Case study

Watkiss DigiVAC sorts bottleneck for B & N Printers

When B & N Printers of Abergavenny needed to address their booklet making bottleneck, they turned to Watkiss and invested in a Watkiss DigiVAC collator and a BookMaster Pro booklet maker.  These compliment the SpineMaster SquareBack book finisher which the company purchased last Ipex.

B & N, which was founded in 1990, is typical of many commercial printers located in every market town across the country.  It has a widespread customer base of mainly industrial clients, both local and from further afield and produces a wide 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 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 they had to collate booklets and magazines by hand, which caused considerable delays.  “As a result, our booklet making used to be a real bottleneck.“ explains proprietor Neil Morgan. “We chose a collating / 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 but also “because Watkiss care – they were 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 & N’s DigiVAC collator has 8 feed stations, although they are considering upgrading this to twelve stations at some time in the future.  The collator has a unique suction feed system which feeds paper from the bottom of the stack, so that it can be loaded whilst running – giving non-stop production. This continuous operation also produces more reliable feed since the paper stack is constantly aerated - all collators run better when they are not stop/starting.

As well as a BookMaster booklet maker and TrimMaster trimmer, the system also has a jogging stacker for the collating jobs which don’t need stapling. 

“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 ten years ago but it was important to us to invest in digital print first”