You are misunderstanding the article Mike. The edge design is still a separate process but they are no longer relying on mint employees to transport the coins from the coin press to the edge lettering machine. It is all automated now. The mint's hope is that this process will remove the possibility of smooth edge errors, but it is by no means a certainty.
Maybe what is a loosely used term here is a "closed operation". What I understand it to mean is that no human handling happens from start to finish, a completely automated process. The edge lettering is still being done in a seperate step from the coin's striking. It will contimue to be done this way. The differrence is this: In the past a human had to take the struck coins to another area to be loaded into the machine to have the edges lettered. This human step is no longer part of the process. A machine will now accept the struck coins and send them to the edge lettering maching automatically. No longer will it be possible for a coin to miss this crucial step. Since the process is all automated from start to finish and therefore we have what has been termed a closed operation. This does NOT however, give a pre-determined orientation to the coins during edge lettering. Since the coins will continue to be edge lettered by the same machines as before, and loaded into it in much the same way, the edge lettering will not change in any way, including the orientation. I hope that helps explain it a little better. BTW, GD... I was typing this as you were typing yours... I think we're both saying the exact same thing.
i bought a ton of jefferson-p rolls and I have about 50 coins with extremely weak edge lettering in some cases so weak you cant even see the in god we trust or just even the trust