In print operations, the cutting department just doesn’t see the kind of attention that other areas receive. “The paper cutter is like a hot water heater in your home,” says Richard Peereboom of C&P Microsystems. “As long as you have hot water, everything is fine and nobody thinks about it. But when the hot water stops, everything is disrupted.” 

Richard is right. In print production, we look at the cutters as an invisible workhorse. Of all of the print facility tours I’ve been on in my career (it’s a big number, by the way), I can think of very few that have stopped so that we could ogle the cutting systems.

Although fanfare isn’t a requirement for any given department, respect certainly is. After all, there’s a lot at stake when the printed page gets all the way to the cutter. Is this where we can tolerate a bottleneck? Is this where we open the door to human error? With so much at stake, I wanted to know more about what’s happening in paper cutting and handling, and where it’s going. As we’ve all watched innovation and focus move through the production workflow from prepress to press and finally to the bindery, cutting is starting to get the attention it deserves—even though the cutting line is not generally viewed as a profit center.