An excellent way to cut down on your labor costs during high volume laminating projects without sacrificing a quality end product is to utilize a commercial laminating system. The Fujipla ALM3220 automatic laminator is an exemplary piece of laminating equipment; it automatically feeds, laminates, and trims projects, virtually unattended!
Aside from some of its great features (including the ability to toggle between encapsulation or single-sided lamination, an ultra-quick warm-up time of less than 5 minutes, a footprint of less than 3 square feet, locking roller casters that enable portability, and a feeding tray capacity of up to 200 sheets), this fully-automatic laminator offers major cost savings when compared to traditional pouch laminating or roll laminating used in conjunction with a manual paper trimmer.
Speed
An economy pouch laminator can laminate up to 12″ per minute while a roll laminator laminates 36″ per minute. The ALM3220 has a top laminating speed of 48″ per minute. Pouch laminating doesn’t require trimming after laminating (since laminating pouches are pre-cut), but roll laminating does; for this example, we’ll assume 100 sheets are trimmed per hour. The Fujipla ALM3220 trims projects while they are being laminated, so there is no additional time added to the project in that respect. The total time to produce 1,000 finished sheets by pouch laminating is 15 hours when the pouches are loaded and fed by hand; the speed of lamination is directly affected by the time involved to manually load and center paper into the pouches. Roll laminating production time, which requires hand-feeding the project into the machine and hand-trimming afterwards, takes a total of 14.5 hours to create 1,000 finished sheets. The ALM3220 finishes 1,000 sheets automatically in just 3.13 hours!
Labor Cost
Aside from the physical production time being reduced, the ALM performs all of the required tasks to finish a project all by itself, which eliminates labor cost completely since it can operate unattended.
Other Factors to Consider
When compared to the results of pouch laminating, the finished documents produced by the ALM3320 are superior. Only encapsulation is possible with pouches; they cannot be trimmed to be flush with the edge of a project (since it would come apart over time). Pouches with adhesive designed for toner-based output are limited in size and finish, expensive, and sometimes hard to come by.
Operator fatigue will greatly reduce speed of a project completed with a roll laminator due to the feeding and trimming aspects. The accuracy of trimming can be inconsistent, since it is done by hand. Job sizes of more than 25 sheets are often discouraged due to high labor involvement.
The ALM3220 overcomes all the above mentioned obstacles:
- No labor is required beyond the initial job set up, which takes less than 5 minutes.
- It produces a uniform finished stack.
- The versatility of this machine allows for complete encapsulation, flush cut, or one-sided laminations.
The Fujipla ALM3220 automatic laminator presents not only a great return on investment, but becomes a profit generator for any high-volume work environment that demands high-quality lamination fast!