BMW and PSO: An international success story

Greenhouse Publishing GmbH produces all the sales literature for BMW worldwide. Since 2003, BMW and Greenhouse Publishing have been facing major issues in achieving their desired quality levels in the printing results they were obtaining on BMW brochures. In an effort to improve the reliability of printing results, Greenhouse Publishing was the instigator of the ISO standard development process in the German printing industry and has now worked with BVDM and FOGRA to create Process Standard Offset-print.

In 2007, Stefan Spengler of Greenhouse Publishing GmbH introduced BMW’s own required PSO validation for printers producing materials for BMW, based on the ISO 12647.2-2007 printing standard.

Under this quality controlled validation system, any printer who wishes to submit a quote to produce printed materials for Greenhouse Publishing GmbH and BMW needs to be FOGRA/BVDM/PSO certified with regard to their internal quality control processes, and must pass the PSO Greenhouse validation process in order to be able to guarantee the best printing results to the end customer.

In a recent discussion with Yves Roussange, Stefan shared some of the details about the size of Greenhouse Publishing’s printing production for BMW and the reasons behind their strict requirements that all their work must be produced by certified printers.

Yves Roussange: What is the value of the printing that Greenhouse Publishing produces for BMW per year in Euros, and how many pages do you print?
Stefan Spengler: Around eight million copies and around 100,000 pages per year. Its value is about E12,000,000.00, or $A21,000,000.00.

Where are your printers located, and how many printers are you using?
All our printers are located in Germany. Greenhouse Publishing currently includes about 15 printers in its pool.

Why did you create your own PSO validation?
In order to achieve better control over the quality of the printed result. We needed to reduce the tolerances to half of what PSO recommend in order to prevent wastage and reprinting.

What is the colour space of your archive?
ECI-RGB_v2 from 2007, and ECI-RGB_v1 until 2007.

When did you start using ISOcoated-v2 profile for your printing production?
In production period 2, part of 2007.

What type of colour management technology are you using on your premises?
We use EyeOnePro and basICColor Control for validating offset prints, and EyeOnePro and basICColor Certify for validating proofs.

Are you using soft-proofing technology to view artworks, and what is your opinion about soft-proofing on the press?
This is a technology we have explored for the future, but due to the limited experience of printers with soft-proofing we have decided to put soft-proofing on press on hold for the short term.

How do you manage your archive with two colour spaces, BMWcoated_v1 (ISOcoated) and ISOcoated_v2?
Greenhouse has developed device-link-profiles with the help of basICColor GmbH to convert our old BMWcoated_v1.icc data to ISOcoated_v2_GCR65_TAC300_bas.icc data, and we use SwitchBOX workflow technology for automatic colour management processing of the PDF files.

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