New System Removes Booklet Making Bottleneck

When B and N Printers of Abergavenny (Wales) needed to address its booklet making bottleneck, it turned to Watkiss and invested in a Digivac collator and a Bookmaster Pro booklet maker.

When B and N Printers of Abergavenny (Wales) needed to address its booklet making bottleneck, it turned to Watkiss and invested in a Digivac collator and a Bookmaster Pro booklet maker.

They complement the Spinemaster Squareback book finisher, which the company purchased last Ipex.

B and N, which was founded in 1990, is typical of many commercial printers located in every market town across the UK.

It has a widespread customer base of mainly industrial clients, both local and from further afield and produces a range of general commercial print from carbonless sets, business cards and envelopes, through to booklets and magazines.

The majority of the work is produced using a Heidelberg Quickmaster press, although a few smaller presses are maintained for envelope printing.

Although the company already had a small collator, it was only friction feed and so it had to collate booklets and magazines by hand, which caused considerable delays.

B and N proprietor Neil Morgan said: "As a result, our booklet making used to be a real bottleneck.

We chose a collating and booklet making system mainly for the magazine work, some of which have regular monthly print runs.

With the Digivac, it takes us just an hour and a half to produce what used to take two days - and that's only one of the magazines we produce.

You can imagine how it has freed up time and helped our workflow." When looking at collating systems, Morgan narrowed it down to a choice of two.

He already knew Watkiss from his previous purchase of a Spinemaster and chose the Digivac system, in part because the machine has a smaller footprint.

And he added: "It was also because Watkiss cares.

The company was prepared to take the trouble to bring a machine in to me for an on-site demonstration and gave me the time and opportunity to be sure it would do my work." B and N's Digivac collator has eight feed stations, although the company is considering upgrading those to 12 stations in the future.

The collator has a suction feed system that feeds paper from the bottom of the stack, so that it can be loaded whilst running, giving non-stop production.

That continuous operation also produces more reliable feed since the paper stack is constantly aerated - all collators run better when they are not stopping and starting, said Watkiss.

As well as a Bookmaster booklet maker and Trim Master trimmer, the system also has a jogging stacker for the collating jobs which do not need stapling.

Morgan added: "We are a small company, so we had to build up to this purchase over a few years.

We would have loved this sort of collator 10 years ago but it was important to us to invest in digital print first.".

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