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to add finishing embellishment to boost revenues. But mak-
ing a dime from finishing depends on printers’ space and
how they segment their customers.
Dylan Westgate, co-owner of Sydney Stone, importers and
resellers of digital print equipment, notes, “Finishing as a
trend is moving toward automation at all levels of the print
industry.”
Mitch Whatford, Plant Manager at Cambridge Label in Cam-
bridge, Ontario, concurs. “The ideal situation is to automate
the entire process all in one line with everything staying up
to speed and no bottlenecks.” There are machines that can
do that but they are limited by the speed of the slowest pro-
cess. Automating finishing and adding digital finishing to a
job makes sense if there is a possibility for sustainable
profit.
Westgate finds that currently many printers are doing digital
finishing in a sort of semi-manual way, on outdated equipment.
These patchwork setups aren’t cost justifiable, can’t be easily
automated and just produce enduring headaches for print
shop owners.
Byron Loeppky, book/web General Manager, Corporate Vice
President of Operations at Friesens, in Altona, Manitoba, has
been eyeing digital printing and finishing for quite a while. In
the 1990s, Friesens took a hard look at its businesses and
undertook its first foray into digital printing for its yearbook
market. That’s where the average quantity is about 500 and
shifting from the offset press to digital made sense. Friesens
was pleased with the quality of the digital print. The challenge
came when the finishing technology, such as a cutter/stacker,
was directly connected to the press. Even though there were
many challenges, the biggest was the communication
between the press and the digital finishing equipment. “It was
too inconsistent, resulting in an inordinate amount of down
time. Coming from a sheetfed big iron environment, where
the uptime is in the high 90% we realized that digital world
uptime is very different from what you would have from big
iron.”
Loeppky does like how more and more technology is being
integrated. Its first digital sewing machine was very basic. Its
second was much more advanced and faster. The next gen-
eration should put the entire process in line where it goes
from a roll directly to a sewn book. “Instead of having four
different work stations, make it in line. That’s where I think
digital has an advantage because it is pretty simple, especially
on these short runs for digital to literally