Digital Upgrades Inspire Bindery Buy in Boulder

When Poppy Forbes upgraded her in-plant to bring it into the world of digital printing, it didn't take her long to realize that the shop's bindery would also need some improvements.

Forbes, print shop manager at the in-plant serving Boulder County, Colo., added a Canon imageRUNNER 7105 black-and-white copier and a Canon imagePRESS C7000VP digital press in 2008. A year later, the government in-plant installed a Duplo System 5000 collating system and a Duplo DC-615 slitter/cutter/creaser.

Boulder County's Printing and Mailing Division prints approximately 500,000 impressions a month. Its five employees handle desktop publishing, process camera work, offset printing, quick printing, binding and bulk mail processing.

"After we got the new printing equipment it just made sense to everybody to buy new finishing equipment," Forbes says. "We were moving from a manual world into a digital world."

Forbes notes that the in-plant can now easily produce smaller quantities of business cards thanks to the Duplo DC-615. Business cards were previously finished using a full-sized cutter.

When researching which bindery equipment would work best for the in-plant, Forbes says that the Duplo equipment offered the automated features she was looking for. What's more, she found the equipment was easy for the shop's employees to use.

The in-plant is mainly using the new Duplo equipment to produce various booklets for the public.

"It has allowed us to put a really nice crease on the covers of the books we are producing," Forbes points out. "We previously did not have any equipment to handle scoring. It's not like we couldn't do booklets before, but it was a lot more difficult."

Boulder County's in-plant produces jobs for various local government departments and elected officials' offices including the sheriff's office, social services and the county health department.

In recent years, the in-plant has also added online ordering by implementing EDU Business Solutions' Print Shop Pro (PSP) software. This eliminated manual data entry, simplified account reporting procedures and automated the inventory management process. In addition to adding the base MIS system (PSP Manager) and the online ordering module (PSP WebDesk), the shop added PSP Template Builder for the creation of templates for business cards, letterhead and envelopes.

—By Chris Bauer