An example of an integrated Smart Binding System from Horizon, with the work flowing from top right to produce fully-bound books. In this case it starts with a Hunkeler unwinder and sheeter, though it could be inline to a roll or sheet fed digital press. Sheets pass through an AF-566F Digital buckle folder to a BQ-470 four-knife binder, then an HT-1000V variable trimmer.
Simon Eccles talks to Horizon’s Paul Jakobson about the hurdles that bindery systems have to overcome to take full advantage of digital print as a source.
Early March saw the Real Print & Finish event held at Apex Digital Graphic’s showroom in Hemel Hempstead. Paul Jakobson, European market support manager for the big Japanese finishing company Horizon, was there with the company’s UK distributor IFS.
Digital Printer took the opportunity to talk to him about the background to Horizon’s integrated book finishing solutions, which were demonstrated at the Hunkeler Innovationsdays in February. These form part of the company’s Smart Binding Solutions, which are explained well in a YouTube video at www.tinyurl.com/o4xrbqz.
‘We have Smart Binding Solutions on several levels, for small, medium and high level production,’ said Mr Jakobson. ‘Everyone is saying “we need to be able to go from a book-of-one to books of thousands.” They need to change many processes and learn how to handle this so that the quality is the same for one copy or thousands.’
For maximum efficiency at the binding end, he said, it is desirable for an MIS or booking system to accept on-demand orders and then organise them into queues that take the whole process through to the finishing devices in similar groups.
‘We are seeing more and more requests from customers to integrate the finishing into the whole workflow. Print-on-demand used to change size for every book. Now there are systems that organise them into groups of sizes, say a sequence of small, medium, large, then medium, small.’ This makes adjustment of the finishers much easier as they only need to quickly step in small amounts between copies.’
Ten years ago the expectation was that JDF and its associated JMF machine links would be able to handle end-to-end integration between MIS, prepress, press and bindery. However, though a lot of progress was made between prepress systems, platesetters and offset presses, further downstream adoption of JDF has been distinctly patchy. For finishing machines and especially short runs, it seems that there are just too many variables.
Instead, the big finishing suppliers have tended to develop their own control networks and offer JDF gateways into these for third parties that want to go to the effort of integrating.
Horizon’s own bindery management network and control system is called pXnet. ‘We’ve been able to integrate with JDF since the start,’ said Mr Jakobson. ‘Our current pXnet is our third attempt to tell the market that it can be done. The missing link is still MIS – the developers say they can set up for finishing but in reality it’s complicated given the range of impositions needed for finishing. There are so many different possible routes.’
Instead of direct links, Mr Jakobson said that most MIS developers that Horizon has worked with have concentrated on barcode generators that can put codes onto variably printed book sections. ‘If you want to dynamically cut a book we can read a bar-code. The size and format is either already in the memory of the trimmer, or it can call it up from a database of sizes.’
The most promising direct link so far has been from Ultimate Technographics, the Canadian imposition software developer, he said. ‘We met Ultimate at Hunkeler and found they were very focused on imposition. They have the Ultimate Bindery, which not only links to Horizon but anything that can be driven by JDF. For not a huge investment it can provide a bridge between the prepress and finishing sides.’
Ultimate rather dryly describes this as a ‘hub of knowledge of different finishing devices from several manufacturers, operating as a central location to validate that each job is built respecting the capabilities and constraints of the selected finishing equipment’. In other words, it takes a JDF imposition job ticket, refers it to its database of possible finishing paths and suggests an answer.
User interfaces are another area that Horizon has concentrated on for its Smart Bindery Solutions, Mr Jakobson said. ‘All over the world, everyone wants fewer employees, so automation becomes important. You increasingly have one person running the binder, cutter, three-knife trimmer and so on. Our graphical user interface is a first – all our screens and GUI are the same for all our devices. We are icon based, not windows, as we have always believed that icon recognition is best.’
Horizon offers three levels of automation depending on the system being used, Mr Jakobson said. ‘In future, customers will have many different print sources, say sheetfed offset and digital, as well as roll fed digital. We can produce a hybrid feed into our binding line, with a gatherer for offset and something else for the pre-ordered digital. We always ask ourselves how to make it easier and cheaper for the customer. That is our biggest challenge.’
