A new home for books: docupoint GmbH location in Ostfalen Technology Park
Air – light - space. You can see that the eleven docupoint staff have been waiting a while to stretch out their arms like this. At 1,100 square metres, the production area at the new location is three times as large as in the centre of Magdeburg. The new building in Ostfalen Technology Park and the procurement of new machinery cost around two million euros. The European Regional Development Fund contributed 600,000 euros of this.
The company’s headquarters will celebrate a grand opening in early September, although the machines have already been running since mid-June. For a while, printing was done at both the old and new locations. The school yearbooks which had been ordered – a new service offered from this summer under the website www.abizeitungen24.de – had to be finished, as well as dissertations, collections of loose pages, textbooks for universities and guidebooks and novels for publishing companies from Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Berlin and Mannheim. A further important segment is the printing of sheet music, manuscripts, music notebooks and even whole orchestral scores. The main business comes from producing reprints for academic and legal publishers – small print runs of between 50 and 1,500 copies for which the expensive offset process is not financially viable. docupoint fills this niche and markets itself as a commission printer, one of around 30 across Germany.
“Our customers value our flexibility,” reports Andre Lange, the staff member responsible for public relations. “A reprint can be printed and delivered within five days. Everything is fully automated. Only in the layout department are the templates checked again, and adjusted for print if necessary.“
One of the layouters is wheelchair user Marco Borchardt. The company hasn’t just created an accessible workspace for him. In the new headquarters, everything is deliberately wheelchair accessible – without steps, with a lift and with appropriate facilities. This is particularly important to the Managing Director Anja Strangfeld and her assistants Bernd Gralka and Steffen Schlüsselburg, and these three partners also have a focus on the environment. In spring 2010, the company joined the Saxony-Anhalt Environmental Alliance. The new production building has a photovoltaic system on the roof.
Who could have foreseen this when docupoint began to breathe new life into a previously insolvent company on 300 square metres in 1998? And that so successfully? The three partners and one employee got going. But the orders needed ever more space, so two and a half years ago, the management had to decide whether to rent more, or to build something brand new.
“The conditions fitted perfectly, so it was fairly easy to decide on the new building. Now I can say it was absolutely the right decision, since here we were able to design everything exactly as we wanted it, especially the working processes.”
The machinery and equipment is arranged in a large U shape. The thick rolls of paper and palettes of sheets are delivered through the rolling door on the left. From the paper entry it goes straight to printing, and from there round the corner to cutting and binding and into cover production. Finally, the book, now wrapped in plastic film, is passed on to shipping.
The docupoint staff are especially proud of the new machinery. That includes, for example, the new ET 1300 binding machine from “Heidelberg”, with a three-sided cutter. This cuts the books into the final shape after printing. The Polar 92 guillotine with lifting platforms avoids the need for laborious and difficult lifting. The paper palette is lifted onto the cutting table by a lifting platform and, on the other side, the cut paper is moved on again with the help of a smaller lifting platform. This makes the work significantly easier and thus ensures faster production. In the next year, the plastic wrapping on the books should also be fully automated using new technology.
The new location can be expanded at any time. Even now, the three bosses are considering new machinery and more staff. Three young people will begin an apprenticeship on August 1st, 2010, at docupoint – a company with big plans for growth.
Author: Margitta Häusler
Contact:
docupoint GmbH
Otto-von-Guericke-Allee 14
39179 Barleben
Deutschland
Tel.: +49 (0)3 91 - 6 11 64-6
info@doccupoint-md.de