Offset Paperback Manufacturers
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Océ Offset Paperback Manufacturers Like most businesses, companies that print books must maintain a OPM began its foray into the world of digital book printing with a high- healthy balance between costs and profits. To stay in business, remain speed, relatively high-volume cut-sheet print and make-ready system. profitable and grow, income must exceed costs. However, when the This first solution met the needs of their initial operation, but as their number of copies of a book in a print run is just 50 to 1,500 or so, that digital printing business flourished, the cut-sheet device and workflow can be difficult to achieve using traditional offset printing processes. simply couldn’t keep up with the growing volumes and productivity requirements. In order to handle a larger, more mainstream operation, Challenge: Produce Quality Short-run Paperback Books OPM needed production-class automated workflows, more print speed, Cost-Effectively higher capacity and the ability to handle a wider variety of data streams. The economic order quantity for offset printing technology, widely used in book printing, is in the thousands or tens of thousands. With short OPM initially added an Océ DemandStream 8090cx continuous form runs, it’s a different story. The time and money spent setting up offset print system to their existing cut-sheet workflow to address these presses simply can’t be amortized sufficiently over a few hundred books. requirements. The Océ print system proved to be a workhorse that The most common approach is to print, bind and warehouse several successfully handled the majority of the company’s short-run trade books thousand copies hoping they will sell. In over eighty percent of the cases, and educational books and supplemental materials for the next few years. these extra copies are thrown away after being stored for months or years. That means lower profits for the printer, publisher and writer. However, a five-year contract to take over the majority of printing for a major educational book publisher sent OPM in search of a solution Faced with issues like these, Offset Paperback Manufacturers (OPM), a that could handle volume increases from about 13 million to 75 division of Bertelsmann AG and one of the largest manufacturers of million pages per month and produce the text and high-quality photos mass-market paperback books in the world, began looking at digital the publisher required. OPM added three Océ VarioStream 7650cx printing as an alternative to offset for short-run book-printing jobs. In printers and an advanced Océ PRISMA workflow solution to auto- addition to needing the ability to print short-run books quickly and mate labor-intensive, time-consuming tasks from the receipt of files profitably, OPM required that books the company produced using a through finishing and binding. digital print system be of the same or better print quality than books produced on offset presses. Offset Paperback Manufacturers The Solution: Océ PRISMA Workflow and Océ Printers for imposes the files based on predefined layouts for cut sheet and continuous Automatic Data Stream Management, Accurate On-line forms printers. There’s no manual intervention required. ” Proofing and Offset-Quality Printing After a selection process that included a head-to-head field trial of Océ Prior to implementing Océ PRISMA workflow, setting up print jobs was and competitive products, OPM selected Océ PRISMA workflow to a tedious process. “We used to have to position the printed page pretty manage the huge volume increase. According to Steve Talacka, OPM much by trial and error,” Talacka explains. “We’d create a template in manager of digital services, “Océ PRISMA workflow was the major Preps®, drop the files into it, send a few pages to the printer, and look at factor in our decision to go with the Océ solution.” the result on a light table. If it wasn’t right, we’d manually measure the misalignment, enter numeric values to shift pages and try again. A good With the new contract primarily focused on short-run book products operator could probably get it right in a couple of passes, but we still averaging 150 to 250 copies, Océ PRISMA workflow provides two would spend two to four hours every morning doing set ups to get all the key advantages. These advantages, critical to successfully positioning jobs for the day ready for printing.” OPM to win the contract by accommodating the greatly increased workload, are its ability to automatically manage a wide range of data OPM Short-Run Paperback Printing Today streams with PRISMAproduction, and 100% accurate on-line “With the Océ PRISMA workflow we can set up in about two minutes,” proofing from Océ TrueProof. Talacka says. “It really does a great job for us.” OPM sets up a complete shift’s work and loads up the print queue so the printer keeps running “To be successful in meeting both our ongoing printing obligations and from job to job without ever stopping. This provides maximum the demands of this new contract, efficiency in make-ready and set up productivity and utilization of OPM’s Océ printing solution’s capacity. became more important than ever,” Talacka says. “The files our customers supply us may be PDF, PostScript, Quark, TIFFs, or other data streams. A key Océ PRISMA feature that is making such a reduction in set-up We have to be able to set up and impose them rapidly – typically in two- time possible and allowing OPM to meet acceptable cost points for their up format. With Océ PRISMA, it doesn’t matter what the file data stream new contract is Océ TrueProof. A component of Océ PRISMA, is. PRISMA accepts whatever the customer sends and automatically TrueProof is an electronic viewing system that lets OPM do an on-screen The Océ Digital Book Manufacturing Solution PDF files submitted by publisher. Océ DocSetter™ software combines PDFs, adds blank pages and makes adjustments. Océ Print Job Manager™ and Professional Document Composer™ RIPs and imposes pages, without interrupting printing. Océ TrueProof™ electronically proofs Using PRISMAproduction+POD™, book blocks Books are bound, trimmed in-line or off-line, print files and measures front/back align- are queued and prioritized for printing. and packed for shipment. ment on screen with 100% accuracy. Documents are printed on Océ VarioStream™ Reprints are printed directly from approved Print-ready files are sent to Océ Print File or VarioPrint™ digital print systems. print-ready-files stored in the Océ Print File Library™ for archive and quick access. Library™. verification that a book will print to the exact quality and alignment software. “Publishers typically send one or multiple PDFs for a book,” requirements, eliminating the need for a hardcopy proof before the print notes Talacka. “With DocSetter, we can easily import and manipulate run can begin. headers, footers, margins and other attributes to ensure that the final book is assembled correctly and ready to go to print.” “I’m not sure we could have put this business model together successfully without Océ TrueProof,” notes Talacka. “Without TrueProof, the only Implementing the new workflow and printers took place along with a way to check to see if a book is right is to print a copy and measure it. move from a 7,500 square foot facility to a new 27,000 square foot That takes a lot of time, and the printer is not available for printing location. According to Talacka, implementation of the Océ solution books, which means we’re wasting production time to run a proof.” went very smoothly. “We had already mapped the solution while we still were using our Océ DemandStream 8090cx, and were very confi- “With TrueProof, we can RIP the file, see it and know that the pages are dent that we would be able to do this the way we expected,” he where they are supposed to be. If we see any issues or problems we can explains. “We started the installation of the three Océ print lines and correct them by shifting the post-ripped pages in PRISMAproduction Océ PRISMA workflow on a Wednesday and produced our first live before we ever send the book to the printer. That’s not to say that we job on the following Monday.” don’t check the book when it comes off the printer, but we’re 99% sure when we send it that it will be correct – without running a printed proof Most of the work OPM is doing under their new contract with the first. That’s a huge plus because we can stack up jobs and keep the printer educational book publisher was formerly printed on offset presses. The running with complete confidence.” Océ PRISMA workflow and Océ VarioStream 7650cx printers are making it possible for OPM to solve a business problem for their client OPM still prints hard-copy proofs for customers, but now that just using digital printing that equals the quality of offset but at a much lower means an additional copy added to the print run. There’s no production cost. Also, books are stored electronically so reprinting is a simple matter time lost except the minimal amount of time it takes to print another of calling up the file and running the printer. With this model, no book, which in most cases is less than one minute. OPM also uses physical inventory is required. another Océ PRISMA component – Océ DocSetter Make-Ready Offset Paperback Manufacturers Business Benefits According to Talacka, only a small percentage of paperback books in the US are produced digitally at this point, but he thinks that will soon change. “A lot of people in the industry are watching to see how well this model works.