As personalised printing becomes more advanced and more commonplace, one application in particular is growing in prevalence – the production of personalised booklets.

A typical example is investment reports, where each investor is regularly sent a booklet detailing their individual portfolio or investment trust performance.

These have pages of personalised data unique to each individual, which can result in different numbers of pages and thus different thicknesses of finished booklets throughout each mailing.

These types of booklets are now a commonly produced item for many financial services organisations, but how are their mailrooms dealing with the automated inserting of these booklets into envelopes on the mailing line?

Feeders with the capability to handle books of variable thicknesses are still not widely available as the need has only recently become common place.  However there are solutions coming onto the market, such as the feeder developed by KAS Paper Systems as an option for our Mailmaster 465HS Envelope Inserter.
 
If the books are printed with a barcode or 2D matrix, this system ensures that each book can be tracked through the process using the reporting software. We also have a solution that can be retrofitted to existing equipment.    

A Belgian bank, part of a global financial services corporation, purchased this specialist solution from us a few months ago. They required an envelope inserter to handle variable numbers of sheets and selected enclosures for each envelope which could range in size from DL to C4.
 
The Mailmaster 465HS met this need perfectly.  However they also had a regular run of personalised investment portfolio books which varied significantly in pagination and therefore thickness. So they chose the variable thickness booklet feeder option as well.

There are a growing number of applications where such personalised variable thickness booklets are now being produced. It is ironic that in using leading edge personalised printing technology to produce these books, some organisations are still using hand insertion to mail them. 

The means to automate this work, with the added benefit of data reading technology is now available, and it offers a much greater degree of mailing and data integrity.