every copy means that you can print multi-page work in pre-collated order. However, it’s only recently that Dalton has found a finishing system he’s happy to do this with. Previously an old conventional Horizon tower collator was used, with the presses producing non-collated sets. 

When that finally wore out, 1st Byte looked around and bought a Duplo bookletmaker with DSF-5000 feeder that accepts pre-collated sets and adds separate covers. “This has really been a big help to us because it significantly cuts down the wastage we used to get and the set-up time is dramatically reduced – you just need to run a couple of sheets,” Dalton says.

 Demand from digital printers like 1st Byte led to manufacturers such as Morgana, Duplo, Horizon and others introducing versatile, easily set-up bookletmakers, as well as standalone creasers, folders, cutters, laminators, binders and UV varnishers. Because all the first sheetfed digital presses were SRA3, these finishers could be compact too, which suited the often tight confines of pressrooms. 

Peter Dyson, product development manager at Duplo, recalls: “When I joined Duplo in the early 1990s, the machines were still manually adjusted, but you could do it without tools. It’d take five or 10 minutes and you’d waste the first 10 or 15 copies. In 1995 we launched the first automated bookletmakers, replacing all that with stepper motors.

“In 2002, at Ipex we had our first digital products, adding PC controls to the bookletmakers that came out in the mid 90s. The whole set-up was less than a minute, about 15 seconds. We found it necessary to add things like image recognition, to either set up the finishing template, or to read the document to make sure it’s assembled in the right way.”

Better control

Touchscreen controls have helped to make set-ups smoother and easier, points out Bryan Godwyn, joint managing director of Horizon’s UK distributor Intelligent Finishing Systems. The Horizon machines share universal icon-based commands and simple navigation fields, he says: “This technology also creates job flexibility as longer runs can be interrupted for shorter, quicker turnaround jobs. Also the ease of use of systems allows staff to move from one finishing service to another, helping eliminate bottlenecks. This can also help workflow by simply getting completed work out the door as soon as possible.”

Although digital printing tends to be associated with short runs, this doesn’t always mean low volumes. Dyson says: “In Germany we’ve noticed that some of their digital volumes are so high that they’re going back to offset finishing, because they can afford to set it up and run it for a few hours. Particularly in photobooks, greetings cards, etc, where they offer a restricted choice of formats.”

Kolbus in Germany is associated with high-volume binding systems, but has been increasingly supporting variable print and resizing on the fly. Greg Bird, sales director at Kolbus UK, says: “It may be short run printing, but that doesn’t mean that the overall run length is limited. Flexibility in terms of short runs is available on most of our equipment now. Our BF 530 Book Production Line is the faster of the two Bookjet digital editions we make, but that’s the one we supply more of to short-run producers, because the makeready is so much quicker too.

“We are concentrating our development on flexible platforms, rather than slow-running machines for short runs and fast-running machines for long runs. Customers want ultra-quick makeready, but also the ability to handle longer runs as well.”

A UK example is Harrier LLC, a very large digital print operation in Newton Abbott, which runs six HP Indigos. Its main business is photobooks and other photo products as either B2B operations for the likes of Snapfish, Tesco and Funky Pigeon, or direct B2C through its own Truprint brand. In 2013 it installed a Kolbus system comprising the DA 260 Casemaker and BF 512 Book Production Line to make personalised hard-cover books in high volumes, for both its photobooks and for medium-run trade services. 

Julian Marsh, commercial business development and photo products consultant at Harrier says: “It’s been 18 months since the Kolbus line went in and we’re very pleased with progress. The way we do photo products is to batch them, so we wait until we’ve got a volume of similar jobs in. Ideally it’ll be batches of 50 or 100, but in off-peak periods the batches will be smaller.

“We’ve been able to go to the market and offer big batches of photobooks, still pretty much to the trade, but also to corporates and companies for their marketing materials. That’s driven quite big volumes. I’m talking to one customer who if they go ahead will want 300,000 photobooks over a 10-week period.”

Over the years there have been various attempts to introduce device-independent end-to-end networked communications that take in everything from jobs received, through pre-press, printing, finishing and despatch. While JDF has been a success in offset pre-press and printing as a way to generate electronic job tickets and receive live feedback from production systems, it’s never made much impact in finishing. 

Duplo’s Dyson has an idea why JDF itself rarely reaches into the bindery: “JDF does offer a lot to the commercial printer who has some bindery equipment that takes 30 minutes to set up and 100 copies to make-ready. If you have that and somebody says they can make it all automated, then it looks very attractive. 

“But from the 1990s we were already developing the equipment to automatically set up from templates. That largely negated the advantages of JDF. Because our automated features are built in, they are a much easier and lower cost investment for a company, especially if you consider the huge costs involved with implementing a full JDF workflow. We can develop and improve our systems independently and it still fits into an existing workflow with minimal disruption.” 

Not always needed

Chris Cooper, managing director of Terry Cooper Services, agrees about JDF: “It’s only relevant really for the top 10% of the market, otherwise equipment has become quicker and easier to set up, so it’s not really needed.”

He cites the Challenge three-knife trimmer as an example. This scans a barcode to set itself automatically from a printed job ticket or list of standard job types. 

“With those machines some customers are producing as few as two or three copies of a book and then changing format. If that’s the case then they may choose to fit higher-powered servo motors so the settings can be changed between jobs more quickly,” says Cooper.

Ray Hillhouse at Morgana adds: “When we launched our Pro range of finishing machines about five years ago, we made them JDF-compliant. But hardly anyone asks for this and I think we only have one user, in France.”

However, JDF can still be used to send job tickets into proprietary systems. For instance Horizon’s pXnet networked bindery management system links most of the manufacturer’s machines, providing job information while feeding back status to managers. This can optionally take set-up data from JDF. 

Likewise Heidelberg’s Prinect production network includes Prinect PostPress Manager to link its finishing machines and feed information to and from the MIS. Prinect is JDF compatible. 

“Digital workflows are well established to link pre-press and press and production and MIS, but only now is there a serious take-up for post-press,” says Ian Trengrouse, post-press product manager at Heidelberg UK. 

“It has been a more complex area to address because of the plethora of processes, and even the order in which those processes are undertaken, but finishing as much as the pressroom has much to gain from the control, shorter makeready and production feedback that Prinect workflows provide.”

1st Byte’s Dalton sums up with a note of realism from a user’s perspective: “The Nirvana for me would be to get a report every day that shows everything in the building that has deviated by, say, 10%, or the hours, clicks, sheets of paper used. 

“The speeding up of set-up times is great, and for digital it’s vital, but as yet post-press workflows are not as automated as suppliers said they would be. Maybe we’ll see that at the next Drupa, or three years down the road at the Drupa after that!”