Premium Commentary & Analysis
A shop’s cutting department is often thought of—when it’s thought of at all—as an “invisible workhorse”: highly productive—until it’s not. In this feature, Trish Witkowski takes a 360-degree look at cutting equipment, from retrofitting newer features onto older cutters, to the latest automated, and even robot-assisted, cutting systems.
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About Trish Witkowski
Trish specializes in creative solutions and engagement strategies for direct mail and marketing. She frequently travels and speaks to print organizations and their clients to illustrate the power of print.
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Discussion
By Robert Godwin on Mar 08, 2018
Trish,
Excellent article on the cutting stage in print workflows. it is the most difficult bottleneck (think time suck and errors) to deal with. You correctly identified the buy new or update conundrum. Cutters have a long life (good thing), but with the advances in technology they can become a bit of a dinosaur (bad thing).
I am obliged to mention that ScissorHands (yes those Gothically attired ladies at the trade shows) is another solution for automating a guillotine cutter. It also works across a range of various sized cutters so many shops can benefit. Any automation system will reduce errors and the learning curve for an operator. The first time I ran a cutter, it was with a ScissorHands.net system. I cut 7 different jobs, each a different form factor and had them cut, boxed and labeled in 15 minutes. First time, no errors.
So automation is a good choice and there are several good products on the market that address the classic cutter bottle neck in workflow.
By Trish Witkowski on Mar 12, 2018
Robert - thanks so much for your feedback on the article, and for adding Scissorhands to the conversation. I'll check them out!