Written By Melissa Reynolds
iGen Consultant
Xerox Corporation

Imagine this situation:

You walk into your print shop and everything is running like a well-oiled machine.  Sales has captured important new clients for 1:1 Marketing Collaterals, customer service is getting great feedback from clients for delivering excellent products ahead of schedule, prepress and design knows exactly how to send client work to your new digital presses, your digital press operators are cranking out thousands of CONFIDENT color impressions per shift and the on-schedule finishing folks trim, score, fold and box completed pieces.

And then, POOF, you wake up and realize that this isn’t the way your digital shop runs at all.  Is it only a dream?  It doesn’t have to be.  Many print professionals engage outside consultants for a thorough workflow assessment from time to time, regardless of industry.  An in-plant shop can benefit just as much as a commercial printer from an objective professional’s recommendations about their digital shop workflow.

Still think you’re dreaming?  Read on to see what the buzz is about workflow assessments…

As a print professional, you have a vision of your digital business, current goals and growth initiatives.  But let’s be honest, sometimes it’s just not as simple as getting from “job submission to print”.  That’s okay, because you don’t have to go it alone!  The purpose of a workflow assessment is to provide a unique view of your print shop workflow with pain points (yes, you know what some are already) and soft spots that could be lurking bottlenecks waiting to happen.  The best part is that on a department-by-department basis, your assessment will provide a detailed analysis of what works well, what’s marginal and what could benefit from some improvement.  That means, if your customers could really use a web to print online tool for order submissions, it might be recommended.  Maybe you could benefit from job tracking software, especially if work orders seem to play hide and seek at times.  If your prepress folks need assistance with preflighting and preparing files for digital presses, that can open the door for some individualized training.  Perhaps your digital press operators need to brush up on their color management skills or, even better, you need a solution to color match between your digital presses; all of these solutions can appropriately be recommended to you by your workflow assessment professional.

Achieving a solid, reliable digital workflow takes some planning and effort.  Is there an opportunity for an industry professional to analyze your workflow and make your dreams become a reality in your shop?

Written By James Tressler
Director of Marketing & Branch Operations
C.P. Bourg Incorporated

What an incredibly compelling and relevant testimonial with an unusual twist ……Finishing automation driving print opportunity. In today’s age of complexities and cross media bliss it is exciting to read about a customer, an In-Plant none-the-less that has found and implemented technologies that have delivered on their promises.

After all, with print becoming more commoditized every day we as manufacturers are challenged to design and bring to market devices that enable our customers to improve their processes and increase their bottom line all the while knowing there are fewer customers and stronger competition vying for their business. However ….. When this process is successful and the right customer gets the right product, amazing things happen. This article is a glowing testament to that very thing.

Jeff Taranto and his team got it right and they are delivering for their corporation on the promise their new technology investment brought them. He has found new ways to keep print relevant and expand its role with exciting results and staggering savings adding significant value to the bottom line. Their success is in no small part the result of knowing and understanding the precise role print plays in their corporation’s ability to deliver the right message to their customer.

Congratulations to the Highmark team, I wish you much continued success!

So what do you think …… can automation in the production environment help organizations make print more relevant, green and overcome commoditization?

Written by:
Howard Fenton
Senior Technology Consultant
NAPL

What if you could automate the manual steps required to calibrate your digital press and maintain the adjustments for consistent printing? What if the technology existed that would help you match color across different devices? The result would be increased utilization costs, reduced cost per page and a faster ROI (Return on Investment).

Last July, we introduced the idea that utilization rates play a role in cost per page and return on investment. Due to peaks (high volume) and valleys (low volume) in demand we can see these effects each month on the cost per page. For example, in one recent assignment we calculated a cost per color page for a Xerox customer ranged from a low of 9¢ to a high of 19¢ an impression depending on if the work was done during a peak or valley in production.

Another aspect of cost and the ROI of color printing is the ability to match and maintain a color consistency with less expensive devices, which was the subject of a recent blog about color matching on more affordable color devices. Another piece to this puzzle are the results from an independent testing lab that showed that the IGen4 offers one of the highest utilization rates in the industry.

Spencer Labs compared a Xerox iGen4 with two Indigo presses in a utilization test.

According to the report, the Spencer Labs staff trained the production staff in multiple locations in the data collection protocol. This protocol analyzed uptime and downtown and categorized different types of downtime such as morning maintenance, consumable change, quality control, etc.

Their conclusion was “The Xerox iGen4’s consistently high actual daily machine production time contributed to its highest average availability for the test period. The iGen4 required lower morning routine, job setup and consumable change time.” According to the graphic, the iGen achieved 85% utilization, the Indigo 5500 68% and the Indigo 7000 was 58%.

What are the three steps to reduce the ROI of a digital press?

• automate the manual steps required to calibrate the device
• streamline the process that checks and readjusts the color
• reduce the time to achieve color match across devices

All three result in better utilization rates and a faster ROI.

Howard Fenton is a Senior Technology Consultant at NAPL. Howie advises commercial printers, in-plants, and manufacturers on workflow management, operations, digital services, and customer research. He is a paid contributor to this blog.

Written by Joel Basa
eMarketing Manager
Xerox Corporation

Howie detailed the importance of Performance Based Metrics in a December Blog Post. I was intrigued by his outline of the 4 “STEPs” to determine productivity of your shop. If you recall, the four components  were: Staff, Training, Equipment and Procedures. What are your thoughts on the importance of these 4 components? A few small thoughts.

Staff: I’ve seen a great amount of discussion on LinkedIn on the importance of an experienced operator. This is an invaluable resource and is often overlooked by many shops. I personally think this is the most important aspect of a productive print operations.

Training: This is very much tied to staff but understanding the capabilities of digital printing technology requires training. I’ve had discussions with operators that were not recently trained and some “not aware” of the full capabilities of their technologies. It resulted in some missed gains in productivity.

Equipment: This is without question the most discussed aspect of a productive print operation. However, the discussion needs to move past “speeds and feeds.” Does your digital press have features to help automate and make your press more productive? Our latest installment of YouTube Technically Speaking videos talks about these kinds of features (Full Width Array).

Procedures: Print Production = Manufacturing. If you buy into that statement then the procedures (on the press and off the press) are critical to creating a productive environment. Have you analyzed these processes? I’ve seen many print shops pay attention to every detail to maximize productivity from order to fulfillment.

I’m wondering how you would rank each of these “STEPs” of productivity. Comment with your rankings and let the debate begin!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in:

• Productivity and Versatility: Meet the New Xerox J75 and C75 Color Presses
• How do you measure the productivity of your digital press? (Part 1)
• How do you measure the productivity of your digital press? (Part 2)
• How do you measure the productivity of your digital press? (Part 3)
• The Wrong Metric – When The Best Looks Like the Worst

Written by Joel Basa
eMarketing Manager
Xerox Corporation

We’ve heard this statement many times, “the proof is in the pudding.” I’m not sure where that statement originated from but here in the business world we know measurement and data tells us so much. Data indicates whether we’re doing the right thing, the wrong thing, the best thing or the better thing.  The same goes for measuring productivity of a digital press. The collection of data and then the analysis that follows is critical to making your print operation run more efficient and more profitable.

Spencerlab recently released their independent benchmarking study to estimate the level of digital press Availability by determining Potential and Actual production time measurements of a sampling of digital presses. Availability = Actual Production Time divided by Potential Production Time. Ideally this percentage is 100% but that’s nearly impossible. However, what I found most intriguing about their methodology were the factors that reduced the amount of Actual Production Time.

Here are some of those factors according to Spencerlab:

1. Press Error Waste
2. Quality Control
3. Job Setup
4. Waiting for Press
5. Paper Jam
6. Planned Maintenance
7. Consumable Change
8. Service
9. Repair
10. Morning Routine

What are some other factors that affect the amount of potential production time? Are you measuring these factors? If so, how? Please read the Spencerlab report for a detailed description of their methodology and the end results.

Interested in similar topics? You may want to check out:

• How do you measure the productivity of your digital press? (Part 1)
• How do you measure the productivity of your digital press? (Part 2)
• The Wrong Metric – When The Best Looks Like the Worst
• What’s the most important aspect of your shop’s productivity? Staff? Training? Equipment? Procedures?
• The Pros and Cons of the Sales Per Employee Ratio

Written by:
Howard Fenton
Senior Technology Consultant
NAPL

If you’re Dave Zamorski, the COO of Associates International, Inc. (Ai), and the winner of the 2010 CIPPI Award for biggest improvement in process management and customer responsiveness, then workflow improvements are very important. Ai is a digital printer that has combined digital printing, web-to-print, and JDF-enabled automation to produce a dramatic effect. They provide an array of services including electronic prepress, digital printing, commercial printing, variable data marketing programs, email marketing programs, integrated campaign management, and web-to-print storefronts.

The conventional division has all Heidelberg sheetfed equipment and the digital division has three Xerox DocuColor iGen3 Digital Production Presses with CREO Color Server RIP systems plus two Xerox 6100’s with booklet makers and interposers.

One issue was that they were capable of running hundreds of orders daily but they required manual intervention to collect job costs. Invoicing would have been delayed for 7-10 days while the job costs were gathered from orders that contained an average of 3.2 line items each.

In an interview on WhatTheyThink.com Zamorski said, “We handle hundreds of line items a day that come through our (digital) storefronts. To sit there and manually go back through and try to touch (invoice) each one of those and record those was very expensive. This (automation) saved us annually someplace in the area of $150,000 to $180,000. One of the … take-aways, was …(the) improvement in our process …  (which was over) 75%. Actually our payroll went down an astounding 30% and our profitability went up.”

CIPPI Award Judge Patrick Cahuet said that they have shown us what the future printer will look like. ”Associates stated that their goal was ‘lights out production,’” and while two companies won this award, Ai proved that they could “increase efficiency and profitability during difficult economic times.”

Congratulations to Dave Zamorski and the entire staff at Associates International.

Howard Fenton is a Senior Technology Consultant at NAPL. Howie advises commercial printers, in-plants, and manufacturers on workflow management, operations, digital services, and customer research. He is a paid contributor to this blog.

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Written by:
John Conley
Vice President, Publishing and Commercial Print
Xerox Corporation

I am tired of hearing technologist use the Dinosaur analogy when talking about the future of books and printing.  It is just not accurate.  Print in not dead and both the Book print supply chain and Book Products are evolving to meet the changing needs of their associated customers and constituents

There is undeniable change taking place which I think of as Evolution and not destitution.  As book mix changes based on E Books in Trade and Education Applications on iPads and other devices so will the mix of print facilities that serve publishers.  The large 1,000,000 square foot offset book factories are the TRex’s of the Book industry.  They are beginning to starve and have begun to shut down.

On the other hand the Print on Demand Book facilities powered by digital workflows, presses, and services are thriving and growing at a 20%+ CARG as the redefined supply chain looks for more and more agile and distributed print points.  POD printers have become the Birds in our evolution paradigm with industry DNA which comes from the “old” print world but a vision to be able to respond to the changing requirements of the new publishing environment and future print products.  These distributed POD Book Printing companies are technologically sophisticated and aggressive.  They are raptors with wings and they will continue to evolve and end up dominating the print part of the future Book Supply Chain.  They will continue to grow and prosper.

As this change continues to accelerate we move from the age of dedicated roles in the delivery system to more complex and multi functional roles for a single entity in the future.  Book Stores become Self Publishing Community Centers; POD Book Printers become global virtual warehouses for any Publisher; and Publishers become platform agnostic focused on the value of what they do and serving their customers in the media of their choice.

In this new and quickly emerging world what is to become of the Traditional Offset Book Printer and is the Cloud the enabling asteroid that becomes the final cataclysmic event?