Firstly, I'd like to ask a couple of questions. How many of you are printers? Now, how many of you have pre-press departments that look like the Starship Enterprise while your bindery looks like the boiler room of the Titanic? Well, you're not alone and there's a reason for it.

While many bandy about the term: "Digital Bindery" I believe that the term is an oxymoron. How can you have a digital mechanical process? When there is one, it will be in the form of the electronic book and then we'll all have to go out and work for a living. What keeps the book alive is the very fact that it is a codex. The bound book has endured because it can be leafed through at will. You can reread the last few pages or leaf through it to find that quote you were looking for. This is what has replaced the scroll and lucky for us, electronic books have to be scrolled through.

So the very notion that a mechanical publication be digitally bound is a misnomer. While we all love fancy digital readouts and computer boards in our machines, this does not take away the fact that books are now and forever a mechanically used tool.

What we can talk about, however, is automation.

Our company specializes in the field of mechanical binding. This means: Loose leaf, Double loop wire, spiral binding, coil binding, comb binding, and plastic coil. This area of binding, as you know, has exploded over the past decade. We have seen a steady growth over the past ten years and it shows no sign of slowing down. Granted, ordinary spiral binding and comb binding are slowly dying out but it is merely being replaced by plastic coil and double loop wire. The pendulum swings between these two methods of binding and we have seen it swing strongly towards plastic coil of late.

With all due respect to my colleagues who sell perfect binders, it irks me when I walk into a plant and I see a half million dollar perfect binder right next to a bank of ten or twenty people inserting plastic coil into books by hand. It harkens back to the days when I was young and I went into a bindery and saw banks of women folding paper, using tongue depressors.

Automatic coil binding, while still in its infancy, is here to stay. It may have been a rocky road for those of us who originally developed the equipment but there are too many binderies and printers using our automatic machines to consider this an aberration. Add to this the fact that you can now create the coil as you bind makes the need for this type of machinery more apparent.

Let's look at the numbers:

Let us say that you do 200,000 books per year in plastic coil and as an example, we'll use 16mm diameter 12 inch lengths as an average size. Generally, with large runs, we see a bank of five people working as a team. Two workers starting the books off by spinning in the first three loops, two inserting the rest, and one cutting and crimping. The average output is 500 books per hour for five workers. Therefore it takes 2,000 man hours to bind 200,000 books. At $10 per hour ( a number in which we include tax, workman's comp, etc.) the labor costs $20,000.

On a 700 book per hour machine you should be able to net 500 BPH. Let's be conservative and say 400 books per hour is netted. That's only 5,000 man hours and that's conservative. There is a $15,000 savings on labor.

A 16mm 12" length's lowest cost is about 11.25 cents. 200,000 pieces would cost $22,500. On an automatic coil forming machine you save well over 50% on material cost. The savings is $11,000 and that does not count the enormous savings on shipping.

The first year's depreciation on a machine like this is $26,000. So in adding all these savings together you can save nearly $52,000 in your first year on a $50,000 machine. What bank will give you that kind of return for your money? The time has come for printers and binders to treat the plastic coil process like saddle stitching. You do not buy your staples preformed and hand staple each booklet.

Furthermore, You could lease this machine for as little as $1,125 per month. Now remember that you are paying $22,500 per year in coil, which is roughly $1,900 per month. At a 50% savings, which is conservative, you will only pay $950 per month, saving $950 per month. The depreciation saves you $2,150 per month. The total savings without labor is $3,100 per month in the first year alone! That pays for the lease on the machine and you have $2,000 per month left over! If you factor in the labor savings you save $4,350 per month and have over $3,200 left over per month after you pay for the lease. That's not free. That's free plus a bonus!!!

Imagine a bindery that does the same amount of perfect binding and Wire-O. I walk into his shop and he tells me he is buying a $400,000 perfect binder so that he can produce 6,000 BPH instead of 5,000 BPH. I look at his antiquated mechanical binding department and there is a variety of semi-automatic wire binders there. I tell him that while he may get between 600 and 800 books per hour on each machine, he can get up to 4,000 books per hour on our automatic wire binder. He laughs and says he is not interested. He says his six wire binders can produce the same amount. This is a man who loves to pay for labor.

There is a bindery in the Northern mid-west who uses our Rilecart B599 automatic double loop wire binder. Again, let's look at the numbers: He used to use 12 operators on 6 semiautomatic wire binders to net 3,000 BPH. He now uses 3 operators on our automatic wire binder and nets 2,500 BPH. The cost difference for a 75,000 run is $3,000 vs. $900, a savings of $2,100. A run like this twice per month will pay for a lease on the machine. Of course this is only applicable to companies who produce over a million wire bound books per year.

Last but not least let us get to punching. I was in a bindery some time ago and I saw a customer using one of my competitor's automatic punches, one that has been around for a long, long time. It was chugging along at a moderate speed. I asked him what speed did he think he was punching at and his reply was 50- 60,000 sheets per hour. I looked at my watch and then asked his operator how many sheets she was punching each stroke. When all of the math was said and done he was only punching 24,000 sheets per hour. It was costing him twice what he thought to punch his job. You've got to time your punches people!!!

A good auto punch will punch up to 7 inches of paper per minute, or over 100,000 sheets per hour. Companies that punch paper for others to bind generally charge 50 cents per inch. This other punch I was talking about was punching less than 2 inches per minute, netting under $60 per hour. The right punching machine could be earning $240 per hour. If you use such a machine for five hours a month, that will pay for a lease on the machine. All the printers and binders we speak to bemoan the fact that they can't find good people. The obvious solution is to go with automation and to make your workforce leaner and meaner. The same plant manager should be able to set up all the machines I spoke about and have lesser skilled operators run them. This is the best solution to today's brain drain. Let the machines do the work for you. After all, they don't take breaks, show up late, show up drunk or don't show up at all. Thank you.