The machine, which was installed at the Leicester-headquartered firm’s premises last week, will produce variably paginated, digitally printed booklets that allow for the inclusion of more targeted information.
The use of optical mark recognition and the subsequent ability to provide a complete production record will enable the firm to meet customer requirements for booklets, to the same high security and quality standard as its other products.
The device includes the 400 sheets/min Document Sheet Feeder 5000, which drives paper into the finishing section of the device.
Working from collated sets in one half of the feeder and from pre-printed covers in the other, the machine can produce booklets at a rate of up to 3,600 per hour. The maximum sheet size is 250x350mm with a minimum of 75x120mm.
This is GI Solutions' first investment in digital bookletmaking, although it already operates a small manual bookletmaker. The firm plans to buy a second system in the next few months.
“We’ve got some projects coming up that require digital bookletmaking so I reviewed what was available in the market and we settled on the Duplo Digital System 5000Pro for quite a number of reasons,” said operations director Ifor Pedley.
“It’s got both read-in and read-out 2D barcode technology, the lead time was very short, it’s fast and it’s highly modular so we can build it up to do more things such as square-back binding and three-knife trimming if we want to.
“The others that we looked at ranged in price and specification, but some of them didn’t really have the technology that we required; they could read in but maybe not read out. We’re using digital data and we want to verify everything.”
GI Solutions, which is celebrating its 21st anniversary this year, has a turnover of £37m. Earlier this year, the firm spent £3m on two HP T-series high-speed colour inkjet presses, £250,000 on the ‘world’s first’ inline window applicator and £2m on two JWR 30K paper wrappers.
The company recently acquired a majority stake in London-based web analytics business Cognesia, which will operate as a division of GI Solutions’ data management and analytics business GI Insights.
