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NPC Print Upgrades Morgana Booklet Maker with BM4035 Purchase

February 23, 2024 - webmaster


NPC Print, Mytchett, near Camberley, Surrey, has upgraded its booklet making capability with the purchase of a Morgana BM4035. The new finishing device replaces a previous Morgana booklet maker. The BM4035 expands the range of sizes and formats that can be produced.

The Morgana BM4035 represents the latest style of booklet maker in the supplier’s range. The product can produce A6 to A4 portrait publications, as well as A4 landscape and large format 297mm x 297mm books. It also has the ability to corner and edge staple as standard.

NPC Print founder and CEO, Natalie Puttock, commenting on this latest purchase, said: “We needed to expand the range of formats that we could produce. Most importantly, the ability to produce long sheets, such as A4 landscape products, a format that has become increasingly popular in recent years – jobs that we have had to send out for finishing. The ability of the new BM4035 to produce this format in-house will give us control of that work, as well as saving us money on outwork.
“Having recently taken the decision to upgrade our digital print device to a new Konica Minolta AccurioPress C4070 engine, the new binder will help us to show off both our print and in-house finishing capabilities to the fullest. The square-back capability of the binder is a feature that we can also promote for higher pagination publications – it gives the impression of a perfect bound book.”

“The binder will initially be manually fed, but as print quantities increase, we know that we can easily add an automated feeder on to the unit for higher productivity.”

The company currently utilise other Morgana products in its post-press section, including a Morgana AutoCreaser, and an Intec ColourFlare device for foiling and laminating, purchased through Morgana.

The Morgana BM4035 is a versatile booklet maker designed to work with low to mid volume digital production printers. It delivers booklets of exceptional quality and is able to feed long printed sheets to produce a wide variety of applications, including A4 landscape booklets, which are becoming an increasingly important expectation of customers.

Commenting further on the purchase decision, Natalie added: “Our previous Morgana binder gave us exceptional service – it never let us down. That reliability meant that we didn’t need to even look at any other machines in the market. Everybody at Morgana – from sales to installation personnel – have been helpful and very professional.”

“Having recently taken the decision to upgrade our digital print device to a new Konica Minolta AccurioPress C4070 engine, the new binder will help us to show off both our print and in-house finishing capabilities to the fullest. The square-back capability of the binder is a feature that we can also promote for higher pagination publications – it gives the impression of a perfect bound book.”

“The binder will initially be manually fed, but as print quantities increase, we know that we can easily add an automated feeder on to the unit for higher productivity.”

NPC Print

NPC Print serves customers ranging from agencies, corporate clients, finance companies, and restaurants, through to local businesses. It operates from 186sqm premises with warehousing facilities, enabling it to offer free of charge stockholding facility for its customers.

Morgana Systems

The BM4000 Series uses the latest patented Plockmatic technologies to deliver top quality output. The base unit folds and staples booklets, and also provides for corner or edge stapled. It can produce up to 140 pages (35 sheets with the BM4035) or 200 pages (50 sheets with the BM4050). The set positioning mechanism enables the operator to easily adjust the staple and fold position on the fly. Corner or edge stapling is a fast and simple solution, typically used for producing meeting notes, reference documents, or hard copies of PowerPoint presentations.

The heavy-duty staple mechanism is designed for durability, as is maintenance free thanks to a patented solution that eliminates periodic service intervals. Staples are delivered via an easy to change staple cartridge.

Full details of Morgana’s product line-up can be found at: www.plockmaticgroup.com


Editorial article first published in QPP Quick Print Pro: NPC Print Upgrades Morgana Booklet Maker With BM4035 Purchase (quickprintpro.co.uk)


Plockmatic Group joins the Accent family

January 22, 2024 - webmaster

  • Accent Equity has become the new majority owner of Plockmatic Group (“Plockmatic”), while Grimaldi Industri will remain as a significant co-investor
  • Plockmatic is a global market leader within high and mid-end finishing solutions for the printing and packaging industries
  • Key management will co-invest and will continue to develop the company in close cooperation with Accent Equity and Grimaldi

Accent Equity has as of today stepped in as new majority owners of Plockmatic together with Grimaldi Industri. Plockmatic’s management team will continue in their current roles and co-invest alongside Accent Equity and Grimaldi Industri.

Plockmatic is a trusted and well-established provider of innovative document finishing solutions to the global digital print- and packaging industries. The company offers a unique range of in-house developed products which support current macro trends such as increased automation and individual customization of printed materials.

“We are very proud of our 20 years together with Plockmatic and are excited to see Accent enter as a strong investor. We believe they will be a great partner for us to further enhance our journey of expanding our business and strengthen our offerings”, says Salvatore Grimaldi, CEO & Founder of Grimaldi Industri.

“We are very happy for this opportunity to invest in a truly well-managed company and we are impressed how the management team has developed Plockmatic over the years with a successful long-term strategic view. The company is well positioned to continue its growth journey in several different areas. We have a clear target to grow Plockmatic both organically and through acquisitions and look very much forward to working together with the Plockmatic team”, says Oscar Claeson, Associate Partner at Accent Equity.

The graphical market offers great business opportunities for continued transfer of applications from traditional offset to digital print. With high focus and strong support from our owners, Accent Equity and Grimaldi Industri, we will be able to continue our journey of business development for finishing solutions and other core areas, such as supply chain, marketing, sales and technical support with focus on sustainability. Plockmatic continues to be dedicated in ensuring new and innovative solutions for the market, our partners and customers”, says Jan Marstorp, Group CEO of Plockmatic.

Oscar Claeson (Accent, chairman) & Jan Marstorp (CEO, Plockmatic Group)


Wilson Press installs Morgana BM5050 booklet maker

December 7, 2023 - admin


Wilson Press installs Morgana BM5050 booklet maker

Wilson Press & Mail House, Seneca Falls, New York State, USA, “the one-stop shop for design, print and mail”, became the latest printer to install a Morgana BM5050 booklet maker, manufactured by Morgana Systems Ltd, a Plockmatic International post-press product business, in March 2023.

The Need

Whilst the company was already using an inline booklet maker, there was a demand for additional booklet making that was not governed by the speed of the print engine. An offline booklet maker would provide for both additional capacity and the ability to bind jobs for those print engines not coupled to a dedicated binder.

Wilson Press - Morgana BM5050 Booklet Maker

“The Morgana system is so user friendly. This system allows us to provide improved job turnaround times. Our team like the ease of use of the BM5050. Its menu driven via the user touch screen, and it presents the operator with straightforward logical choices when setting up the job.”

Rick adds: “With typical production runs of about 2,000 copies, the BM5050 just whizzes through the work, meaning that our turnaround times for jobs have been reduced. Our finishing department is just delighted with the binder.”

Wilson Press - Morgana BM5050 Booklet Maker

The Result

The new system at Wilson Press was installed and ready for action from early 2023. With regard to the arrival of the new booklet maker, Rick Ricci said: “We have been familiar with Morgana equipment for some time, so when we were looking to an offline booklet making machine, they were an obvious place for us to look.

Work produced at Wilson Press on the new booklet maker can now include the square-back finish – when a wire-stitched booklet can take on the appearance of a perfect bound product.

Typical throughput at Wilson Press is focused on a core business of designing, printing, and mailing.

Operators can now also compensate for the skew caused when feeding long sheets with a simple adjustment in the user interface, on the fly. Wilson Press can now produce SquareFold booklets in sizes from 4.1 x 5.8” to Letter-sized Landscape, or in the larger Letter-square-format (297 x 297mm).


Morgana BM5050 booklet maker
Wilson Press - Morgana BM5050 Booklet Maker

Apprintable grows again with Morgana booklet maker

October 9, 2023 -


Apprintable grows again with Morgana booklet maker

Apprintable, Wembley, has further grown its stable of Morgana equipment, adding a Morgana Systems BM4050 booklet maker, complete with VFX dual bin feeder, and a new guillotine in the shape of an EBA ideal 56. The equipment was provided direct from Morgana Systems, Milton Keynes, a Plockmatic International company.

Morgana Systems BM4000 suite of booklet makers, introduced at The Print Show last year, provide the solution for work with low to mid volume digital production printers. The BM4050 delivers booklets of exceptional quality, and is able to feed long printed sheets to produce a wide variety of applications, including A4 landscape booklets, which are becoming increasingly popular with customers.

Apprintable Morgana booklet maker

“We had been outsourcing an ever-increasing amount of binding work. When we examined the numbers in detail, and the amount of margin that we were giving away, it was clear that we should now be producing this work in-house with our own equipment,” said Peter Haddad, Managing Director of Apprintable.

“The new booklet maker is very robust – and it just eats up the work, faster than we can print it sometimes. There’s no doubt that it could keep up with two print engines working full-time – but that’s for the future. The fact that we can use the two bins on the feeder to produce the jobs at high speed – one bin for the heavier weight, laminated cover perhaps, and the second bin for the inner pages – is just great for now. It really does produce booklets quickly and efficiently,” he adds. Currently the company has one full time engine, a Xerox Versant 280, with its predecessor, a Ricoh Pro C5300s, still retained as a back-up for those really busy days.

Booklets produced with recycled paper is a niche where Apprintable is winning work at the moment. Customers are keen to find a supplier that can produce print using recycled stock, and there appears to be only a small number of online producers out there that are able to offer a solution at a reasonable price, said Peter Haddad.

The purchase of a new guillotine has also helped speed up production on the shop floor. “Our previous guillotine was fairly basic – yes, it cut paper, but the new EBA ideal 56 can store a multitude of different cut combinations. It can then guide the operator through each stage of the process – telling them when to turn the paper, and when to cut. It really does speed up the whole process, and it is usable by any of our team. You don’t need to be a guillotine expert anymore.”

Going back to the BM4050 binder, Peter added: “I particularly like the fact that the machine is so easy to set up – that’s important when you have inexperienced operators using it. The SquareBack finish is a great enhancement for us to speak to people about – it’s not something that we were ever offered when we were outsourcing, so it’s a new feature for our customers. The “perfect bound” appearance is something to promote to graphic designers, in that the spine that can now be printed on for the larger pagination booklets.”

 

When talking of jobs processed to date, one larger, same-day job came to mind: “1,600 books, 28-pages, printing and binding. We imaged a portion of the text pages so that we could get the binding started, whilst then running the rest of the job on the print engine. It all worked well, and we got the job out on time.” A fine example of where outsourcing the binding just wouldn’t have worked.

About Apprintable

From humble beginnings, Apprintable was built from the ground up. With the goal to improve the quality of the print industry, whilst maintaining a low, fair price. Based in West London, Apprintable presents the premier online printing platform for obtaining personal, promotional, commercial, and informational print products at the lowest prices.

The business has grown quickly, and moved to larger premises in September, 2022. It is now housed in a 3,000sq.ft. leased site in an industrial part of Wembley. “We’ve invested over a quarter-of-a-million pounds in the past two-and-a-half years into our own production equipment, despite the circumstances of the pandemic and recent toughening of market conditions,” added Peter.

If the Apprintable name seems familiar, that could be down to its frequent appearance courtesy of Google ads! A piece of promotional activity that Peter Haddap says is paying for itself time and time again. Whether it’s a small, one-off order, or a company that returns time and again for quantities of the wide range of promotional items, and regular print that Apprintable can produce, it’s been a worthwhile investment. The company holds a good SEO position for a number of its leading products.

See Apprintable online https://www.apprintable.com for a full selection of available product.

“I particularly like the fact that the machine is so easy to set up – that’s important when you have inexperienced operators using it. The SquareBack finish is a great enhancement for us to speak to people about – it’s not something that we were ever offered when we were outsourcing, so it’s a new feature for our customers. The “perfect bound” appearance is something to promote to graphic designers, in that the spine that can now be printed on for the larger pagination booklets.”

Morgana Systems BM4000

The Morgana Systems BM4000 series of booklet makers produce consistently high-quality booklets in a wide range of sizes and media types. The basic configuration, with hand feed capability, enables users to make booklets in an offline mode, meaning that one binder can service multiple print engines.

BM4050 can produce corner stapled documents in portrait A4, as well as edge stapled documents in portrait, plus the popular landscape A4, with up to 200-page booklet capacity. The unit can also support long sheets of up to 660mm, without the Creasing and Side slitting module (CST) or 620mm with CST.

The unit’s heavy duty staple mechanism has been designed for durability, and is maintenance free thanks to a patented solution that eliminates periodic service intervals. Users are able to adjust both the staple and fold positions though the easy initial set-up. The BM4000 series machines have a patented “set positioning mechanism” that allows the operator to adjust the staple position and the direction of travel from the intuitive user interface.

Operators can now also compensate for the skew caused when feeding long sheets with a simple adjustment in the user interface, on the fly. Apprintable can now produce SquareFold booklets in sizes from A6 to A4 Landscape, or in the larger A4-square-format 297 x 297mm.


Apprintable Morgana booklet maker

Sodexo Enterprises adds Plockmatic BLM5050 booklet maker

September 7, 2023 - webmaster


Sodexo Enterprises, Versailles, France, has added a Plockmatic BLM5050 booklet maker to its large print production installation. The new booklet maker links inline to one of the operations Canon imagePRESS C10010VP print engines.

The Plockmatic BLM5050 booklet maker is installed in combination with a Canon imagePRESS C10010VP. The CRD houses one more Canon imagePRESS C10010VP with an existing Plockmatic BLM50 booklet maker, and two Canon imagePRESS C10010VP with Canon AN2 finishers. The department also includes many different types of offline equipment finishing kit, including guillotines, folders, wire binders, and glue binders.

Product Director for Sodexo, Laurent Barbut, said: “We need to produce a lot of different publications every day with our Canon print engines. It’s critical that these documents are finished correctly, even though many are very short runs.”

Senior Account Manager from Canon France, Francois-Xavier Duvernay, commenting on behalf of the print engine supplier, said: “Canon won their first deal eight years ago replacing Xerox/Horizon with Canon/Plockmatic. Since then, Canon has been the main supplier regarding professional print, wide format, software, and inline finishing. As for many in the print industry, the volumes are going down for Sodexo. Because of that they are looking for easy-to-use inline print and finishing solutions to keep print production in-house. Canon and Plockmatic has been able to provide the perfect solutions together for Sodexo so they can produce high quality booklets and other products in an easy and time saving way.”

Canon engineers work closely with Plockmatic to ensure the closest possible integration of the booklet making system with the print engine. This supports ease of use and allows operators of different skill levels to get the most out of the entire printing system.

“The new finishing unit is a great time saver. It means an overall increase in production, which gives my staff additional time to complete other tasks on the job. We are particularly impressed with the ability to finish A4 landscape publications – we couldn’t do that before.”

Speaking particularly about the latest Plockmatic addition, responsible for the production, Cyril Pioli, said: “The BLM5050 is very user friendly – and that’s one of the reasons why we chose this model. The display panel on the unit tells you exactly what to do, step by step, so it’s easy for an inexperienced operator to learn. We also have the Plockmatic BLM50 from some time ago, so we know that Plockmatic solutions are both reliable and robust.”

Laurent Barbut adds: “The new Plockmatic unit has already saved us a lot of production time and money because we can do all of the job production in-house – there’s no need to outsource anything, which is something that always comes at a higher cost.”

Overall, Cyril Pioli said: “Plockmatic deliver a reliable product, with a strong construction, that is easy to use – an ideal solution to work in tandem with our Canon printers. Whilst I do really love our French car industry, Plockmatic equipment is like comparing a Citroen to a Mercedes! It’s built so much better than other products, and it just works.”

“Because we had used a Plockmatic unit before, and we were extremely satisfied with that, we had no hesitation in returning to them again, and this time, of course, we had added extra functionality being able to produce A4 landscape books.”

With reference to future investments Pioli said: “We are always looking for new solutions to invest in – solutions that can make our business better in terms of quality or in our working environment. Special requests from our customers may require a further equipment investment, but for now we are good!”

Plockmatic BLM5000

A new kind of booklet making system that combines robust and reliable performance with a new range of applications, including landscape format. Add the Plockmatic signature square fold finish to A4 landscape format documents for the appearance of a perfect bound book. BLM5000 is available in both staple and stitch versions.

The BLM5000 series is compatible with Canon imagePRESS V1350, imagePRESS V1000 and the imagePRESS V900 series.

The staple version can handle sheets from 206 x 210mm up to 320 x 620mm, in weights from 65 to 350gsm (dependant on paper type). The maximum book thickness is 10mm (approx. 200 pages of 80gsm). The unit contains two low impact staple heads with moving clinchers.

The stitch version can handle sheets from 120 x 210mm up to 320 x 620mm, in weights from 65 to 350gsm (dependant on paper type). With RTC minimum sheet size is 148.5 x 210mm. The maximum book thickness is 10mm, dependant on paper size (approx. 200 pages of 80gsm). The unit includes two ISP stitch heads.

Sodexo Enterprises

The company was founded in 1963. The in-house operation in Versailles, which incorporates the company’s Central Reprographics Department (CRD), came into being in 1990.

Sodexo Enterprises are one of the forty largest companies in France. They produce a wide range of products, mostly focused on food and facilities management. In the in-house print unit Sodexo produce a large variety of print on their Canon print engines that needs to be finished. Many of the print products are output from the Canon devices in booklet form, from 5 to 50 sheets in A4 format (both portrait and landscape), with most requiring a short print run – from just a couple of copies, up to 30. Approximately 80% of the work produced is for their own internal business use, with 20% of work for other companies within the Sodexo Group.