Finishing solutions for digital print

Feb 23, 2004 12:00 PM, by Dominic Quennell | APeditor@primediabusiness.com

To ensure survival in today's competitive landscape, printers face a very real need to differentiate themselves and provide a service that offers more than their competition. Many companies focus on customer service, print quality and price, but not so many realize the full potential of finishing in providing real value-added opportunities.

It is those that consider the importance of finishing that find themselves ahead of the game. To take an extreme example: imagine a typical annual company report and then remove the finishing aspects from it. You are left with unfolded, untrimmed, unlaminated and loose sheets—nothing more. While print quality is undoubtedly important, it forms only part of the success of the final printed item. The highest quality printed item will look bad if it has been clumsily finished or remains unfinished.

The development of finishing technology has moved on throughout the last five years and the possibilities—for both traditional and digital printers—are now very broad. Such rapid development has left uncertainty about which is the most appropriate finishing option for individual companies. I hope to provide some guidelines in this article that will help you make informed choices.

Preparing for equipment selection

To determine which finishing solution is right for you, it's important to consider certain aspects of your business:

Your supplier | Your choice of supplier will be integral to the success of your installation. You should look for a supplier who will be your partner, providing training and support as needed. It's worthwhile to consider modular solutions that match your current cost and production requirements, but can be adapted to meet changing requirements. Your existing supplier might also consider a 'trade-in' of old to new equipment. Retro-fittable units and software updates can be a cost-effective way to get more out of your investment in the long term and need not break the bank. Suppliers should know about the benefits of both traditional and digital solutions and how these solutions are likely to develop in the future.

Existing equipment | It's important to review the equipment you have before you invest in new machinery because it will make an impact on the best choice of finishing equipment for your production set-up. For example, is your existing printing equipment digital or offset? How many presses do you have and—crucially—what speeds do they run at? Do you have existing finishing equipment and, if so, can it fit into new production solutions or be traded up for a newer product? At Duplo, for example, we design our complete range of products in a modular way so that users can start with an entry-level solution and gradually trade up the components to a more high-level solution as their business grows. Take into account that investment in an expensive digital press doesn't make sense if the finishing solution you choose can't handle short runs, variable print or slows down what should be 'quick print.’

Typical jobs | Critical to your choice of finishing equipment will be a clear understanding of the type of jobs you typically run. Are the jobs produced digitally or traditionally, and are the formats standardized or unusual? Typical run lengths, substrates and variable data requirements will also have an impact on the choice of solutions. It's safe to say that the more variable the jobs, the more capable the solution must be.

Design & consulting facilities | Another crucial component in making your decision is whether you have an in-house design facility or consultancy for your clients. It is important to remember that consumers buy finished printed products without any real consideration for the processes that takes them from substrate to finished item. Incorporating the finishing element into the design process is a simple way to add value to the product and deliver greater customer satisfaction. Take into account all the production stages at the very beginning and you will produce the most profitable job.

Customer relationships | Building a close relationship with your customers and discussing what they intend to do with the finished product is extremely important. For instance, if you understand who the product is destined for, how it will be transported and its intended shelf life, you can give valuable advice on the product design. Perfect binding, for example, is the most professional looking finish but spiral binding is ideal for items that will be used for continuous reference.

Whether a product is folded, stapled, stitched, perfect-bound or spiral-bound will impact the fundamental design of the item, so it's important to make this decision early in the design process.

Choosing a solution

To start with, there are four main options to choose from: inline, off-line, near-line and, the most recent introduction, dual-line.

While an integrated inline solution might seem like the best option, it tends to be most suitable if job runs involve standardized formats that don't vary much. Inline finishing options are close-coupled or hard-coupled to a print engine and so each print engine must have its own finishing solution.

Tying printing and finishing capabilities can also present problems. Although an inline solution removes the need for operator intervention between print and finishing, and assures sheet and set integrity, if the print engine is being serviced or is out of action, then the inline finishing equipment is out of action, too. Furthermore, most print finishing devices such as bookletmakers and perfect binders are capable of finishing at far higher cycling speeds than most digital printers, whether black-and-white or color. So for maximum productivity, many users find that having multiple print engines and off-line or near-line finishing is the more cost-effective and productive solution.

Off-line solutions such as collating towers provide the benefit of one finishing device being able to finish work from multiple print engines, both digital and offset, thus ensuring that everything runs at maximum capability. The option, however, is not suited to variable data or personalized work, because a fully off-line solution has no communication with the printer server.

A hybrid of the two options is likely to be the most productive, cost-effective and efficient solution. A 'near-line' solution implies that while the equipment is not connected directly to the print engine, it is communicating with it via a network or is aware of the job criteria through intelligent marks on the sheets themselves, such as optical mark recognition (OMR) or bar codes. Near-line solutions allow multiple print engines to talk to the finishing equipment and jobs to be set up automatically in a queue facilitated by the increasing use of digital job tickets containing all necessary job criteria. It is also possible to combine traditionally printed covers with digital contents using this option. Finally, near-line devices can ensure sheet and set integrity and be part of a closed-loop workflow.

Finally, there is now ‘dual-line,’ the name given by Duplo to a booklet-making system fed by a combination of an off-line collating tower for collating offset printed work and a near-line sheet feeder for feeding digital output. The advantage of this kind of setup is that you only need one booklet-making line, irrespective of how the print is produced.

As we move toward the print room of the future where all equipment will talk to each other, it is important to consider today's investment to ensure it will be able to join in the conversation. A number of industry players are working together to develop a standard to allow input, output and finishing devices to talk to each other. UP3I (Universal Printer, Pre- and Post-Processing Interface) has been developed by Océ, Xerox, IBM, Strålfors and Hunkeler. UP3I is compatible with, and complementary to, the JDF standard developed by CIP4. It is vital to ensure the finishing equipment you invest in is, or will be, able to be compliant with these standards.

Conclusion
One of history's great statesmen, Sir Winston Churchill, once said to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”

Fortunately for you, there are a lot of finishing 'tools' out there and something to match the needs of most production requirements. What is important now is making the necessary investigations and getting the help you need to determine which one is right for you. I'm sure that is the very least Churchill would have done!

Dominic Quennell is vice president, global marketing of Duplo Corp. Contact him at d-quennell@duplonet.co.jp