John Patrick installs a Smart-binder for Church Bulletin production

Continuing its momentum in serving the needs of church-bulletin printers, IBIS has installed a Smart-binder SB-3 'Plus HS' at John Patrick Publishing Company (JPPC) in Trenton, New Jersey, USA.

Founded in 1992, JPPC provides various weekly bulletins and publications for more than 500 churches throughout the United States. In addition to weekly bulletin printing, JPPC provides many other printed communication products for the parishes and website development.

Last year John Hartmann, CEO of JPPC, decided to convert weekly bulletin production from offset to digital printing. In doing so, JPPC followed the general trend within the bulletin printer segment to move to high-speed inkjet. The requirements for weekly parish bulletins are almost a perfect fit for web inkjet printing. The format is around 8 ½" x 11', and page counts are generally between 8 and 16 pages. Average run-lengths are less than a thousand bulletins.
The move from offset to digital print enables the number of different bulletin jobs per hour to increase from a handful to dozens. A single digital web press (with a finishing system) can replace multiple offset presses since there is no set-up time between different jobs. Parish bulletins have an inflexible production deadline with a relatively short time window between receipt of print files and the delivery of finished bulletins. For this the digital print process is ideally suited.

JPPC therefore took the plunge with an HP 'T"-series Pagewide web inkjet press, Tecnau web processing equipment and a near-line IBIS Smart-binder SB-3 'Plus HS'. The transition required planning and IBIS worked with the other vendor partners together to make this as painless as
possible. The result has been a revolution for JPPC, with virtually seamless non-stop bulletin output.

John Hartmann, CEO John Patrick Publishing Co, says:

"The Smart-binder is a heavy duty, fast saddle-stitcher which allows for frequent changes in booklet pagination and is well suited to meeting the requirement for on-time delivery of our short-run Bulletin documents."



John Cracknell, Managing Director
IBIS Bindery Systems UK