Beck buy brings boost to booklet bundling

Who Alito Color Group
Aim Improve shrinkwrapping efficiency
Spend Around £60,000
What Beck Serienpacker Grabfeeder
When September 2008
Target Financial institutions

Challenge
Alito Color Group is an East London-based printer that supplies the point-of-sale, commercial colour print and direct mail markets, generating a turnover of around £10m a year.

The company counts major banks and high street stores among its customer base, for which it produces information booklets, some of which are shrinkwrapped prior to shipment in cardboard boxes.

Traditionally, the booklets were stitched by one machine, stacked and stored before being transferred to another machine for shrinkwrapping. Piles of booklets that came off the stacker also needed to have an elastic band put on, to stop them falling over, before shrinkwrapping.

Keeping up with the stitching process meant four people a day, over two 12-hour shifts, were putting rubber bands around stacks of booklets, which the firm recognised was an inefficient use of staff.

Strategy
Having recently installed a new Muller Martini saddlestitcher with a trimmer and an Apollo stacking unit, Alito had sufficient business, in the form of a major contract from a financial institution, to justify investment in the new shrinkwrapper.

We contemplated a stand-alone machine, but found we had piles of packs waiting to be shrinkwrapped, says managing director Les Newnham.

Wrapping the packs inline was the logical method for improving efficiency. The firm contacted Friedheim International, the UK agent for Beck Packautomaten, which developed a system where  the stacks are conveyed directly to the Serienpacker Grabfeeder machine.

One of the biggest factors was to ensure that the two machines could work at the same speed and the target was set at around 30 packs of booklets a minute. Software was a problem because we couldn’t afford to have the stitcher slow down, says Newnham.

Implementation
The system separates the two packs of 10 booklets that come off the stacker and conveys them sideways, at 90 degrees to the machine, on to the infeed belt of the shrink wrapper system. The wrapper itself uses two rolls of film creating a four-sided seal around the stacks, meaning less heat is required.

It’s mainly used for stacks of 10 A5-size booklets, but can be adapted to process A4 and packs of five booklets. By shrinkwrapping the stacks as soon as they come off the machine, the need for an elastic band is removed. Newnham says: By taking out the banding you can further save an enormous amount of time, and the end product ultimately looks better for not having an elastic band around it.

The fact that the two machines are  in parallel, connected by the conveyer, is also beneficial as it reduces the overall footprint. The machine is also flexible as it can operate as a stand-alone wrapping unit, if the stitcher is used to process products that are not wrapped.

Results
Newnham has found the machine is economically beneficial and also improves our efficiency. It more than passes the speed requirement and is currently being used to wrap 40,000 stacks, some 400,000 booklets, over a two-shift 24-hour period.

You also halve the number of people required to do the whole process, because it needs the same number of people as if you were not shrinkwrapping, says Newnham.

Having the machine up and running has enabled Alito to target more financial institutions and companies requiring shrinkwrapped packs of booklets. Initial concerns that putting the two machines together might mean it had to work at a slower rate have been overcome.

It’s working perfectly. We can put packs of 10 booklets through the machine as fast as we can produce them, and as soon as they are done we can take them off by hand and put them in a box ready for distribution, says Newnham.

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