Brainerd, Minn.

Brainerd, Minn.-based book manufacturer Bang Printing has acquired Delta Printing Solutions, a book manufacturer located in Valencia, Calif. According to Bang, the combined companies will take advantage of dual-facility benefits, including plant-load balancing, employee cross-training and increased purchasing power. Bang Printing’s Minnesota facility produces approximately 10,000 titles each year. Combined with Delta’s output, this number will increase to more than 15,000 titles. Together, the two facilities will employ 350 people. The 109-year-old Bang Printing provides web and sheet-fed printing, complete bindery services, and fulfillment and storage. Delta Printing Solutions, which has been in business for more than 50 years, is the largest provider

There's only one way a print shop makes money: When the presses are running. When presses are idle, jobs are delayed, worker productivity plummets, and customers start screaming. Excluding system failures, the biggest culprit behind downtime is the make-ready process. That's when operators shut presses down to adjust paper size, ink settings, and feeders. Make-ready limits how many jobs printers can fit in an eight-hour shift. But some press manufacturers offer technology that cuts make-ready time to zero. They're called, appropriately enough, zero-make-ready (ZMR) presses. "The time it takes from form to form, plus how many signatures of waste you create form