JPS Books + Logistics serves educational curriculum publishers and corporate training professionals. They produce student workbooks for K-12 schools, and corporate manuals mainly dealing with safety, regulatory and compliance training. These materials are standard 8 ½” X 11” books that are most commonly soft cover perfect bound or coil bound. The K-12 market has rebounded better from the pandemic than corporate training.
The pandemic definitely has had a major impact on the printing market, further amplifying JPS’ two big challenges – uptime and throughput.
JPS had been 100 percent digital on the print side for a while. In 2021 the company went from 100 percent toner to cut sheet inkjet. In 2023 JPS took the next step and put in continuous inkjet, installing the Tecnau Revolution 50 Stack 5251 with the Canon ColorStream 3900Z printer. “We felt that Canon and Tecnau had a strong partnership. There was a lot of confidence that the two companies were in lockstep and could provide a good end-to-end solution,” stated Mr. Johnson.
In May 2022, JPS implemented the million-page challenge, which was printing one million pages per day. At that time, this seemed to be a lofty goal considering JPS was only printing about 400,000 pages on any given day. “Now with the new equipment alone we easily print one million pages per day. Our new record for a single day is 1.6 million pages,” proclaimed Hunter.
In addition to the Revolution 50 Stack 5251, JPS Books + Logistics also purchased the Tecnau TC 1350 RW Dynamic Perforator, which enables smart perforation with a small footprint. The TC 1350 RW provides dynamic vertical perforations integrated on the rewinder. It includes two independent perforation wheels with single or coupled knives and programmable perforation lengths. This critical piece of equipment perforates pages that are often assessments or learning certificates, which are torn out of workbooks.
During the pandemic, JPS experienced supply chain issues when trying to source pre perforated paper. “Pre perforated paper was not readily available and the price was through the roof, making it a nightmare situation,” said Hunter. “Also, seven day turn times were expected with short runs of 100 – 1,000 books. The sourcing of pre perforated paper ate into these turn times. Being able to dynamically perforate pages on the fly with the Tecnau TC 1350 RW has been a huge value add from a supply chain and sourcing standpoint,” added Mr. Johnson.
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