We live in a world of instant gratification: online shopping, on-demand television, news and sports results on tap through smartphones, laptops and tablets. So it comes as no surprise that print cus-tom-ers are more demanding than ever – they increasingly want their job yesterday. The rise of digital has done nothing to change this; it has raised expectations of last-minute, fast-turnaround jobs. 

As one respondent to a short ProPrint survey put it: “Customers believe ‘digital’ means ‘instant’ despite the logistics of acquiring paper, collating, folding, packing and delivery.”

Plenty of printers know the pressure of unrealistic deadlines. Spare a thought, then, for trade printers. These suppliers face even greater pressure to turn work around quickly because they are a step removed from the sales process. 

For the country’s biggest trade printer, CMYKhub, intense deadlines are par for the course. While company founder Clive Denholm is reticent to go on the record with specifics about the number of jobs turned around each day, it is a lot. 

Digital printing is a driver for heightened expectations, but advances in offset technology also makes fast turnarounds possible, says Denholm.

For instance, UV printing on the Ryobi press at the trade supplier’s Brisbane hub allows fast turnarounds on uncoated stock with heavy ink coverage, which otherwise would take two days to dry. If the job is spec’d on coated stock, Denholm says the “only machine” to use would be its Heidelberg Anicolor. 

“To produce 2,000 four-colour leaflets on 250gsm with a gloss coating quickly, the Anicolor is the only machine you can print on if you want to do that job with a two-hour turnaround,” says Denholm.

The trade printer recently went to market with a promise of next-day despatch on certain products. Denholm says the company had to put a number of things in place to fulfil this kind of pledge. 

“To do something next day, you need to have enough of that work. To do next day at the right price, you have to have the volumes or exactly the right machine and sometimes a combination of both. Uncoated straight away must be UV; a small leaflet on a variety of paper stocks must be Anicolor or Indigo. Indigo is the only machine in the market that provide registration,” he says.

That’s why the company made a foray into digital with the Drupa-launched HP Indigo 5600, which has been installed at a new facility near its Melbourne hub. 

The new normal

A mix of in-house production and outsourced procurement is standard practice at Melbourne-based Greg Williams Print Management (GWPM). Managing director Peter Barnes says the focus is on outsourcing, but the company continues to produce work internally for existing customers. This in-house work currently comprises 30% of turnover. 

Whichever way work is produced, fast turnarounds have become the norm. “A lot is changing. The pressures these days are on turnaround times. Some of our clients are retail-based, so they are implementing short-notice marketing initiatives and we need to respond very quickly. The advantage of having in-house production lets us schedule accordingly. The major change is that turnaround times from quote to finished jobs are phenomenally quick.”

Barnes offers an example. “There was a directive from the leadership team of one of our clients that they wanted to introduce an incentive program for staff. The decision was made in the morning one day and by the next morning, all the printed materials were completed and despatched to 260-odd sites.”

The job comprised 22,000 four-colour flyers, each sent to a personalised, digitally printed address. GWPM ended up outsourcing this overprint, because it was faster than doing it in-house. 

“We use trade printers to cover our peaks and troughs. Those relationships are extremely important to us. The days of getting three quotes from people and taking a day to make up your mind are gone. You need your trade printers to be transparent and responsive,” adds Barnes.  

While these kind of lightning-quick turnarounds are more common, occasionally GWPM is afforded the luxury of lead times. For instance, when ProPrint speaks to Barnes in October, the firm is already ahead with planning Christmas work for a major client.

Get it right up front

The right press and the tight relationships are both important, but there’s an increasing awareness that the most essential part of the mix is in administration and pre-press. Tresta Keegan, managing director of Tharstern Australia & New Zealand, says the MIS developer has researched the constraints to faster turnarounds. In terms of what stops printers from being able to turn work around faster, “there’s nothing wrong with the speed of the equipment”, she says.

For an example of a printer putting this ideology into action, Keegan points to UK firm ESP Colour. Anthony Thirlby, managing director of this self-confessed “manufacturer of commodity printed products”, says the company chose a path toward automation after Drupa 2008.

“We decided to develop a process and sales strategy to maximise JDF and rules-based automation and develop a sales process around it,” says Thirlby.

ESP dubbed this process “one-touch manufacturing”. The journey was largely a case of integrating Tharstern with its Kodak Prinergy workflow and Litho-technics Metrix imposition software. Thirlby says that before going down the one-touch route, “we had 13 touch points to process a job through the front end   of the business, from an estimate being raised to a plate being made”. It is now down to three. “We were able to do that through rules-based automation,” he says.

The results have been profound. ESP has gone from a turnover of £7 million ($10.8 million) with 64 staff to a turnover of £11.5 million with 50 staff. 

The company’s dogged efficiency focus was acknowledged in the beginning of 2012, when Heidelberg revealed ESP had achieved a global productivity record on its Speedmaster XL 75 straight presses and perfector. ESP’s straight press managed 278 makereadies averaging 4.09 minutes, an overall speed of 14,135 sheets per hour (sph) and 1.783 million impressions across a 156-hour week. The perfecting model produced 202 makereadies averaging 4.33 minutes and an average press speed of 14,217sph, totalling 1.902 million impressions across a 160-hour week.

Poor paperwork

There are plenty of printers in Australia combining pre-press and print technology to achieve fast-paced turnarounds. 

Melbourne sheetfed firm Lithocraft has a hefty offset capacity thanks to a trio of Manroland presses: a straight Roland 505 LV that can reach up to 18,000sph, an eight-colour Roland 708 perfector and a Roland 705 with coater. But director Nick O’Sullivan says the greatest productivity gains are in administration and pre-press. 

“You must have the work presented complete and accurate. The biggest thing that slows everything down is poor files, poor paperwork and lots of changes.”

Technology has overcome many of these obstacles. However, O’Sullivan is unimpressed by the tendency among printers to give away these advances in pre-press and press automation.

“Go back to CTP – you eliminate the process of making film and Cromalin, but instead of using that to the advantage of the printer, the tendency of the industry is to give away every incremental improve-ment in speed. Once you give it away, it becomes the new normal. You could have kept it as padding in production,” he says.

For O’Sullivan, the ideal way to improve production efficiencies is to educate clients on how to supply print-ready files. “That is not just some flippant issue; this is major. You have to totally reach into your client’s creative, where it is being initiated and start organising it at that level.”

Lights out

The Lithocraft team is excited about what its new Screen Equios workflow can do for the company, especially when new features revealed at Drupa become available. Pre-press manager Paul Salmon says: “We could be heading toward a ‘lights off’ pre-press situation. We’re trying to get customers to pre-flight online – Equios enables more interaction from
the client and lets them chart the job through the system. 

“It allows us to go head to head with companies who have Kodak Insite. We also have Metrix imposition software. We are trying to make things smarter and quicker due to the shorter turnarounds. With Equios, Screen is looking to offer the ability for small impositions to be automatically created through their database, so a client can put a four-page brochure in and if it is simple enough, the RIP will just do it,” adds Salmon. 

One of the respondents to ProPrint’s turnaround survey agrees that the lack of understanding about print among client is a barrier to faster turnarounds. Demands for quick turnaround might seem particularly rich coming from customers who supply poor or late files. The survey respondent says that those “customers that are always disorganised, leave things to the last minute and expect us to bend over backwards soon leave anyway. There is no loyalty from these sort of customers.”

Speed gains

Kodak is a dominant force in printing workflows, and agrees that the biggest speed gains can be made in the front end. 

The group’s local solutions manager, Michael Smedley, says: “We audit the workflows of many print companies big and small and in this world of shorter turnaround times, we have found that over 60% of the time spent on a job is taken up in estimating, proofing, impositioning, preparing the file and dealing with the transaction of the print job. 

“Software is improving these functions in a number of ways: web-to-print for pricing and ordering, online proofing for approvals and advanced workflows like Prinergy to automate all aspects of preparing files for print,” adds Smedley.

Workflow automation can bridge the gap between seller, customer and trade suppliers. EFI points out how its suite of software, such as the Prism MIS, can form a link all the way down the line from the print manufacturer to the print buyer and on to their end customer. 

Anthony Parnemann, South Asia manager at EFI, gives an example. “A manufacturer needed to have on hand a wide range of product datasheets, which they would send in response to their dealer enquires from around Australia. Before automation, they would keep the data sheets in the marketing department on racks and when a request came in from a dealer for datasheets, the marketing coordinator would go to the shelves, picked the appropriate datasheet and send them to the dealer. If they were running low, the coordinator would call the printer for more datasheets. 

“Today, after automation, the dealer logs into the manufacturer’s website to order datasheets. But unknown to the dealer, they have been hyperlinked to the printer’s office who now keeps all
the datasheets online. “The printer now takes the order, bypassing the manufacturer’s head office, shelves and picking. To improve the service the printer also personalises the data sheets by placing the dealer’s name and address on it then despatches them directly to the dealer,” says Parnemann.

By cutting out steps in the process, workflow automation is an immediate way to meet rising customer expectations for fast turnarounds. Perhaps more importantly, it could also be the best
form of defence against the threats from low-cost Asian suppliers. Local printers will always have time on their side. For this reason, the push for seemingly impossibly fast turnarounds should be welcomed with open arms. 

Lithocraft’s O’Sullivan says: “Last month there was a big whingeing article about work going to China – how can anything get printed in China when deadline are getting shorter? No work in China can get delivered in less than four weeks. If that is true, rather than whinge about deadlines, the industry is safer than it has ever been. The latest whinge that turnarounds are too tight is actually the greatest thing we have ever heard. It means the industry has a chance and that nothing is going to China or India.” 

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