More and more organizations are recognizing the variety of vertical markets that can benefit from digital book manufacturing.  Case in point:  Arvato Digital Services.  Arvato provides full service printing services and specializes in customized content for the healthcare industry.  This content includes enrollment kits, provider directories and plan benefit summaries.

Recently, Arvato Digital Services' print team, Media Factory, installed Muller Martini's SigmaBinder, SigmaTower and SigmaTrimmer in order to accommodate a new project from a major managed care provider.  According to Todd Potrykus, Media Factory Director, "The job involved a wide variety of personalized material to be produced internally utilizing a large arsenal of continuous and cut sheet printers, all supplying personalized content bound into dynamic kits.  The combination of SigmaLine's ability to dynamically bind variable page books and the high level of productivity we achieved enabled us to both meet and exceed our customer's requirements.  In addition, the fact that SigmaLine does not group orders by like page counts for perfect binding has increased our flexibility downstream in the supply chain in both minimizing turnaround times and reducing our operational costs."

Muller Martini's SigmaLine is the world's first commercial-quality, totally modular digital book manufacturing solution.  The fully automated SigmaBinder produces variable size books with a speed of up to 1,000 copies per hour.  It's equipped with hot melt glue perfect binding technology for spine and side gluing.  The SigmaTower's space-saving design efficiently cools the books prior to trimming.  The SigmaTrimmer utilizes a patented principle with three independently driven knife elements, automatically trimming books of varying sizes and thickness.  Book sizes and book thickness can be changed from cycle to cycle.

The benefits derived from a digital solution are many and include a reduction in traditional offset, warehouse and fulfillment costs.  In addition to personalized member material, many types of products – from law books to textbooks to operating instructions – need to be continually updated.  With SigmaLine, small run jobs and jobs that need frequent updating become economically feasible.  Commented Mr. Potrykus, "The SigmaBinder, SigmaTower and SigmaTrimmer were the perfect fit for our healthcare client's needs, delivering production speeds of 900+ cycles per hour while producing dynamic page counts.  We were not disappointed in Muller Martini's outstanding reputation for high quality equipment."