Book Binders and Printers since 1890 – Deanprint (Video Transcript)

We started work as print finishers in the eighteen nineties, moved to our present location in the early twenties and we have been settled here ever since. The factory is a 50,000 square foot factory and it contains approximately 109 pieces of printing and finishing equipment which allows us to produce numerous varied print finishing products over the range of machinery we have got.
You’ve got the machines here with 109 pieces of printing and finishing equipment. We have the upto the minuet machines going back to some machines that are 60 odd year old. You can do things and sizes and turns and various print finishing processes that in a lot of places not only have they not got the kit for but they have forgotten how to do.
We currently provide print finishing to five main market areas they are: education, hair and beauty stationary, government, commercial and trade.

It is a strange company in one senses because it is still small enough to care about the individual walking through the door, yet large enough to cope with the bigger print finishing contracts. With just under 50 people it is still personal and people still want to get it right.
We have a great workforce here very dedicated, very flexible, can operate numerous print finishing machines, and they really are key to what we can offer here.
I think here at Deanprint we have the experience and knowledge to cover far more than a lot of print finishing houses or other print centres. Because of the depth of experience and the amount of people we tend to take on things and people ring us when everybody else fails really. When it comes to print finishing we do the unusual.
We can do the all under one roof printing and finishing service. We can design, we can print, we can turn the print then into books, hard backed, soft backed, wiro bound books, perfect bound books, saddle stitched books, singer sewn books, we can also produce ring binders slip cases and boxes. We can foil block them we can put dust jackets on them, we can add head and tail bands, ribbons. We can pack them, shrink wrap them and we can also deliver them using our own fleet of vehicles.
We can always cope, and there is enough experience here that whatever somebody puts in front of us we have done something like it before. From the normal print finishing processes that we do, the normal perfect bound books, the normal case bound books, right through to the other end of the spectrum where people are still tooling leather and gilding the edges of pages, of which there aren’t that many places left. We can couple that with the new technology of the digital presses, which we have got three of along with three litho machines, through our new case making machine and our perfect book binding machine. We can mould those elements together to make an efficient print finishing service with a bespoke product that can be quite unusual sometimes. We can either do the whole job in house, as we do for many of our commercial clients or for the trade we can take their printed sheets and we can finish the work for them. Many printers have their own limited in house finishing. We have the bits that they perhaps don’t have the case binding the slip cases the ring binding we can accommodate large sheet sizes through our machines here so we really can do most things that most standard print finishers can not do.
We recently carried out a customer satisfaction survey and the results were absolutely fantastic. Extremely positive the way they spoke about the communication, the quality of the job, the after care, deadlines were hit – that came through strongly in the survey.
We introduced our management system into the company about three year ago. It was basically to improve on our estimating, to ensure we could improve the accuracy and speed of quoting so customers would benefit from speedier quotes.
We now aim turn round all our prices in under 24hours usually half a day.
The system allow us to be a lot more efficient, all individuals can see where in the works a job is up to. Anybody can answer the question as soon as a customer comes onto the phone to make sure the customer gets the information that they require as soon as possible.
At our bussiest times we can have up to 50 or 60 jobs going through the factory at any one time, so it is important that we have systems in place that we can manage the jobs and keep track of where they are up to and to hit the deadlines that you promised your customers you would achieve.
We always aim to hit deadlines and we always do hit those deadlines.
We are in the third year of our iso9001 accreditation now and we have found that a superb tool for both ourselves and our customer really. It involves putting procedures, checking your procedures, auditing those procedures on a regular basis. So each print finishing job as it come through it has its own quality control card, that has a three signature check off at each stage of production. Some of our more complex jobs can have 8, 9 or 10 procedures in rather than just a simple print it fold it.
We have backup everywhere, so we may have two machines that will do the same job or we have skilled girls on the tables that can make, by hand, the products that the machines may be making. So if a machine breaks down or an operator is off sick or we just have so much work on that we can not put your job through that machine then we have go options to give the same quality and enable up to meet the deadlines.
I think we can cope with anything really, I do not think there has ever been a phone call when we have gone…. I don’t know. People can have different names for things in the trade but we do everything. We can always turn things around in good time, we have the capacity within the building to work more hours if need be, we have a very flexible work force, and we can meet peoples requirements. We can deliver everything on time, every time.