A subsidiary of Simple Solutions, BIP Printing Solutions was established four years ago as an in-plant producer of Simple Solutions’ educational curricula. Master Teacher Nancy McGraw, with more than 20 years of experience in a wide variety of subject areas, created the Simple Solutions approach to help students experience success in mathematics. With a growing number of educators wishing to take advantage of her curricula, McGraw met that demand cut that waste and downtime. With our by outsourcing printing through her company, Bright Ideas Press.
“About four years ago, a vendor approached us about producing our Simple Solutions perfect-bound educational workbooks in-house,” explains Joe Dambrogio, who became General Manager of the resulting inhouse print operation, BIP Printing Solutions. “We installed both color and black & white sheet-fed digital tonerbased presses, and that allowed us to produce about 70% of our work in-house. But we wanted to bring everything in-house and have additional capacity to support a trade printing business as well, so we began looking at production inkjet as a solution.”
As a result of its due diligence, BIP Printing Solutions chose a Canon Océ ColorStream 3900 color inkjet digital press to replace its sheet-fed toner devices. “At the time we purchased our ColorStream, we also considered what finishing we needed. The bindery has always been a bottleneck for us, and this was our opportunity to rectify that. If you have 3,000 unfinished book blocks and it takes you three weeks to get them out the door, that’s pretty useless.”
Dambrogio relied on the advice of his Canon sales representative to recommend a solution to create book blocks in-line with the Canon ColorStream. “Our rep told us that the Hunkeler Roll-to-Cut/Stack line was the ideal solution for our needs, and we’ve been very happy with that. It delivers perfectly cut book blocks that are ready to be perfect bound. And it includes a perfing unit as well as the slitter and stacker, ideal for our workbooks.” The integrated line allows BIP Printing Solutions to go from roll to finished book blocks seamlessly in one process at full press speed.