UEL’S cutting edge

The University of East London has revitalised their Print Centre with the latest print and finishing technology from Xerox and Duplo and hope this will make them ‘One of the most cutting edge printing facilities in Higher Education in the UK’.
Their Docklands Campus facility, which was formed in 2006 as a consolidation of three former print centres at their Barking, Stratford and Docklands sites, works in 5 year technology updates and Steve Marlow, Head of Print Services, explains the brief for the current cycle of changes.

“We wanted to increase our production efficiency and offer a broader service and product spectrum to our customers. Our brief for the printing side was primarily focussed on workflow speeds, improvement in print quality and creating cost efficiencies. With the finishing side it was more about finding improvements in automation and intelligence, we were keen to introduce variable data printing in-house as well.”

In December 2010 the Print Centre went through a process of full regeneration, including a new Xerox Colour 1000 Press, two Xerox Nuvera 144 EA Production Systems, a Xerox 700 digital colour press, wide format printing plus a Digital System 5000ProSCC bookletmaking line from Duplo.

The Duplo modular system includes a DSF-5000 intelligent sheet feeder with barcode reader for variable print, plus an antistatic feeding feature. The sheets then enter the SCC-PRO inline top and tail slitter and creaser, which in turn feeds the set into Duplo’s DBM-500/T bookletmaker and fore-edge trimmer. The books are then finished with an ASM-500 squareback device.

“At IPEX we were actively seeking a bookletmaker that suited our new print production model. We were impressed with the build quality and modularity of the Duplo system and we felt the line could be tailored for our needs. We were particularly impressed with the squareback finish, traditionally higher education printed prospectuses and booklets can be quite thick, so the inline spine square along with the SCC crease has made a massive difference to the quality of our books,” comments Steve.

The university offers a vast array of different course programmes, from architecture to media to teaching, and with this there is demand for large amounts of different types of print work passing through the Print Centre every day. This requirement to become more reactive, flexible and efficient was a major driver in the upgrade of equipment.
“We find the Duplo system very intuitive to set-up with the PC front end, and the fact that you can pull up pre-programmed jobs that configure automatically without the need for tools is a major factor. Previously we had to change set-up between jobs with socket sets and spanners, as far as labour is concerned that is dead time, now the Duplo changes at the touch of a button,” says Bob Ellis, Principal Finisher.

“Now we have this cutting edge technology in place, we are looking at even more targeted marketing for the university with the use of variable data print. We have a mini prospectus project that we are developing, which we can run two-up on a digital sheet and stitch on the Duplo using the front barcode readers to ensure complete integrity with each book. We are also looking at QR codes as a form of marketing. These kinds of projects are now the future for this print facility, and we believe that we can drive the university forward with this new investment in production equipment,” concludes Steve.