“The printing industry is a price-driven industry,” says Frédéric Fabi. That is why the founder and CEO of the French Groupe dupliprint invested in a SigmaLine Compact with an inline Antaro Digital perfect binder from Muller Martini.
Since Frédéric Fabi (third from right in the picture above) founded his own company 32 years ago, Groupe dupliprint has been one of the most innovative graphic arts companies in France and is now the country's undisputed number one in digital printing. In 1999, Groupe dupliprint – which, in addition to Domont, also has a plant in Mayenne in the Pays de la Loire region – was the first French printing company to offer its customers web-to-print solutions. And in 2012, it expanded its machine park with the first fully automatic short-run book production line.
“A seamless workflow is indispensable”
The core business of the company, which employs a total of 245 people in the two plants, is the production of softcover books, which takes place in Domont in 7/24 mode. And there, in turn, the focus is on digital short-run production. At Groupe dupliprint, which offers its own web-based solution,
Sosimply, for short print runs, this means that the print run per title is between 10 and 2500 copies. The company prints larger jobs using offset and finishes them on two perfect binders: a Corona from Muller Martini and a KM 600 from Kolbus in Mayenne.
Even though it can rely on many years of experience in digital production, Groupe dupliprint continuously adapts its production processes to the latest technology trends. “A seamless workflow without a lot of manual intervention is indispensable for the short-run sector,” says Frédéric Fabi. “Because the printing industry is a price-driven industry.”
Customer order data goes directly into the company system
At Domont, a seamless workflow means that customer order data from all over France – primarily from publishing houses that want to avoid unnecessary storage costs by using on-demand production, and increasingly from self-publishers, even though this segment is not part of the company's main business – is sent directly to the company's proprietary system as an XML file. The batches – the thick books first, then the thin books – are then transferred to the
Connex workflow system, are fed into the offline HP T380 digital printing press and then into the SigmaLine Compact digital book block production system before the softcover books are finished in the inline Antaro Digital perfect binder and the
InfiniTrim trimming robot.
The second SigmaLine investment
Five years ago, Groupe dupliprint invested in a system from a different machine manufacturer. However, its productivity proved to be too low due to lower automation. “That's why we decided on a more economical system,” says Frédéric Fabi.
“After a thorough evaluation, we chose the SigmaLine Compact and the Antaro Digital. My employees took a particularly close look at the SigmaLine Compact before we made the purchase decision. I myself did not see it live before it was installed at our company. But I have known Muller Martini for many years. And we had a first-generation SigmaLine in our plant many years ago.”
