First installation for Impel-Welbound and Bosid partnership
The Bosid 180/46 fully automatic sewing machine has been installed in Lakshmi Printographics in New Delhi. This is the first machine to be installed as part of Impel-Welbound group's partnership with Bosid to introduce high speed sewing machines in the Indian subcontinent.
18 Dec 2019 | By Charmiane Alexander
Arvind Kalasur with the father-son duo of Nagpals of Lakshmi Printographics, New Delhi
Himanshu Nagpal, director Lakshmi Printographics had faith in the Impel-Welbound team while deciding on this investment. "The machine has been installed in one day and it has started delivering optimal speed the next day. We are able to see the real difference. Be it: productivity or the quality of sewing".
Lakshmi Printographics are one of the leading book printers in North India and prints and binds books in large volumes – be it religious books or technical manuals. They have a few pre-owned European sewing machines and always found it a challenge to meet production requirements in peak times, facing issues of breakdowns, availability of parts and dependence on third party servicing.
Welbound Technical Services leads the knowledge business of the group, providing solutions for automation for bindery, hardware and software universalisation of pre-owned equipment, installation and training on bookbinding equipment, and also adoption of new technology and products. Arvind Kalasur, who heads this venture has three decades of experience in working with leading European post-press manufacturers.
He said, "Thread sewing has always been a problem area in India. It is an offline process and a major bottleneck in bookbinding. During the season the demands are unreasonably high and most printers invest in more machines than they need in order to meet this. PUR binding has, to an extent helped the situation, and many of the leading printers have this facility today.
I have seen most of our customers rely on pre-owned European sewing machines to meet their sewing requirements. Though the cost of investment is less, the ownership cost is very high. And a 180 cycles per minute machine ends up running at 30% efficiency."
Kalasur added that there has been a consistent demand from the market to support this need and that is what made the team evaluate the solutions from Bosid. “I visited their factory and spent time understanding the manufacturing process as thread sewing machines require high quality parts to deliver efficiency. I was surprised at their component manufacturing facility and standards, which are on par with what I have seen in Europe during my earlier stint with Muller Martini."
"We will leverage our knowledge to bring in cost efficient solutions in bookbinding, where we do not plan to have our own manufactured products. It is important to provide pre and post installation support to customers. For this, we have specialists in application and electrical-mechanical support who can meet the customer requirements just in time," concluded Arvind Kalasur.
During Pamex in Mumbai, Impel-Welbound will be demonstrating the fully automatic hard cover line from Rokin along with the new soft cover binders that they have developed in their Bengaluru plant
Thread sewn books – at a glance
India is the largest producer of thread sewn books in the world. Most of education books in the private publishing segment are thread sewn, and there are exports to African market. High speed sewing machines from Europe meet the production and quality demands of the Indian book printer, but have the disadvantage of high cost of ownership. Most Indian book printers rely on pre-owned European machines to meet their domestic and export requirements. These do not meet the rated speeds, and there is high cost of maintenance and obsolescence – drives, monitor and PLC requiring replacements. The locally manufactured machines do not have automatic feeding of signatures, there by not meeting the productivity requirements.
"Solutions for sewing and hard cover binding from China are as per global requirements and some of these companies export in large numbers to Europe. We identified high speed thread-sewing and hard cover manufacturing as areas where gaps in India can be addressed through such solutions. The missing link was the knowledge-part of this adoption, which is where we bring in the strengths of Welbound Technical Services", said Pallppuram Sajith, managing director of Impel-Welbound group.
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