In-Plant Gains Labor Efficiencies

The Graphic Arts Department of East Baton Rouge Parish School (EBR) operates as the in-plant print facility servicing 90 schools and more than 40,000 students with all of their print and finishing needs.

Since the installation of the Tornado Autopunch EX from Rhin-o-Tuff (Booth 11464) in April 2018, EBR’s in-house print operation has been able to automate the collating and punching steps for its finishing jobs that include a variety of media that were previously hand-collated and punched. 

The applications for EBR Graphic Arts department include a variety of coil-bound books. Its main challenge is that many of the application components require a secondary finishing process that does not allow them to run the full document in-line on their printer.

Prior to the Tornado Autopunch EX, the finishing process required a series of manual steps by trained operators. All of the UV-coated covers were hand-collated into each booklet, as well as front and back covers. Because their printer cannot print/run index tabs in-line, it is a separate process to send them out for tabbing followed by manual insertion. This forced EBR Graphic Arts Department to run the documents and its components uncollated. This made their jobs more difficult and took more time to complete. 

Now, EBR Graphic Arts department is using the Tornado Autopunch EX for all of its inserting and punching of book components that were manually inserted before. The speed of the machine is fast enough to produce offset book stacks while the operator runs the automatic coiling machine enabling concurrent binding, reducing operators from two to one.

“The machine doesn’t make mistakes,” says Chad Simpson, production manager. “The confidence level is there that if the first book and last book are correct, everything in the middle is right. It’s like having another worker.”