Legatoria Ellecibi has recently installed a brand new Polar N Pro paper cutter complete with automatic system for entry and delivery of the bundles, for improved productivity and cutting precision which in bindery is the fundamental starting point for the success of the final product.
If you get in your hands every issue of Converter&Cartotecnica, it’s also thanks to them. We are talking about Legatoria Ellecibi of Gorgonzola (Milan), with 15 collaborators, which in addition to being one of the historic companies in the province of Milan and a point of reference for many printers, has been our reference supplier for over 20 years now.
The company with this corporate name was born in 1985, following the footsteps of Legatoria Colombo, and began its activity with leafleting service, and then inserted saddle-stitching and special applications dedicated to mailing.
“My dream from the beginning was to have paper binding and hardback lines in the company, a dream that came true around the mid-2000s, specializing ourselves in sectors with greater added value, thanks to important technological investments, but above all able to give that satisfaction to us who are the last link in the production chain of a book or a magazine, and to see an editorial work completed in our hands”, says Fabio Bassani, owner of the company managed together with his wife Tiziana Mauri, who manages the administrative department.
Quality is the objective, starting from the cut
Ellecibi has always favored high quality and this policy is still rewarding today; in fact all the investments carried out by the management have been aimed at improving the qualitative aspect of the work and of the finished product. “The finishing processes for paperback and hardback require a certain accuracy and the right technologies, but as we all know, a job that finishes well must start just as well and be managed in the best possible way right from the moment it enters the company”, Fabio continues, “and for us, the entry of the work into production necessarily passes through the cutting phase. We had a fully functional paper cutting machine for around 23 years, and we know that these are machines that can work, if well maintained, for several decades, but also thanks to discussions with our partner supplier Heidelberg we have analyzed our entire cutting cycle, putting the basis for this new project that has changed our working life for the better”.
Let’s start from the mistaken assumption that the cut is taken for granted, so much so that most of the time in bookbinding estimates it is not even foreseen. If we stop to reflect, as they did in Ellecibi, also thanks to the support of Lorenzo Ariberti, postpress Business Driver of Heidelberg Italia, it clearly emerges that instead it is one of the crucial phases of the production process of ant printed staff, and if done badly , it can even compromise the good result. A study conducted by Polar has shown that apart from the actual cutting which requires a few seconds, it is all the management of incoming and outgoing signatures that requires more time, therefore it is advisable to evaluate the adoption of peripheral systems, specifically as did Ellecibi.
“A precise cut is reflected in a precise fold and in an equally precise paper binding. Making the wrong cut, even only for 2mm, takes an instant and this then entails a series of corrective actions which in the end can compromise the quality of the printed matter or in any case waste a lot of production time”, says Bassani again, underlining the fact that now the paperback line fed from the new cutter does not require adjustments with the change of signature, since the cuts from the first to the last are identical, and there are no longer those small millimeter jumps, which required adjustments on the paper binding line.
Thanks to the new Polar N Pro cutter equipped with automatic loading and unloading of bundles, all those onerous operations for the operator are now performed by the machine and managed by the handling line without any difficulty even in the maximum 120×160, the typical format of book publishing. Before this investment, the cutting phase in Ellecibi represented an important bottleneck and forced the operator to try to be faster than the folding machines, which always had to be fed. Now the situation has literally turned upside down and the 9 folding machines are fed without any trouble, so much so that in the downtime that occasionally occurs, the two operators in charge of cutting help their colleagues in other phases of production.
“Many underestimate the peripherals of the cutter both in input and output, thanks to which instead it is possible to greatly lighten the daily effort for the operator, who is thus able to produce more and better. Furthermore, thanks to the function that allows you to memorize the job settings for each customer, it allows you to recall the job in a few seconds compared to the previous machine, as well as a whole series of small improvements which, however, at the end of the day, especially when the orders, make the difference”, adds Ariberti.
New investments make way for young people
Ellecibi is also active in the training of young people and participates in training programs proposed by some Graphic Institutes in Milan, hosting students for work-related internships, and thanks to this experience it has managed to identify several young people who at the end of their path were hired. “We strongly believe in the training of young people and we are happy to have managed to include them in the company, creating the right mix with our experienced operators. It takes patience with young people, but a good starting point is certainly having modern technologies that can help ensure that young people are passionate about jobs like ours, which is always and in any case a craft job and also quite tiring, but characterized by a great passion”, concludes Fabio Bassani.
