The London Borough of Barnet’s Document Centre and Mailroom has upgraded a Mailmaster 565 envelope inserter with a DL-C4 Mailmaster Compact, staying with KAS Paper Systems.
The Borough’s Document Centre and Mailroom employs 14 full time staff and runns two Ricoh colour digital presses, several Kyocera MFDs, an HP large format plotter, a Polar guillotine, a Stahl folder, a Citoborma drill and an FSN numbering machine. Its relationship with KAS dates back to 1990, when bought two inserters, when the Community Charge (better remembered as the Poll Tax) was introduced.
Subsequent outsourcing of what became the Council Tax resulted in the replacement of the two original KAS machines in 2001 with a DL to C5 Mailmaster 565. Simon Hime, manager of the Document Centre and Mailroom, explains, ‘Although the Mailmaster 565 was still running well after more than 20 years, it was starting to show its age at times, and it couldn’t insert into C4 envelopes. So when KAS offered a showroom demonstration of their Mailmaster Compact, which can do C4 as well as C5 and DL, we jumped at the opportunity, bringing our own letters and envelopes to test on the machine. Following a successful demonstration, the machine was ordered and delivered in late summer this year [2023].’
Mr Hime commented that he and his team had been impressed with how quickly they were trained on the new machine and with a follow-up engineer visit. The machine’s performance has been more than satisfactory too, he said: ‘It’s been absolutely fine. As well as now being able to insert C4 envelopes, the Compact eats up, with changeovers in minutes, our multiple short-run jobs, including pre-folded A1-size planning applications, stapled sets and thicker books up to 7mm, often at up to the maximum speed of 6000 envelopes per hour.’
Possible future developments include retrofitting a KAS letter feeder with code reading to support election-related work or hybrid mailings.
