Background 
Four decades of commercial print leadership 

Lake County Press, located near Chicago, is nationally known not just for the high-quality of its commercial printing, but also for the wide variety of products and services it offers, from printing through to fulfillment. With a 45 year-plus heritage in litho, it now also leads in digital print-on-demand and web-to-print. 

“Our litho commercial business gave us a lot of growth, but since 2008, when the economy changed, we moved more toward the digital side, knowing that it’s a growing area of the market,” explains Daniel Murphy, Senior Vice President-Director of Manufacturing at LCP.

Challenges
Time and labor in conventional bindery processes

LCP has fueled its aggressive growth in digital print and digital services by frequently investing in new, cutting edge technologies while continuing to leverage existing traditional processes where it made sense. 

Murphy explains: “We had an Indigo 7600 on our floor, doing an extensive amount of digital production. We always took our stitched books and ran them through our conventional bindery. But, doing that added a lot of extra processes between hand collation, folding, and then stitching at our conventional stitchers. There's a lot of time, labor and therefore money that's associated with that.”

Solution
Bourg Booklet Maker ExPress with the BSF (BSF + BCM-e + BM-e) 

Looking to expand its digital capacity, and boost its finishing productivity accordingly, LCP researched its options. Ultimately, it found the ideal complete solution, jointly presented by C.P. Bourg and HP Indigo at the at the 2015 GraphExpo show: the Bourg Booklet ExPress w/ BSF, integrated in-line with the HP Indigo 7800 digital press.

For LCP, the Bourg Booklet ExPress w/ BSF solution was the clear frontrunner because of the dual production capabilities, and fast return on investment. 

“It was a very easy decision to go in-line with our stitched books and cut down all those extra processes,” recalls Murphy. “We looked at the competitors and saw that the Bourg Booklet Maker ExPress with the BSF would give us the most versatility to produce in-line and near-line on the same device, which no other solution could do. And then, when we did the ROI calculation on this piece of equipment, it came out just over a year, so it was a very quick and easy decision.” 

The Bourg Booklet Maker ExPress w/ BSF solution brings together the Bourg Sheet Feeder (BSF), with the Bourg Bleed Crease Module (BCM-e) and the Bourg Booklet Maker (BM-e), providing LCP with a highly versatile, booklet finishing solution.  

The dual-mode BSF offers the best of both worlds for companies like LCP that have multiple printers but don’t want to lock themselves into either in-line or off-line finishing. Positioned in-line with one press (in LCP’s case, the Indigo 7800), it can also work in near/off-line with any other printer in LCP’s plant. Its two feeding stations allow for a wide range of applications, with the capacity to accept fully stocked trolleys of collated sheets from other presses. 

The BCM-e offers the highest-quality knife creasing, with automatic adjustment to the variable speeds of the connected equipment. Capable of precision trimming coated and uncoated stock up to 350 gsm, in the widest range of sizes of any bleed-trim device designed for digital printing, the BCM-e easily meets the needs of LCP’s diverse offering.

The BM-e is Bourg’s high-end, award-winning booklet maker that produces on-demand booklets with unparalleled quality and speed. The paper flow follows a stitch-fold-trim process, producing books of up to 120 pages (30 sheets) at up to 5,000 booklets per hour – the best in its category.   

Benefits
In-line + near-line versatility 

With the Bourg Booklet Maker ExPress w/ BSF installed in-line with the Indigo press, LCP is able to switch at any time from inline mode and off-line/near-line mode, to use it with production runs printed on its other digital and offset presses. 

Murphy explains: “We can print on the HP Indigo and feed to the press feeder while simultaneously running a totally different job on the Bourg. Or we can run the HP and in-line finish the books that are coming off that.” 

A year later…

On September 22, 2016, the team at C.P. Bourg followed up with LCP a year after their purchase to find out if they were satisfied with the investment made. Murphy responds: “We are very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to other printers. Our throughput increased exponentially and the ROI came just over a year, which corresponds to our initial estimation.”