BÖWE SYSTEC AG 2015-06-18
The output center of Allianz Deutschland AG in Unterföhring is one of Germany's biggest digital printing houses. Every day, the facility produces 400,000 letters and dispatches them to the insurance company's customers within 24 hours. At the end of 2014, Allianz replaced its three existing policy systems with two faster inserting systems, namely BÖWE SYSTEC's high-performance Fusion Cross. The newly installed systems lost no time in showing what they were capable of, outputting some 15 million sheets of paper in the year-end production run.
With over 20 million customers, Allianz Deutschland is Germany's leading insurance company. The company produces all its mail at its output center in Unterföhring near Munich. All correspondence and insurance policies drawn up anywhere in Germany end up at the output center as electronic documents, where they are forwarded to the customer in paper form. This can amount to as much as 680 million pages a year which, stacked on top of one another, would create a column of paper 30 kilometers high.
For the previous decade, Allianz had been using three BÖWE SYSTEC Quattro systems, each with six infeed channels, for inserting policies into envelopes. By 2014, however, the machines had come to the end of their service lives and were to be replaced. Allianz took this opportunity to review its policy production process. "Over the past 20 years, the process of optimizing our mailing system, with collation of various outbound policies and letters addressed to the same customer in a single envelope, has proved a major challenge," explains Robert Herele, Head of Print and Output Services at Allianz. "In some cases, our highly complex multi-channel systems were having to cope with more than six different types of paper. Now, the low-cost full-color options offered by our new ink-jet printer mean that we can arrange the various forms in the correct order as early as the web printing stage, then collate them into a single mailing at high speed." The new inserting systems would consequently only have to be equipped with one infeed channel, rather than the six required to date. In addition, the same production volume would be handled by a maximum of two instead of the previous three systems, with a significant reduction in service times and downtimes. "Having looked at other systems, we ultimately opted for BÖWE SYSTEC's Fusion Cross because it represented the best value for money," explains Robert Herele. "Moreover, the fact that we had been using BÖWE SYSTEC systems for 20 years and would not need to change manufacturer certainly made the switch from the old production system easier."
The successful bid was followed by a nine-month planning and implementation process with monthly project meetings at BÖWE SYSTEC's factory in Augsburg. "Our demands were exacting, to say the least. For example, we now required two systems to do a job that had been handled by three systems over the previous decade, and by five systems prior to that," emphasizes Robert Herele. "The monthly progress reports and in-depth meetings were extremely worthwhile because they allowed us to identify the optimum solution and to incorporate any changes at short notice. We've never worked that intensively with a postprocessing manufacturer before."
New developments tailored precisely to customer requirements "The requirement was for just two inserting systems to produce 30,000 policies or 900,000 sheets of paper in a single shift - that's some output if you consider that the policies also have to be stapled," adds Alexander Graf, Sales and Project Management at BÖWE SYSTEC. To achieve this level of performance, the Augsburg-based inserting specialist developed several new modules, including a nest folding module with two stapling heads, for the Fusion Cross. "The module retrieves the information on whether and when to staple from the barcode," explains Alexander Graf. "If need be, two groups of documents can be stapled in parallel. Rather than working with continuous wire, we use cassette staplers that can staple up to 80 sheets of paper together." The collating track now also features a synchronization module which, besides supporting extremely high output, now allows both unstapled documents and stapled policiesto be assembled highly flexibly in a single envelope. The two highperformance Fusion Cross inserting systems configured for Allianz were also equipped with high-speed infeed channels which likewise serve to enhance performance. "During the cutting process, the machine pauses for an instant before accelerating to top speed," says Alexander Graf. "In view of the chaotic number of assembled sheets, with a variation between odd and even groups, it is essential that the documents accelerate very quickly when they leave the unwinder - and our infeed channel can push even the fastest unwinders to the limits of their performance." Both systems are fitted with Vektor camera reading solutions in the infeed channel and with topCam cameras from reading technology specialist topSenso, now managed by BÖWE SYSTEC as an independent brand, in the enclosure feeders. Moreover, the software can now be programmed to eject any blank paper waste resulting from the printing process automatically without the machine having to be stopped first, as was previously the case.
Following trials at the factory in Augsburg, the first Fusion Cross was installed at Allianz in Unterföhring in August 2014. It was commissioned a week later and entered full productive service a week after that. The second system was commissioned right on schedule in October, in readiness for the first major challenge - the 2014 year-end production run. "In December we produced and inserted more than half a million policies, each with an average of 25 DIN A4 sheets of paper," explains Robert Herele. "We produced the same volume with two machines as we did in previous years with three, while still managing to keep two Saturdays, two Sundays and two public holidays free of work, just as we had envisaged. There was no overhang going into the new year; there were no complaints from the input center due to misdirected envelopes and no irate calls from customers. In short, we are delighted with the year-end production run."
"With its high-speed infeed channel, the Fusion Cross makes for
extremely quick and simple processing and operates with outstanding accuracy and stability," concludes Robert Herele. "Even stapling is no longer a bottleneck in the production run, and we now have the option of inserting a large number of enclosures of different weights and thicknesses."
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