Product of the Week

Direct mail, transactional mail, transpromo, addressed mail: distinctions in the mailing market are becoming increasingly blurred. Financial institutions are beginning to realise that sending out statements is a cost, and increasingly they are moving towards recouping that cost by including promotional material in the envelope with a view to selling additional products. At the same time, direct mail users are turning towards shorter runs of highly-personalised mail material, whose packs are as selective and personalised as their covering letter or envelope.

All of which means that organisations that mail – or their contract printers/mailing houses – are looking for new capabilities from their equipment: the flexibility to move from one type of mailing to another quickly and easily, and the ability to guarantee integrity, not just at bundle level, but at whole pack level. Dutch mailroom manufacturer Buhrs believes it has one solution: its BB700 mailing line, the fastest in its range of envelope inserters, and also the most flexible in terms of application.

The BB700 was launched at the back end of 2006, and currently has half a dozen installations across the spread of UK mail producers: Communisis, Real Digital, Metromail and K2 Direct between them represent all types of personal mail currently used in the UK. Buhrs UK managing director John Rick­etts sees the BB700 being used as “the ideal bridge between direct mail and transactional mail – companies currently active in one sector can use the BB700 to get into another without having to buy or find room for a separate machine”.

Format flexibility
The BB700’s claims to flexibility rest on a combination of its maximum 15mm thick pack size, its precision servo-drives and its envelope size range – it can fill any envelope size or shape from C6 to B4, plus there’s a version that can handle pocket envelopes as well as standard wallets. Its development is a combination of technologies from Buhrs’ 10-year-old BB300 mailing line, an entirely mechanical machine, and the BB600, launched in 2004: servo-driven like its new sibling, but with a limited envelope size range.

Security of mailings is of huge importance in the personalised sector. As Ricketts says: “There’s no point in spending a fortune on a 5,000 run of highly-personalised documents only to find Mr Smith’s document going to Mr Jones.” The BB700’s security features work at document, bundle and pack level. The document is matched to the bundle, which is matched to the envelope, and the BB700’s ‘brain’ (otherwise known as the Buhrs System Controller or BSC) knows exactly where a given document, bundle or pack is at any point throughout the machine. A suite of software that operates from the BSC control panel produces “integrity reports” detailing statistics for each individual mailpiece to satisfy the most demanding production manager: date, time, type of documents in the bundle, and even which feeders on the BB700 they came from, all courtesy of the individual servo-motors that drive each feeder, and each section of the line. Any failed packs are noted on a ‘reprint’ report which is passed back to the printer for re-runs of the spoils; the failed packs are automatically diverted into a bin, while the line continues to run.

Accurate tracking
The BSC’s tracking abilities are triggered either by the reading of a code – typically OMR (optical mark recognition) or a 2D datamatrix – printed on the prime document itself, or by a file-based insertion routine that refers to a database for instructions on how to handle each individual prime document, which items to bundle it with, and any necessary address details. This allows the BB700 to provide “a first-class level of mailing integrity, which is exactly what the transactional market wants,” claims Ricketts. Interestingly, he says, “even direct mail houses are starting to want that kind of integrity now – personalised mailings are more expensive, and whereas in the past you’d have run 100,000 and if 500 didn’t get mailed because they were spoiled, you didn’t worry about that, whereas now every piece has a high value and quite rightly customers don’t want a single piece to go missing”.

The BSC is also the centre for makeready on the BB700, and passes management information to a factory-wide MIS, or makes its own management reports. A memory function stores settings for repeat work and quick machine re-setting. Here, the servo-drives come into their own, with job changeovers taking just minutes and calling for only minimal operator involvement.

The BB700 isn’t designed to link to a printer directly, but instead takes its infeed – the prime document, or covering letter or statement – through a “system channel” designed to handle either cut sheets or reels or fan-fold stacks; customers can take either or both routes, and if both are chosen, the system channels can be wheeled up or away as necessary. A continuous reel is sheeted and slit inline and ‘accumulated’ or gathered as a set of documents in page order. The sheets are then either folded or left unfolded, and placed on a track. As they move down the track, other documents or booklets are selectively fed onto the bundle from one of a maximum 24 feeder stations (all of which can handle flip-flop feeding so that when one feeder runs empty, feeding automatically switches to a duplicate bin). The bundle is then inserted into an envelope. Buhrs technology takes an unusual route here: unlike rival machines, the envelope is fed square-on to its contents, stopped for a fraction of a second, opened by vacuum suckers and filled. Ricketts claims that, rather than feeding into a moving envelope (which does boost a mailing line’s speed) the stop-and-feed route makes for less jams and a tighter fit of the contents to the envelope. After this, the closing station dampens the envelope seal and folds it over, from where the pack exits onto a delivery belt.

Extra features
Options for the BB700 are many and various. One of the most popular, Ricketts says, is an inkjet station for what’s becoming known as ‘disguised mail’ – mail in unwindowed, plain envelopes, where the name and address are inkjetted onto the envelope itself. Unattended working over a relatively long period is a possibility with the BB700. Each feed station can be equipped with its own auto-loader, as can the envelope feeder. There’s a choice of feed types – friction feeders for heavier documents, and suction feeders for tricky stocks – with each suction feeder able to handle documents up to 3mm, and each friction feeder taking documents up to 6.5mm; each type will go down to just a single sheet.

Another interesting attribute of the BB700 is Buhrs’ configuration flexibility: it’s possible to build BB700s in what are known as ‘left-left’ configurations, where the flow travels to the left and comes off at the left, or ‘right-right’ configurations similarly. What this means for a busy mailing house is that two machines can be set up back-to-back, with their feeders next-door to each other and their deliveries likewise – and that means a single operator can work two lines, both loading and unloading.

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SPECIFICATIONS
Max speed 14,000 packs per hour
Max envelope size 250x353mm
Min envelope size 114x162mm
Max single item thickness 3/6.5mm
Max pack thickness 15mm
Price from £150,000 (six feeders plus conveyor output)
Contact Buhrs (UK) 01256 329191, www.buhrs.com

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THE ALTERNATIVES
Pitney Bowes FPS Series
Like Buhrs, Pitney Bowes has recognised the market need for flexibility, and the FPS – Flexible Productivity Series – is the US company’s answer. A combination of rotary and friction feeders handles thicker items as well as single sheets, and feeders are servo-driven. The FPS can read optical marks or link to a database for secure processing and it can also handle reels or sheets at the feed end, with input modules being mobile for easier use. It offers a similar range of options to the BB700, including inkjet addressing, banding on delivery, and a variety of input handlers including unusual fold schemes.

Max speed 14,000 packs per hour
Max envelope size 254x330mm
Min envelope size 102x171mm
Max single item thickness 6.5mm
Max pack thickness 10mm
Price from £80,000
Contact Pitney Bowes 08705 252525 www.pbdmt.com

Muller 6800
The Muller systems are known for their modularity, which makes them highly flexible. Like the Buhrs BB700, the 6800 can accept input as reels, which are sheeted and slit, or as sheets; fold or leave flat; accumulate documents up to 6.5mm bundle height, and inserted into pre-formed envelopes. There’s no maximum feed stations, and it can be configured to run inline to a laser printer or offline as a standalone machine. It reads printed marks as standard (a wider range than the BB700) but can’t integrate with a database for file inserting.

Max speed 15,000 packs per hour
Max envelope size 250x345mm
Min envelope size 218x300mm
Max single item thickness 6.5mm
Max pack thickness 6.5mm
Price from £64,000
Contact Mailing & Mechanisation (UK) 01327 315031, www.mailingandmech.com

Kern 2500 Multimailer
Kern’s machines are noted for their speed, but this mid-range model is also scoped to allow for flexibility. It has up to 28 feed stations, with a modular approach that handles reels and sheets at the front-end, along with various optically-driven fold formats. It can’t handle as big an envelope as the BB700, and it’s a bit slower too; configurations aren’t flexible either.

Max speed 12,000 packs per hour
Max envelope size 176x250mm
Min envelope size 114x162mm
Max single item thickness 6.5mm
Max pack thickness 10mm
Price not available
Contact Kern UK 01489 564141, www.kern.co.uk