Johannesburg-based printing house Smartworks recently purchased a new Duplo DBM150i booklet maker and DC-645 slitter/cutter/creaser from Kemtek to assist in improving and speeding up the company’s in-house document finishing.
As a dedicated digital house, Shane Witter, co-founder and financial director of Smartworks, and his team handle numerous variable data files that need to be converted speedily and precisely into finished documents such as statements, courier forms, travel documents and more. In the last year, as orders have escalated, Shane has found it hard to maintain a swift finishing schedule on his existing guillotine and folding and creasing hand-fed units.
Earlier this year, Witter attended the launch of Kemtek’s Centre of Digital Print Excellence to find out more about the company, its principals and binding technologies available. Witter was impressed with the precise performance of the Duplo equipment and its accessible design.
‘The compact Duplo DBM150i booklet maker looked good on paper, but I wanted to see it in action before taking the plunge,’ said Witter. ‘More specifically, I was looking for a modular machine that could be upgraded as the business grows. With the DBM150i’s easy-to-use control panel, a job can be set up in seconds. There’s a choice of four finishing modes to choose from and currently we’re managing to produce 1000 saddle-stitched booklets every hour.’
Ideal for short to medium runs, the DC-645 slitter/cutter/creaser has double-feed detection that handles large sheet sizes and heavy substrates up to 350g/sqm, at a speed up to 26 sheets/min.
Performing up to six slits, 15 cuts and ten creases in a single pass, it finishes a variety of full-bleed applications without difficult adjustments and lengthy changeovers. Jobs can be swiftly set-up through the user-friendly control panel and each machine comes with a built-in CCD scanner to recall any job stored in its 80-job memory.
‘Overall, the Duplo equipment is allowing us to reduce a previously labour-intensive six-step printing and finishing process to a three-step procedure that gets the job done in half the time. That’s great news when it comes to keeping customers satisfied!’ said Witter.
