You know the frustration. In the daily commute across Sydney, Melbourne or the other capital cities, you must have gripped the steering wheel in frustration when, after breezing down a freeway, you hit an endless queue of traffic feeding into the next junction.
A print shop workflow is no different. It might run a state-of-the-art order desk linked to a late-model management information system. Downstream of this, there might an impressive CTP system bowling up plates to a closed-loop, colour-managed press or a digital pre-press system pumping files to a full digital solution, capable of lightning fast turnarounds for print-on-demand and variable-data work.
Each of these islands of production is a high-tech marvel, capable of running with autonomy – a fantasy just a decade ago. But what about the bits in between?
The ultimate set-up, a fully automated workflow where each island is truly linked without the need for human intervention, seems too good to be true.
It is possible: at a cost. That leads some printers to question whether it’s necessary to sink the extra cash into the software system and capital equipment to go that far. Lights-out automation from go to whoa isn’t for every print provider. It might be overkill. Is it only appropriate for a sausage factory, pumping out stock standard items. You’ve no doubt heard of printers blowing their budget in the question for total automation. So how do you make the judgment call?
Know where the gaps are
Theo Prosenica, owner of Melbourne’s PMS Lithography, a 22-year-old hybrid printer at Thomastown, runs a KBA 162A and Ryobi 925 from an Agfa Apogee X workflow. On the large-format side, the company has an Arizona flatbed, Epson rollfeds and screen printers. It’s a nice equipment list, but Prosenica is conscious of repetitive, manual tasks lingering on his production floor.
What are these hands-on duties and could they ever be automated? PMS Lithography uses a tablet-accessible Dolphin MIS with job ticketing, but at the grunt end, it’s decidedly more manual. Prosenica lists chores like applying double-sided tape, packing out multiple items to outer shippers, extremely short-run gluing jobs where it’s not viable to set up the gluer. There are semi-automatic tasks such as shrinkwrapping pallets for which the business has now bought a shrinkwrapping unit. But it still has to be moved from point to point unless a conveyor system is added.
“If you’ve got short-run jobs of 500 sheets, you wouldn’t use a pallet turner to turn the sheets over, you’d manually flip the sheets. But there aren’t a lot of manual activities. Most we do are semi- or fully automatic,” he says.
Prosenica has spoken to manufacturers about more automation. “For our Esko cutting machines, we’ve asked them to come up with a solution where we can fly-tape automatically, where we can input the data and specify we want it so many millimeters.”
IBS Design Resources on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast is a trade offset operation that has spent the past seven years investing in its front end. Edit&Print, a workflow solution developed with IT partner 44 Gallons Technology, plugs into IBS’s bespoke MIS, with jobs flowing to a Kodak Prinergy plate system that serves two KBA Genius waterless UV presses. Externally, Edit&Print is a W2P hub offering small printers a transparent, white-label solution they can re-skin to their customers.
Scott Siganto, owner of the 17-year-old Nerang-based company, says several of its “flagship partners” use MIS components in proprietary vendor workflows. But a majority of customers do not run an MIS and perform many tasks manually.
“So at least Edit&Print is giving them a stepping stone to going online and going digital with their workflows. If you auto-mate, you make more money by keeping your cost of sales down. But we believe in including our customers in the stream-lining, rather than charging them for it.”
Siganto identifies unique quotes and incorrect file submissions as the most common reasons work must be done manually. But he adds that automation should never come at the expense of customer service. “We still like the customer interaction. When they need us, we’re here and when they don’t, it needs to be slick and easy for them.”
Automation wish list
At the top of Kevin Walsh’s wish list is an automated process for raising purchase orders relating to paper merchants. Walsh is IT manager at Focus Press, which has three NSW sites, at Matraville, Strathfield and Wollongong, and a staff of 200. The company uses a Da Vinci MIS and is well automated.
“There’s been a lot of automation of pre‑press, MIS and ERP, but the paper companies are still lagging. We have JDF between MIS systems, pre-press, press and shopfloor data capture. But with paper merchants, on every work ticket, they need to raise the purchase order and manually fax it or make a phone call,” he tells ProPrint.
Walsh’s goal might be realised in one instance; Focus Press is collaborating with BJ Ball to have an automated file generated by Da Vinci and go direct to the paper company’s online ordering system. He would like to see paper merchants plugging into an open-architecture platform for raising orders, but that’s unlikely as there are so many different ordering technologies.
Cheque-Mates, a division of Lamson Paragon and a trade-only provider of communications documents, is in the process of streamlining its transactional document printing. The company made a splash at PacPrint when it became Australia’s first customer for Objectif Lune’s PrintSoft Pres Enhance software. Cheque-Mates chief executive Rodney Frost says this system will re-purpose documents without the need to modify existing applications.
A long-term customer of MIS provider Quote & Print, Cheque-Mates recently invested in Q&P’s Shop Floor Manage-ment, which automates the capture of true costs and real profit margins through barcoding.
At PacPrint, Sydney’s Dominion Print invested in Chili Publisher’s online document editing. Dominion managing director Kelvin Gage says this will further automate online orders. “We’d done a lot of web-to-print in the past but it had been ad hoc and didn’t integrate all that well. We purchased Tharstern six months ago and now we’re looking at the next step – how we can streamline customer integration and the workflow from the customer all the way to production as smoothly as possible. One of the things we liked particularly about Chili was its ability to integrate so seamlessly into Tharstern, so from the customer’s click to production, it’s a fully automated system.”
Re-keying equals wastage
“Everywhere that you see re-keying of information into a computer system is a pocket of inefficiency,” says Quote & Print managing director Shanti Kumar. “One common example is the re-keying of data for invoicing. This can be streamlined with Q&P’s integrated accounts system or our links with third-party accounting software. Another widespread example is the re-keying of information scribbled on job tickets to capture actual job times and real profit margins. With our integrated shopfloor management and barcoding, this critical business information can be captured efficiently and accurately.”
Glenn Mitchell of Ink Outside, which supplies the Da Vinci MIS, is a devotee of full automation. “Despite production staff clinging to the idea that they bring an almost oracle-like understanding of the process, the data indicates that they will always respond to a production issue in a very limited, highly predictable way.”
He says the next major revision of production and estimating in Da Vinci – coinciding with the US and European release of the software – “will be totally uncompromising and will eliminate the discretion of random workers who come and go at any particular printer”.
Resource-heavy activities include double entries into the MIS. With online ordering, this becomes unnecessary, says Debbie Ludwig, Pent Net’s marketing & sales director. “Quoting, especially for digital, can be easily done on Pent Net’s W2P system, which has a flexible pricing structure that makes even the most complicated products easy to price and quote on-the-fly. The pricing of course can be built into the web-to-print system, so simple estimating jobs can now be automatically done.”
At PacPrint, Pent Net drew interest with Online StoreFront, a W2P configuration that integrates Q&P technology with HP Indigo printing and delivery via Couriers Please.
Colour connection
In April, ProPrint reported on Melbourne large-format printer Styleprint claiming savings of some $100,000 – amounting to wages equivalent to at least two staff – after having automated its workflow with SwitchBox midway through last year. “It’s basically allowed us not to have to have more staff doing what we call mundane tasks,” said operations manager Andrew Woodhouse at the time.
Clients typically send multiple files per campaign. Those files used to be handled manually, but now SwitchBox automatically checks for things such as image size, resolution and spot colours. It generates approval sheets sent to customers and creates thumbnails used for Styleprint’s online ordering system. A campaign that may have demanded an hour of manual processing is now done automatically in seconds, said Woodhouse.
SwitchBox is offered by Soltect, a division of Colour Process, run by managing director Yves Roussange. Asked to name the most cumbersome colour management tasks, Roussange cites checking document size, number of pages, number of separations, bleeds and ‘flattening’ of the transparency, RGB-to-CMYK conversion and PDF fix-ups.
Logjams make the workflow work
Problem Estimators are lumbered with quotes given to them by account managers and turnaround is slow.
Solution Automation in estimating is firstly about taking the control away from the estimator. By dumbing down the process in a MIS, you end up with 80% of your quotes completed by account managers or the customer themselves. The result is a significant increase in turnaround times, fewer estimators and, most importantly, an estimator focused on implementing pricing and product strategies for the business.
Problem From artwork submission to pre-flighting, proofing, validation and imposition pre-planning, it’s all labour-intensive, hands-on management, with a typical job handled six or more times before it hits the press.
Solution Integrate Pitstop Server, Metrix and Prinergy, and streamline into a disciplined workflow that culminates in a fully imposed print-ready file in both traditional and gang-print environments.
Problem The outsourcing process is an inefficient, labour-intensive activity where all the profit is eroded by administration. Obtaining prices, communicating instructions and keeping track require an automated approach. Instead, all we see are piles of paper, unread emails and jobs not delivered on time.
Solution Use an outsource manager module, a centralised portal from which the outsource process is managed. Managing quote requests by using a supplier web portal to consolidate information and tracking work on a dedicated production board makes outsourcing as easy as producing the job in your factory.
Problem Job tracking involves lots of queues, questions and phone calls.
Solution By producing and collecting real-time production information, a transparent tracking process ensures everyone knows what’s going on in the factory. This can be delivered internally through a production-board module with a ‘traffic-light’ approach and at-a-glance tracking. For customers, you need a tracking portal with everything they require in order to avoid calling you up. It should be accessible through a browser or iPad.
Mick Rowan is director of IQ Australia which offers the PrintIQ MIS, and all the portals and modules he describes are integrated into the PrintIQ product. The Printing Hub, Whirlwind and DR Print among IQ’s clients.
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