~Excerpted from DigiBook Mag,
June 2005
Mr. Vanhooff, after several
months of intensive use of your la Walck
workshop equipped with four Digitizing
Lines, can you tell us something about the
safety, of the operators of course, but also
that of scanned volumes?
From the point of view of
users, one can speak not only of ergonomic
and user-friendly operation (which is also a
safety aspect for the finished product), but
also of enhanced safety for books that have
been processed by the DL5000. In fact,
DL5000 applies only two mechanical stresses
on books, the suction of covers (for
supporting them fully) and the suction of
pages by the lifting cylinder. No other
mechanical stress is applied on any part of
the book.
We have even digitized
newspapers, which are known to be difficult
to handle because of their size as well as
the paper quality. The hitches encountered
were related to the intense and sustained
use in production (24h a day and 5 days a
week), but only from the point of view of
the machine, it was never anything to do
with the books. The frequency of hitches is
very minimal in comparison to the actual
hours of use in production.
Currently, we have digitized
more than 12500 books, of a size larger than
double A2, which represents more than
5,000,000 typed pages, over a period of 5
months of production.
Mr. Vanhooff, do you have
anything to say regarding the reliability of
DLs?
After more than a year of
use, which included coming to grips with the
machine, a running-in period, a testing
period, a period of “industrial” tuning-up
and finally a period of actual production,
we notice that the efficiency obtained is
slightly better than what was anticipated.
This is due to the actual efficiency of the
DL5000 as well as the quality of the
product, from the point of view of its
design as well as from the point of view of
ease of maintenance.
Mr. Vanhooff, what do you
have to say about the after sales service?
Being confronted with
constraints of just-in-time production, we
operate with a maintenance contract at two
levels, the first for immediate remotely
controlled interventions by our personnel,
using spare parts that are already
available, and the second one for standard
interventions provided by our partner,
within timeframes that allow us to maintain
our average level of productivity.
Mr. Vanhooff, can you tell
us if you have attained your production
objectives? If not, why so?
Yes, but I think I have
already answered this question when we
discussed the questions of safety at the
beginning of the interview. Moreover, we are
always ready to implement any idea or method
that allows us to improve this.
Mr. Vanhooff, if
Infotechnique was entrusted with a new
project that required the use of equipment
that provided higher production volumes,
would you purchase DL 5000s or equivalent
equipment from i2S / ASSY to achieve this?
The answer is YES without
hesitation, for several reasons:
