and the future on press 14 - Print Business

the magazine for forward thinking printingDecember 2012

printers and manufacturers talk

automationand the future on press 14

kBa

piccolo

oce

Market demands are changing all the time. The Speedmaster SX, the new generation of

printing presses from Heidelberg, offers the ideal solution with made-to-measure

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equipped for the future, whatever it may bring. Find out more at: www.uk.heidelberg.com

THE FAST TRACK TO THE FUTURE –THE NEW GENERATION OF PRINTING PRESSES

HEI_SXDrupaStampAd_21x297_LH.indd 1 12/06/2012 14:53

DECEMBER 20124 NEWS Paperlinx AGM. Press

manufacturing results.

7 INNOVATIONS &INVESTMENTS Large KBA forClifford Press. DBMi for ABC.

14 COVER STORY Press to Go,automation round the table.

18 PAPER Advertiser calls forprint to prove its worth.

20 DESIGNER Print drives desirefor luxury brands.

26 MIS Next steps for MIS.

31 NIXON RETURNS with valueadded in finishing.

THE TURN OF THE YEAR ALWAYS BRINGS CHANGES and while Decemberis traditionally a time to look back and reflect, this year it may be moreproductive and fruitful to look forwards.

As I sit here, the not unexepected news that Polestar has acquired BGPhas arrived, though not any of any consequences. And that follows on theAGM for Paperlinx where the board acknowledged that papermerchanting was not suffering from recession but from a fundamentaltransformation in the industry. Polestar’s backers Sun Capital Partnersundoubtedly reached this same conclusion when buying that business. It will be interesting to see if Sun considers high volume web to be a UKor a European business and what happens next.

But neither logical move means that print is on its way out. BGP wasplaying a game of high stakes and when the wheel stopped the ball was inthe wrong number. It might have carried on playing, but the landscapehas changed since ‘invest and grow’ seemed a better idea than ‘shrink andclose’ a few years ago. The market is in transformation. Consolidation inline with declining demand for print is underway.

However, declining demand does not mean no demand. To a large extentprint (and printers) grew fat and lazy on being the only game in townwhen talking to advertisers. The young upstart digital did not have muchto do to out flank print. Print’s role is changing. It can no longer be aboutthe lowest cost way to reach consumers. It has to be about the mosteffective way to reach consumers. Prices may not go up much, if at all, andprint runs will shrink. The pressure will continue. But print must changewith the times.

Printers must fight back with quality, with innovation, with work thathas impact.The industry needs to come together to really demonstrate thatfor emotional impact, for direct to the heart messaging, print remainssecond to none.

GARETH WARD Editor

COMMENTARY

EDITORIAL

COMMERCIAL

GARETH WARD 01580 236456 • 07866 [email protected]

DEBBIE WARD 01580 236456 • 07711 [email protected] • printbusinessmedia.co.uk

ARCHIVE bit.ly/RoivIT

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News

4 December 2012 www.printbusinessmagazine.co.uk

Paperlinx begins seismic shake up with new boardPaPerlinx has started what interim CEO Dave Allen calls a “seismic cultural change” with the announcement of a further 150 job cuts from the UK operation to bring the total redundancies announced this year in this country to 200, some 12% of its workforce. In total Paperlinx is cutting 370 jobs before June.

And more cuts may follow. The company has to deal with its loss making German and Dutch operations and has promised that if these cannot be reorgan-ised successfully, then they will be sold.

The news of further reor-ganisation came just ahead of the company’s AGM which was presided over by a completely new board: Michael Barker as chairman, Andrew Price as director to tackle the reorgani-sation in Europe for at least six months, and Robert Kaye as non executive director.

The search for a permanent CEO has been suspended while the reorganisation takes place.

The job cuts are concen-trated on the commercial print side of the business, but will also include marketing, IT and procurement.

Speculation about how deep these will go continues as the 30-day notice period is worked through. It is clear that back selling has ceased and that what is termed discretionary spend-ing has been halted. The sign and display division and Deliv-ery Co will also be subject to change.

There will be a flatter organi-sation across the group and a recognition that what has been done so far by way of branch closures and reorganisation is not enough. An eventual single trading entity is not ruled out entirely, though the company wants to retain its three customer facing brands.

“We are making tough calls to put our company on a sustain-able footing,” Allen told the AGM in Melbourne. “Branch closures are not enough.” He had already warned: “There is a seismic cultural change under-way in Paperlinx.”

There is recognition that the down turn in demand for paper is a structural issue and not just the result of recession.

Average demand for paper in Europe last year fell 5%, and while demand in Australia fell 10%, Paperlinx operations there as well as in New Zealand and Canada were profitable.

There is a need for further consolidation chairman Michael Barker told the meeting and that Europe was “seriously under performing”.

He added “We need to rede-fine and reinvent the business we are in.” There was a need “to recalibrate the cost base ahead of the structural decline curve”.

On the websiteprintbusinessmagazine.co.uk

JOhN watsON & CO JOiNs Us grOUPThe Glasgow label printer is the second whisky label printer to be snapped up by North American groups in less than a year.bit.ly/10TFtwC

QUadteCh adds digital iNkiNg tO POrtfOliOThe system for web offset presses takes another step towards lights out printing for newspaper and web offset plants. bit.ly/PxclZw

PaPermakers shOw sigNs CONsOlidatiON is wOrkiNgSappi is reporting profits in its coated paper operations, while 8,000 tonnes of paper for the Fifty Shades sensation has boosted earnings for Arctic Paper.bit.ly/SGuMrH

kOdak is iNChiNg tOwards tUrNarOUNd It is three steps forwards and two steps back as the supertanker that is Kodak is turned around in stormy seas. Progress is being made, but slowly. bit.ly/R7SCxF

laNda OPeNs UP as it tUrNs tO market makiNgSix months after becoming the sensation of Drupa, Landa executives have been talking about the technology and the promise it delivers at conferences around the world, while the company is talking to the financial community about a round of investment.bit.ly/Qhk4vZ

drUPa bOws tO PressUre aNd stiCks tO fOUr yearsDrupa will take place in 2016, the organisers having flirted with a three-yearly iteration. bit.ly/TDMYn0

eFi has acquired UK MIS supplier Technique for an undisclosed sum.

The deal adds to EFI’s expanding portfolio of MIS businesses and follows on from the acquisition last year of Prism and Alphagraph in Germany.

This time however the inten-tion is not only to acquire customers and to wind down development.

Marc Olin, general manager of EFI’s productivity soft-ware business unit, says: “The acquisition is part of our strategy to build our market share around the globe and Technique has been success-ful in the UK, Australia and

South Africa. But we are also acquiring a technology plat-form which we will continue to develop because there are some nice aspects to it.

“We will continue to sell Technique to new clients as opportunities present them-selves. And we will bring some of the Technique technology into other EFI platforms.”

Technique CEO Paul Cooper adds that the resources EFI has will be put to good use.

“The world of print is chang-ing quickly and being part of the EFI family gives our customers instant access to wider solutions from their portfolio, together with the opportunity for more local support,” he says.

efi adds technique to mis portfolio

technique CeO Paul Cooper says: “the world of print is changing and being part of the efi family gives our customers instant access to wider solutions.”

News

www.printbusinessmedia.co.uk December 2012 5

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Konica Minolta sees off competition to buy Charterhouse PMKonica Minolta has won the race to buy Charterhouse PM, beating a number of other interested parties to acquire the UK print management company.

The move makes the Japa-nese digital technology much stronger in business process outsourcing as marketing print becomes a service it can offer alongside other types of managed print.

The deal has been processed through Konica Minolta Busi-ness Solutions Europe, though there is a worldwide dimension to the deal. Charterhouse works with global brands across 21 locations around Europe includ-

ing a continental head office in Paris and corporate headquar-ters in Hatfield.

Gary Mahoney, CEO of Charterhouse, declines to discuss which other parties were interested in acquiring the business.

He explains, however, why the KM approach was attrac-tive. “From a market point of view there is no conflict between us. However, we see some common competi-tors in the market, so we think we complement each other in our offering and together we can become stronger.

We will get more involved in advising our clients around

marketing services, whether in traditional print or the rapidly growing demand for a multi-channel cross media offering.”

The business had a turno-ver of £98.2 million in its 2011financial year, 18% higher than in 2010. This led to an operating profit of £1.7 million and a pretax loss of £1.3 million.

The deal for Konica Minolta represents another step towards expanding revenue from the production printing space. It anticipates revenue growing 20% in this financial year through the success of its C8000 series printer.

This, it says, has a 40% share of the production print space

in which it operates, growing market share for KM.

Next year it will launch the C1100, a more powerful engine and the first fruits of collabo-ration with Komori on inkjet press development will come through.

It has around 4,000 clients for its Optimised print Services approach, signing 2,800 in the last financial year.

There are 90 clients in the Global Major Account segment, of which 15 represent new busi-ness in the 2012 financial year.

To date Konica Minolta has derived 10% of its European revenues of €1.86 billion from these contracts.

British books take a bow for high production valuesthe best designed and produced British book this year is a trade illustrated volume, Eat London 2, which according to the judges of the British Book Design & Production Awards, “pushes print disciplines to the limit for a mass production book”.

Needless to say the Terence Conran title was printed in China.

Chinese printers accounted for seven of the categories of book judged this year, with British printers winning six awards, and the Italian industry one. It was a similar story for those mentioned in dispatches. There were 27 highly

commended or shortlisted entries from China, 17 from the UK, nine from Italian printers, four from Germany and one from Holland.

Where production values are the most important factor, the Europeans and especially the British hold sway. Where commercial considerations are most important, it seems impos-sible still to beat printers from the Far Fast.

UK printers earned the accolades in the limited edition and fine binding category (Martins the Printers); digi-tally produced books (Connekt Colour); environmental (KMS Litho); literature (Martins the

Printers); primary, secondary and tertiary education (Gomer Press) and best jacket/cover design (CPI).

In addition the best British book category was won by Butler, Tanner & Dennis for The Essential Camping Cookbook.

In the battle between the UK print giants, Clays earned four mentions and CPI Group had three as did Butler, Tanner & Dennis. The most success-ful printer was, however, C&C Offset Printing Company from China which was mentioned seven times with Graph-icom from Italy gaining five mentions. The Toppan Group also achieved six nominations.

The awards themselves continued their strong revival with 406 volumes being entered this year, up from 374 last year. Once again the best cover/jacket design was the most fiercely fought over.

The judges comments were perhaps disappointingly anodyne, though optimistic: “With digital content continu-ing to increase its share of the book market, it was refreshing to see the care and craftsman-ship that publishers continue to apply to the best of their print books.” The cross media and digital print categories received a marked increase in support this year.

News


The Drupa effect is missing as press manufacturers remain lowDrupa has so far failed to produce evidence of lift off in sales for the major litho press manufacturers, all reporting subdued sales following the show, or that orders died quickly thereafter.

It also underlines their reluc-tance to support a move to a three-year cycle for the show, which has now been shelved, at least for the immediate future.

In its half-year figures, Heidelberg’s orders rose in the first six months to €1.56 billion (€1.33 billion), those this was mostly down to the April to June quarter.

Second quarter orders were at a par with the previous year. Sales for the second quarter were up 10%, but owing to the services business, not equip-ment sales.

The UK was a strong performer while Germany remained steady and sales from Italy fell sharply. North America was the best performing region with orders up 40% on a year ago, but from a very low level.

This is the first set of figures since Gerold Linzbach took over as CEO at the start of Septem-ber and most of the period covered was under the previous regime.

The company anticipates a loss for the year as the costs of its Focus 2012 are carried, but it will produce savings of €60 million this year from fewer employees and a shorter working week. By the end of the process, global headcount will be down to 14,000.

Against this background Linzbach says: “Heidelberg has only one objective at the moment – to get back into the black and stay there. We are therefore systematically gearing the activities of all business areas to this goal.”

KBA, now Heidelberg’s main German rival, also found the boost by Drupa to be short lived, coming to an abrupt end in August according to CEO Claus Bolza-Schünemann.

KBA is at the nine-month point of its financial year and is also taking cost saving measures. These, however, are minor and involve balancing the work load between plants.

Sheetfed business has helped push sales up 17% at this point and to keep the company on course for full year sales of €1.2 billion. The cost of reoganisa-tion taken with the r&d spend and Drupa itself, has kept the

sheetfed operation in loss at €21.4 million, a minor improve-ment on this stage last year.

“Compared to other, international printing press manufacturers, our figures are much better. However, the returns generated remain unsat-isfactory,” says the CEO.

The company nevertheless reported an operating profit of €20.5 million compared to a loss of €20.4 million a year earlier. Its special presses operations, comprising metal decorating, currency presses and special products machines, helped balance the depressed state of sheetfed and commercial web business. In sheetfed packag-ing has been the star performer with more than 30 Rapida 142s expected to be installed this year.

The company is expecting first sales of its RotaJet 76 inkjet machine next year with Bolza-

Schünemann saying there has been “notable interest” in the press.

Komori has a similar press thanks to an development part-nership with Konica Minolta.

This has begun to lead to sales of the C8000 sold by Komori as the Impremia C80 as Komoro plans to take sales of ¥12 billion by 2015 from various digital ventures including working with Landa. The company has also launched sheetfed offset gravure presses for use in printed elec-tronics and has developed a new range of currency presses with De La Rue. The first fruits of this relationship is a currency press which De La Rue is install-ing at present.

The need for this diversifi-cation is seen in results which show sales down in the first six months to €297 (€332 million) and losses reduced to €16 million (€28 million).

Komori has a cash pile which can sustain this rate of attrition for many years, but it is embark-ing on a “business structural transformation” leading to it becoming a “print engineer-ing service provider” in future years.

Meanwhile the contin-ued depressed market has led Manroland Sheeted to trim a further 77 jobs, to sell unnec-essary machine tool capacity and sell its Mainhausen site for housing. Its efforts are not helped by Baumann, its agent for much of southern Germany deciding to switch loyalties to Komori from January 1.

There is no way back now for folder manufacture Mathias Bäuerle which has been seeking a buyer since declar-ing insolvency earlier in the

summer. According to local papers in Germany there were 18 approaches about a purchase, but to no avail. As a consequence the doors shut for the last time

on December 1 and 153 employ-ees were laid off.

The company had expanded into inserting equipment but had failed to make an impact

with just 1% of the market despite heavy investment.

It held a 30% share of the market for folders in its market sector.

Mathias Bäuerle closes its doors as it fails to find a buyer

Claus Bolza-schüneman is trimming costs by balancing prodcution sites.

Gerold Linzbach: “everything is aimed at getting back into the black.”

InnovatIons & Investments

www.printbusinessmagazine.co.uk December 2012 7

aBC adds to Duplo range with DBmi saddle stitching bookletmakerABC Print GrouP sealed the order for Duplo’s largest DBMi saddle stitching book-letmaker to date at its London Calling event last month. The machine will replace a System 5000, boosting production capacity and lifting quality and continues a relationship with Duplo that extends for 15 years.

The System 5000 with inline trimmer was installed six years ago. “It has served us well,” says managing director Mike Greene, “but as we have increased our press technology we have needed more produc-tivity at the finishing end.”

The company has bought the DBMi, launched at Drupa, with four feeder towers. These collate sheets into sets fed into the finishing unit where they are folded, stitched over a true saddle and trimmed. The result is a flatter better quality product than the System 5000 which folds after stitching. “And the technology is so much easier for the operator to set up and use,” says Greene.

The company has remained a specialist B3 printer with a ten-colour SM52 and five-colour Anicolor 52. It also runs a Konica Minolta BizHub for digital print and an Agfa Anapurna for wide format printing. “A few years ago we decided to work with three or four supplier-partners in the industry and chose Duplo

on the finishing side. This was a good decision for us as others we might have chosen have disappeared.”

The new unit will allow ABC to extend its production windows, taking sheets directly from the ten-colour press into the collating towers “as late as possible” and from the end

of the finishing line directly into cartons for delivery. The concept is to reduce the number of contacts as much as possible. “We expect the new equip-ment to double productivity on certain jobs and give us a better finished product,” Greene adds. “In today’s market, you have to print quality work.”

The company uses digital (“It suits a certain marketplace” says Greene) but is a confirmed litho printer and will stay that way with the next investment even if it is not as wedded to the idea of staying B3.

For this reason the DBMi is not configured for digital work. A digital feeder could be added at a later date. The DBMi will also allow the company to produce an A4 landscape product.

“It’s about short run fast turnaround work, and 25-30 jobs a day can arrive for one customer each day with a 24 hour turnaround. To keep up with changes like this, we have to keep investing.”

mike Greene of aBC Print Group, left, shakes hands with Duplo’s Jason Davies on a DBmi saddle stitching bookletmaker.

British Loose LeAf, a company that can point to the Ministry of Defence during the second world war as a customer, has replaced a guillotine that dated back almost as far, with a new Perfecta.

The company had kept an old Polar running with a constant

flow of spare parts arguing that a guillotine could still be effec-tive despite its age. However, when it took three days to replace a part earlier this year, the company realised it was time for a change. As its second guillotine was a vintage Perfecta 115, the company turned to IFS,

UK distributor for the German manufacturer.

“Getting parts for the Perfecta is never a problem, so when we spoke to IFS and saw what the Perfecta 132 could do, it was an ideal replacement for the Polar,” says production manager Robert Kayabashi.

Since making the change the company has noticed it is making big time savings thanks to touch screen set up. “It is a lot more user friendly,” he explains. “The quality of the build, the reliability of service and ability to pre-programme jobs have all stood out.”

ancient guillotine replaced with new Perfecta

oCeAn Press, Lancing, has become the latest company to adopt inkjet platemaking with the installation of a Glunz & Jensen PlateWriter 2000 from UK distributor Intec.

The unit has been located on the upper floor of the building used by the stationery printer. The plates are being used by a Ryobi 522 and an old AB Dick 9810. The company produces

business cards to forms and invoice sets for businesses in West Sussex. Managing direc-tor Kim Hayes was “quite surprised” at being able to afford the investment in a platesetter,

especially one producing metal plates. “The new system makes us more efficient and will help us turn round jobs much quicker. It is so much more convenient being in control,” he says.

ocean Press embraces platemaking with Glunz & Jensen from Intec



speedmaster XL106 covers all bases for Pensord PressPensord Press is install-ing a B1 Speedmaster XL106 perfector that will double as a cover press for the Blackwood company. The new press will replace an eight-colour SM102 and the CD74.5 that has been the machine the company has used for covers.

The old machines will be dismantled during December ready for the new press to arrive from Germany. It will be the first of the new range of XL Speedmasters in the UK with an inline coater and extended delivery.

It plans to print its first pages on January 16, says managing director Darren Coxon. The investment follows the instal-lation of an XL105 perfector last year. “That has delivered 65-70% more productivity than the SM102 it replaced,” he says. “That’s the sort of efficiency

improvement that is key to every printer who wants to drive up margin.”

This time the effi-ciency gains could be even more spectacu-lar, at least against the cover press. The B1 sheet produces twice as many pages to view, perfecting means there is no need for a second makeready and second run through the press.

“Because it is so efficient, only 20% of its time will be spent printing covers. This is a 75% improvement over the CD74,” says Coxon. The company had two printers retire this year who were not replaced because of the plans for this investment. A further two will

be deployed around the plant. Other advantages to the press

include Autoplate XL simul-taneous plate changing and Inpress inline colour control. Coxon reckons that a full makeready will be 15 minutes and a section change around four

minutes less than this. “And Inpress will mean that we produce better consistency and sharper printing.”

As this is the first long perfector in the country with the inline coater, Pensord needed to travel to see the machine in action.

For Heidelberg UK there is a certain amount of relief tha t “someone in the UK finally

gets it” as Pensord operations director Karl Gater says, with Heidelberg UK sales director Jim Todd adding: “All print-ers are trying to find a point of difference and this investment by Pensord will certainly mark it out.”

Isle of WIght company Crossprint has become the first in the UK to achieve Ricoh’s carbon balanced status. It caps a series of milestones taking the company towards becoming one of the most environmentally friendly in the UK.

Over the summer the company fitted 162 solar panels to its factory, generating 40.5kW, equivalent to 90% of its elec-tricity in this way. As Ricoh’s Carbon Balanced Production Printing Programme uses the number of sheets printed and the energy consumed in print-ing those sheets to calculate how much carbon needs to be offset, this becomes minimal because so little power is drawn from the grid.

The company installed a Ricoh Pro 751 to boost its digital

printing capacity, although managing director Tim Sell prefers to talk about “electronic printing” to distinguish it from conventional printing.

The Ricoh sits alongside B2 and B3 five-colour Ryobis and a Xerox 260. The litho presses run without alcohol and with lower energy consumption than rival litho machines. Sell says: “The Ryobi 755 is rated as using 43% less power than any other equivalent offset press on the market.”

The company is a keen advo-cate of recycled paper. “It prevents landfill where paper is implicated in producing methane,” Sell says.

“About 36% of the paper we use is recycled, in doing so we have bucked the trends towards reduced use of recycled papers.

For one customer we have the paper cut to size specifically for us,” he adds.

This is Charnwood Stoves where the company has also profiled the paper against customer requirements to cut the amount of ink used by 7% on the recycled paper.

“And we’ve noticed no differ-ence since production of Revive switched from a French to an Italian mill,” Sell says.

Ahead of joining Ricoh’s scheme, Crossprint was already able to offset any carbon emis-sions generated by printing through the World Land Trust when using Paperlinx sourced papers.

As well as use of paper and the solar panels which mean that Crossprint earns an A rating for its factory, the company uses

process-free plates and vegeta-ble oil inks.

The mainland is going to be the source of new customers as the company seeks to expand beyond customers on the Isle of Wight. It is generating 30% of sales from the mainland and has opened a sales office in Ports-mouth to help with this drive.

However, Sell appreciates that the future lies beyond ink or toner on paper, no matter how good the quality.

“We know we can no longer be simply a printing company,” he explains. “This year I launched Vision 2021 to encap-sulate where we want to be. It means retraining staff, expand-ing the web side, electronic printing and variable data so that we can sell this as a totally integrated service.”

Crossprint is first to receive Ricoh’s carbon balance

Karl Gater (left) and Darren Coxon looking forward to installation of the new press.

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Craig Collins teams up with Polar to supply innovative Guillo-CreaseIt Is a product worthy of Dragons’ Den. It is something that solves a nagging problem, has been developed by someone with deep knowledge of the problem and perfected over a long period.

Only none of the millionaire entrepreneurs will be investing. Instead Craig Collins has a deal with Polar to supply his Guillo-Crease for a minimum of a year.

The tool turns the guillotine into a very effective creasing device for those printers handling creasing but without a special-ist machine on the premises. In very basic terms the cutting stick is replaced by a creasing matrix and the blade of the guillotine masked by a magnetic shield. When the blade is activated, instead of cutting through the sheet, a crease results. Differ-ent sizes of matrix channel cope

with different thicknesses of board and different lengths are available to suite the different formats of guillotine.

The position of the crease is programmed from the control panel in the normal way. Collins himself reckons that 400 creased products an hour is possible with two up folder covers, requiring three creases,

for example. Minimum thick-ness is 250 microns, maximum thickness is 1800 micron board, well beyond the capability of a creasing unit designed for digi-tally printed paper.

Indeed matched with some-thing like that, the adapted guillotine can produce the covers for short run photobooks or covers for training folders. The

different sizes of matrix channel are colour coded according to the dimensions required.

The kit will sell for around £400, a sum that Collins says can be recouped on the first job that would otherwise have to be sent out. And he adds that because the crease is formed from the clamping action of the guillotine, at pressure that can be varied as needed, the result is kinder on the material than creasing by a platen or Cylin-der. “It’s a softer creasing action than letterpress,” Collins says.

Development, as for all in his position, took determination to find the right company able to produce the magnetic male element of the matrix. Once he had found a company that could produce an extruded magnet “everything fell into place” he says.

Craig Collins with effective creasing device which attaches to the blade of guillotine, masked by a magnetic strip.

Not all wIde format printers use inkjet as the imaging engine. Konica Minol-ta’s KIP series of printers has used LED and toner imaging to offer a fast and relatively low cost way to produce mono

prints for the construction sector and in colour is some devices.

Now the company has extended the range to include the KIP C7800 a hybrid mono and colour device that the

company says is suitable for graphic arts applications.

It has two toner delivery systems, keeping mono-only printing separate from colour. It prints at resolutions of 600 x 2,400dpi, controlled from a

touch panel screen.While the range of printed

materials may not be as exten-sive as for some inkjet printers, the toners are both waterproof and lightfast and therefore useable outdoors.

Konica minolta extends its KIP range to include hybrid mono/colour device

HavINg takeN oN distribu-tion of the Mohr small format guillotines after Drupa, Watkiss has now extended its product range a further step by taking on distribution of Tauler lami-nators in the UK.

There are a number models in the range, all thermal lami-nators with 520 and 750mm widths and in semi and fully automatic designs. Tauler is a Spanish manufacturer that has sold more the 3,000 units over

its 40 year history. Watkiss sales director Paul Attew says: “We are delighted to be working with Tauler because they have an in depth knowledge and understanding of laminating. They are a proven brand with a worldwide reputation for quality and reliability.”

This is evident in some of the design touches which make the machines easy to use, and deliver consistent results for smaller print shops. The

machines are also designed to have low maintenance require-

ments. The PrintLam models come as Smart or SmartMatic versions,

have a 520mm laminat-ing width and will run at 15

per minute or 20m per minute respectively. This is the model

which Watkiss expects to prove most popular, while the CTI and CTIS ranges are

more suited to heavier produc-tion demands.

Watkiss takes on tauler laminating range

Watkiss now distributes tauler laminators.



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ferag…

ins_minisert_186x132_e_260812.indd 1 28.08.12 19:11

Clifford Press doubles capacity with KBa 162a sheetfed pressClifford Press, Coventry, is buying a six-colour KBA 162a sheetfed press, one of the largest sheetfed presses sold in the UK this year.

The machine is to be deliv-ered before the end of the year where it will join an existing six-colour 162a. While this is a huge boost to capacity, it is a neces-sary move. The trade printer has been attracting a huge number of inquiries and while a digital press might have eased this problem, the company was not sure that digital quality would match litho.

Works director Paul Cock-erill explains: “Production speeds are still an issue and we felt the digital print quality just wouldn’t suit a lot of our work, such as the cosmetics sector

where skin tones are so demand-ing. The more we looked at it the more a second large format litho press makes sense.”

The company works only via agencies and other printers, placing a premium on quality,

as well as discretion. According to sales director Paul Thomas the company has had to pass on some work because taking on more would risk overloading capacity. “The second KBA will change that. In effect we will be

offering 48 hours of large format capacity every day of the year.,” he says.

The new machine is config-ured to run only with standard inks, leaving the first to offer UV inks printing when required. It has however been specified with thick stock capability and has a coater and UV dryer.

It provides the capacity for a wide range of the special finishes using water based coat-ings and tactile sealers that are demanded.

With makeready aids like LogoTronic and QualiTronic, turnaround times should be faster and waste levels lower. These can be added to the first press for a networked environ-ment linking Esko workflow and Luscher platesetter to the press.

Chris scully of KBa and Paul Cockerill after agreeing the deal.



enfocus: automate when it is needed, not for the sake of itWorkfloW automation has around since the early days of desktop publishing, with ICC profiles a reminder of those first efforts to link different appli-cations in a seamless hands off process.

But for many printers work-flow automation remains daunting, something that they look to a traditional supplier of a big ticket item to provide. Regardless of whether it is a snug fit or not.

There are alternatives to this off the peg tailoring approach and leading the way is Enfocus, first with the PitStop range of tools for preflighting and correcting PDF files and latterly with Switch, its application for linking different applications into a production workflow. And whether a change in strat-egy is responsible, or whether it is because workflow’s time has come, sales of the Switch prod-ucts have risen 35% in the past year.

Vice president Fabian Prud-homme says: “We changed the way we sell Switch this year, from having three versions, to a more modular approach based around the core engine and supplying whatever components to put together according to requirements. It makes every-thing more transparent.”

The basic sysTem might be just the core engine, data-base and configurator modules, but it might also be built into a major system linking to differ-ent databases and linked to web to print engines enabling a fully hands off workflow for manag-ing incoming files, checking them and directing them to the appropriate press and archiving them after.

Prudhomme likens it to a box of children’s building bricks. “With a few bricks you

can easily build a tower, but with more bricks you can build a spaceship,” he says.

The need for automation has become self evident as the recession continues its hold and as the need to handle an increase in the number of jobs of shorter print runs with faster turnaround bites deeper.

The answer is not to throw expen-sive people at the problem, but to automate at least the standard repeti-tive processes so that people can be freed up for more valuable tasks. The value of this step is seen with the rapid payback a modest Switch system can produce “from as little as two weeks to three months at the most” says Prudhomme.

he advises companies to take these small steps at first and build on the confidence that they inspire to take greater strides as trust that automation can be reliable, can save money, can reduce errors and improve customer communication, increases. The extreme can be like the French customer who had mapped out a highly intri-cate workflow map, automating every process the management team could think of.

“We told him that for certain steps it would be better for employees to pass each other Post-It notes,” he adds. “The end result would be the same and it would be cheaper and faster to do it that way. Do not pursue automation for its own sake. Automate what should be

automated and do not automate everything at once.”

There are barriers to adop-tion, mostly based around fear and what if questions. While in the early years it may have been necessary to have program-ming or at least scripting skills, this is no longer the case. And while a major press or prepress vendor can supply a workflow, it is going to be an off the peg system, rather than a made to measure application.

sWiTch can link a huge range of applications via config-urators, where developers have shared communication proto-cols with Enfocus to allow a tight integration between appli-cations, and with pretty much any other software using scripts. These can be created by Enfocus itself, by the third party compa-nies that handle sales of Switch or by printers.

The Crossroads commu-nity, with its own website (www.crossroads-world.com) and forum for users, exists to promote the use of Switch in

automated workflows and to provide information to users about getting the best from the application. “Many companies may not be aware that others have built workflows for their application,” he says.

This has been a success, but next year Enfocus plans to bring Crossroads into the main website and there to build on this level of community support. Prudhomme explains that there will be an e-store where developers or even printers can sell the workflow routines they have developed as apps are sold for mobile phones and tablets. “If you have devel-oped it for Switch, some can sell that development if they wish to other users. We will ramp up the website and take care of the transactions,” he adds.

To Take This a sTep further and make life even easier for those new to automa-tion, Enfocus has been working on some out of the box solutions that can be implemented within hours at a customer site.

The company is planning to launch six or seven of these in 2013 as a first step into automa-tion. Their use will be limited to tightly defined applications to solve common problems and will provide the encouragement that a nervous printer might need to enter the water for the first time.

“We are targeting certain tasks which we know create problems for printers from surveys we have carried out into the pain points in the industry. They can install these and be up and running the same day and once they wish to go further, they can upgrade to a full version of Switch.”

The question then becomes not “why automate?” but rather “why not automate?”.

enfocus vice president Fabian Prudhomme says: “With a few brick you can easily build a tower but with a few more you can build a spaceship.”

Profile


The UK’s first Presstek 75DI digital offset press is bedding in at RCS in Retford where owner and manag-ing director Michael Todd has great

expectations of the machine. It is going to solve a number of problems for the business, not least how to deal effectively with reduc-ing print runs that are still too big for any true digital press, but also are too short to be tackled by its conventional litho machines.

The naTure of The business is changing, he explains. “Placing short run jobs on a traditional press is less efficient and uneconomic. We are becoming a makeready organisation, then what we need is the fastest makeready machine we could get.” The six-minute makeready from the Presstek 75DI fits this bill as does the promise of start up waste of only 20 sheets before reaching sale-able colour.

However, the journey to the investment was not quite as simple. The idea of direct imaging on press has been around for some while and the conventional wisdom, that imaging on press is a step away from imaging offline in an environmentally controlled room to imaging in a hostile environment around the press had long counted against the concept. The relative failure of first generation DI machines has long counted against the technology.

“so i was surprised when I saw the Presstek at Drupa,” Todd says. “The more I looked at it, the more it made a lot of sense.” He needed also to overcome his fear of lack of water as the 75DI, like all Presstek presses, is a waterless machine. “I knew that people had had bad experiences of running waterless on converted conven-tional machines,” he says.

But the big advantage of running water-less in that the machine comes into colour so quickly and that the operator is not constantly fighting to keep ink and water in balance, outweighed these concerns. “And the Presstek was built from the ground up around the waterless concept,” he says.

The company is now bedding the five-colour machine in, having replaced

conventional litho presses with the Presstek. It will run the same stochastic screening that the company bases all its work on, another first for the Presstek platform. “We have started to see some really good productivity from it,” Todd continues.

In theory, if the press could be kept running on the same type of job with the same paper all day long with run lengths of just 250 each time, Todd reckons that the press is easily capable of a 100 job changes in a shift. In practice, however, with the variety of papers that the company runs across its range of promotional print prod-ucts, the press will be running through 40 different jobs in that time. “We are still

going to be getting something quite exciting in terms of productivity,” he explains. With only 20 sheets wasted each time, there is a considerable cost saving as well, and a big environmental impact through not creat-ing this waste, with Todd adding: “I hate having to throw paper away. We are keen to be green and wasting a lot of stock seems a ridiculous thing to do.”

The pressTek siTs alongside a KBA Rapida 106 with Drivetronic which is also specified for rapid makeready and above the Screen Truepress JetSX inkjet press which is designated for one to one market-ing and personalisation that Todd believes is going to increase.

The investment in the Presstek and KBA before it also prepare for a post-recession world where print volumes that drifted away do not return. He accepts that this part of the industry is in decline. However, the investment will ensure that as volumes per order fall, RCS can remain standing.

“I liken the situation to when Royal Mail staff go on strike, when they return to work there is less volume than before post because people have found alternative ways to communicate. Recession has made people focus on their marketing budgets to get the biggest bang from their bucks, and if they have found that online works, it will be diffi-cult to win them back to print.

“But a more positive view is that at some point that in order to stand out from the crowd marketers will have to do something in hard copy – and we are starting to see that as well. Nothing beats putting a piece of direct mail in your hand and it’s much more effective if the message is personal. ”

in shorT The fuTure for rCs lies in being able to deliver these jobs quicker and in smaller volumes than before. Had Todd expected a return to pre-recessionary conditions, he says, the line up of presses would not have been altered. “We felt that the presses we had were becoming less rele-vant to the market we are in,” he says. “ I believe that the Presstek is going to prove to be an exceptional press.” n

rCS has great Presstek expectations

“We are going to get something quite exciting in terms of productivity,” says rCS owner and managing director Michael Todd of the new Presstek 75Di installed at the retford factory.

AutomAtion in printing


There is an inevitability that eventu-ally printing will reach a point of ultimate automation. Where oper-ating a press is a matter of loading

paper and pushing a button, where the skills of the operator are unnecessary and the result is a perfectly printed sheet all the time every time. This state of nirvana has not been reached. Perhaps the costs of attaining this level of automation will make it unreachable and that manufacturers will either bankrupt themselves trying or will pull back because so very few companies will ever be able to afford such super sophis-ticated machinery.

In the meantime there is the reality of daily life for a printer in 2012, where print buyers are becoming more demanding in every sense and the pressure to report a profit in harsh times is greater than it has ever been. The way out is through automa-tion to eliminate inconsistency, to increase throughput and cut waste and to give print-ers a chance to cope with an increased number of smaller volume orders.

Around the tAble four suppliers: Christian Knapp, managing director KBA UK; Matt Rockley, B2 and B1 sheetfed specialist from Heidelberg UK; Dan Ramsey, production software & produc-tion colour product manager marketing at Océ and Peter Banks, managing director Presstek UK; met two printers: Doug Gray, managing director of Cambrian Printers and Richard Kyte, manufacturing director of McLays, a B1 commercial printer in Cardiff. The subject for discussion was automation on and around the press and to what extent it was either necessary or a good thing. Neither printer would turn back the clock.

“I’m a great believer that automation leads to consistency,” says Gray. “It’s about

making our printers work in a robotic way rather than choosing individual ways to work.” The imposition of printing to the numbers, of standards like ISO 12647-2 works to eliminate the variation that exists between different pairs of eyes. The spectral measuring instrument is objective.

Gray’s experience extends to printing promotion documents for one of the big share flotations a decade or so ago. The agency had selected an awkward blue from the Pantone swatch book and wanted the four printers involved to match the colour. At the time his company was working with a web press. “We ran 10,000 sections of the web press without anyone touching the colour at all. We could achieve that through automation on press. In fact the results were more consistent when we didn’t touch the press than when we did,” he says. “That technology is now available on sheetfed.”

todAy it is print mAnAgement that demands colour fidelity. “We have to match the brand colours,” says Kyte, “and there may be eight printers involved in the job.” Automated colour control is essential,

The prime example of this is Heidelberg’s Inpress system for measuring colour inside the press and making minute adjustments before the eye can spot them. Cambrian has this fitted to its XL105 and the equivalent system on its ten-unit KBA Rapida. McLays also has the technology, though Kyte says it was not a given. “The managing direc-tor was not sure of the value of Inpress,” he says. “He has changed his mind since however.”

McLays runs longer jobs on average than Cambrian and two presses will share an assistant as automation has eliminated some of the previously time consuming tasks such as blanket and cylinder cleaning and plate

Just press go

in the final of print Business’ series

of round tables on automation, the

industry gathers to discuss the main event. printing.

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mounting. But it is in control of colour that automation is making the greatest strides.

Rockley says that Heidelberg has 130 installation of Inpress in the UK, making it one of the most successful colour quality devices that the company has sold. It started with Williams Lea and their promotion of ISO 12647-2 15 years ago, he says. Inpress can print to these values and generates a report which can be provided to custom-ers for further reassurance. “Inpress has brought digital printing to litho,” he says.

Colour Controls like this have also helped to slash makeready times as the press can be trusted to bring itself into colour and then to maintain the colour values once passed by the operator. Preparation for the next job can begin before the previous job has ended. This is how Ramsey describes operat-ing in a digital set up and it is now the way to work in litho. As a consequence makeready takes place almost at printing speed.

With average print runs plummeting such automation is necessary for a printer to cope. “Even two or three years ago, this pressure simply wasn’t there,” says Banks. And Kyte adds: “We are getting litho jobs with the same turnaround time as digital.” Automa-tion becomes essential to handle these twin pressures. Certainly this is how Cambrian sets out its stall. The more makereadies the more profit margin there is because a makeready is a paid-for part of each job and provides an opportunity to achieve a faster turnaround than allowed for.

“Automation like this needs the infra-structure around the press,” says Gray, “otherwise it is a waste of time.” This means managing the flow of files through to prepress and delivery of plates to the press. He says that he is happy to print a multi section job with a print run of just

200 sheets. To manage this requires plates to be off and on again almost instantly. It is little wonder that during a shift Cambrian will switch the crews around. “We find that quality tends to suffer after eight hours,” he explains.

This approach is a fundamental shift in the way that print is considered, argues Knapp. “This is about manufacturing. Printing has been considered something of a Black Art, but it has to be commoditised. And this makes a real difference.” Not everyone gets it. “Some printers have innovation in their DNA,” he says.

Inevitably the conversation turns to the achievements that Anthony Thirlby has made at ESP, where makeready is calcu-lated in minutes and the jobs run through with no disruption. This level of automation means cutting down on the options around paper, around job type and around formats. Gray says that he is looking into reducing the number of impositions that Cambrian

uses in order to gain some of these benefits. McLays on the other hand has “hundreds of different impositions” and is not likely to change. The key difference is that where Cambrian is handling shorter print runs and is what Gray calls a “makeready business” McLays is printing runs of 60,000-80,000. There is less pressure to change, but runs are coming down across the board.

As print runs shrink it is the ability to print runs of 3,000 to 5,000 with few errors and managed waste levels that will divide those than can cope from those that struggle. And it is about creating different attitudes. For one thing, the highly expe-rienced skilled press minder able to fly his press almost by intuition is fast disap-pearing. A newer younger generation has less print knowledge but greater IT skills. “Automation is there to compensate for this loss of skill,” says Banks. “With the controls on colour quality, the press can run itself.”

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From left: richard Kyte, McLays; Matt rockley, Heidelberg; Dan ramsey, océ; Peter Banks, Presstek; Doug Gray, cambrian Printers; and christian Knapp, KBA.

Knapp says that managing colour will more often mean that the press operator is looking at the traffic lights on the monitor.

AutomAtion in printing


The Presstek machine, specifically the 75DI, is configured to meet the problem of shrinking skills and print runs. While not quite a green button machine, plates are imaged on press, there is no water to create unwanted variables and automation takes care of everything else. “It’s about elimi-nating as many process steps as possible,” he says. “It’s also a cultural thing. A busi-ness needs to be used to running at peak productivity, producing a large number of jobs per day and even on those days when there are not so many jobs, they should run in the same way. Twenty or 30 jobs a shift should be normal with just 20 waste sheets across all stocks.”

Across the Presstek customer base, trained minders are scarce. One of the best, he says, was working for electrical retailer Comet only a few months previously.

Gray has had the same experience where youngsters take to running a digital press easily. “They have no fear of automation.” Their experience instead is about working and relaxing with video screens. The colour controls on the Heidelbergs now mean that the optimum state is reached when there is no deviation to the flat line that appears on the large screen at the control desk. “That is also useful for the 24-year-old print buyers who see the flat line and recognise this. Digital is perceived to be correct,” he says. In Knapp’s experience, managing colour will more often mean that the press operator is looking at the traffic light colours on the monitor to see that the job is in colour rather than at the printed sheet.

Digital print does not have the problem of balancing a chemical process involving oil

based inks and water of sometimes variable quality (both Cambrian and McLays operate with reverse osmosis systems to negate this variable).

“Paper wasted in digital will be very much less,” says Ramsey. “It brings workflow and press into one where provided the job is correct when set up in prepress you know what you are going to get. The Rip technol-ogy is so intelligent that it can take the PDF, read the colour directly into the press and pull the right paper from up to eight sources on the machine.

“Conditions inside the machine are managed for stability so there is the ability to reproduce something exactly all the time. There’s a process control element built in.”

Where the quality requirement is about achieving a good colour balance, the digital machine will run itself. Colour adjustments are only necessary for absolute top quality, which most work does not need, but there is a penalty, says Ramsey. “When running automatically you are making money,” he says. “Making interventions to get 10/10 quality is expensive and can lose you money.”

DigitAl hAs the benefit of a flat line cost, making the price calculation easier and also a known production time to make that more predictable than litho can be.

As with many print operations McLays also has an extensive digital set up and Cambrian has a digital operation as well as litho. To date digital for both is aimed at shorter runs, though Gray says he is happy to run a 2,000 sheet job on the Indigo with a 200 sheet job on the KBA should the situ-ation be right.

He takes the same attitude to running the pressroom as EasyJet does to turning its planes around and keeping them in the air. “EasyJet is making more money than other airlines because their planes are in the air rather than on the ground for more of the time.” When they are flying they are earning money. “We measure everything about performance and we need to build in maintenance, 12 hours per press per week, because only with everything in top condi-tion can you achieve the performance.

“the PAPer will chAnge, the rollers will go out slightly and you have to have the understanding that colour control has to be calibrated regularly.” Because of this it means that the lights out pressroom is unlikely in the near future, at least for sheetfed offset. There is a greater chance for full automation with digital printing where these variables do not exist.

Once set for colour a digital press should be self calibrating, whereas the offset print-ers need outside help. Cambrian works with Mellow Colour and McLays with Bodoni. Both send sheets away to check that the press remains in balance.

This demand has led Heidelberg to change its ink system to keep the foils in the right place so that duct profiles remain accurate and there is no wear to compensate for, Rockley explains. “It’s about keeping waste sheets to a minimum.” With so few sheets coming off the press some printers have learned not to throw away the first few sheets, but to keep them and use them to set up in finishing he adds. “Makeready is where a printer makes money,” he says. Some printers, however, do not charge for make

océ’s Dan ramsey: “rip technology is so intelligent it can read the colour from the pDF directly into the press.”

mcLays’ richard Kyte: “We have to match the brand colours and there may be eight printers involved.”

Heidelberg’s matt rockley: “it’s about keeping waste sheets to a minimum. makeready is where the money is made.”

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ready and, even worse, some allow press passes and buyers to make adjustments.

This is anathema to both printers. Both actively discourage the press pass, Gray timing them for the middle of the night and then only allowing 15 minutes and 250 sheets before landing the customer with a large bill. With print to the numbers there is no need for the traditional press pass, buyers can learn to trust the numbers. “We can measure quality in 1s and 0s,” says Gray.

The question then is whether automation is worth it, can a printer ever recoup the extra investment that automation entails. In order to decide it means running the finan-cial numbers to calculate a proper return on investment. “The printer needs to under-stand exactly where he makes his money, and many of them don’t,” says Banks.

“But if you do get into the ROI conversa-tion, then that type of printer will have the figures,” says Knapp, “and it must cover the whole process.”

“It has to be about the correct type of automation…” says Rockley. “…with an ROI under three years,” takes up Knapp. “You will need to make some assumptions, but the pay back has to be calculated over a relatively short period, say 18 months to three years.”

This will involve another change because traditionally a press has been depreciated over ten years. Moving this to a five-year depreciation cycle will have an impact on the finances but it has to be done because there will be a new set of changes five years down the road.

Nor should automation be selected for its own sake. Heidelberg can supply CutStars

to manage sheet delivery, but this will not pay off for every printer. On the other hand, Rockley relates the experience at one printer with an automated non-stop delivery, but who did not have a non-stop feeder, so had to stop the press to change piles. Printers must get the logistics around the press right, he says.

In the dIgItal world it is perfectly feasible to add finishing technology inline to increase the degree of automation, but this is not necessarily a good thing. Ramsey explains: “Prepress is highly integrated into the press, but inline finishing for a digital web press is expensive and can be prohibi-tively so for a retro fit.”

Nor is it always the best way to go. Match-ing the ideal production speeds of press and finishing line can be difficult, leaving one or the other operating below par unless in that restricted sweet spot. It is highly unlikely that sheetfed litho presses will feed directly into finishing equipment therefore.

“It’s important to have the correct auto-mation,” says Rockley. While colour and integration with prepress are the obvious steps, there are other choices. Knapp points to automating the changeover for a coater for example. “How long does this take normally?” he says. “What then is the impact on production?”.

Ink pumpIng Is almost accepted as normal, but has a big impact on running a press at high speed if an assistant has to manually load ducts with ink. For Kyte, the productivity of the latest investment in a six-colour XL106 has led to invest-ment in a second automated folder, this time

with a split delivery to cope with the extra productivity and to continue the culture of automation.

Elimination of the manual interven-tion points or on press variables is crucial for successful automation. The Presstek machine is waterless so takes this a step further than either Heidelberg or KBA. Knapp points out that KBA has built water-less presses, but would not have the capacity to make these in volume. Consequently the price is higher. It has been successful on newspaper machines, however. The same would be true of Heidelberg. It is possible to build machines with higher degrees for automation, but it is not always a practi-cal proposition. For Presstek this is not the issue as the company has been able to design the press for waterless operation from the outset.

Gray has cut a further variable from production by keeping the environment constant with humidity controls installed. It helps overcome some of the issues around paper, and nods towards the more controlled environment rooms that digital printing sometimes requires.

It needs the whole system to be geared towards maximum productiv-ity around the press, rather as a Formula 1 team concentrates on getting the tyres right, tweaks the engine set up to avoid over heating the exhaust and monitors everything in the race for peak performance, so the printer needs the MIS in place, the prepress and the finishing that follows to reduce the touch points. “The less you touch the job, the greater the profit,” says Gray. That is the point and benefit of automation. n

Presstek’s Peter Banks: “Automation is there to compensate for this loss of skills. the press can run itself.”

cambrian Printers’ Doug Gray: “the less you touch the jobs, the greater the profit.”

KBA’s christian Knapp: “Printing has been considered something of a Black Art, but it has to be commoditised.”

Print Power/two sides


The print and paper industry needs to spend more, a lot more, on research-ing and promoting the effectiveness of printed communication, the

Print Power/Two Sides autumn seminar at Stationers’ Hall was told. Julian Ingram, EVP EMEA at McCann Worldgroup, went further: “You need to fund real research to prove the real value of print. Increase Print Power’s budget fivefold and you might see some results.”

His was a sobering assessment of where print is failing to win ground against on-screen communications and followed on from an even gloomier presentation from Jeremy Dain, strategy director at PWC and who is focused on media, print and digital. PWC produces an annual survey of trends across 120 countries in the sector. And this makes depressing reading for those reliant on a thriving demand for print. “Every company needs a digital strategy,” he told an audience drawn from paper and print. “It is no longer about print or digital – it’s all captured into one. This is the end of the digital beginning.”

Advertising growth globally is around 5-6%, lower at around 3-4% in the mature economies and at 12% in the rising coun-tries. “But growth is driven by digital. In the UK all the growth is about digital, print is in slight decline.”

The mass media baTTle may have been lost. Paid search is the fastest growing arm of advertising with social media advertising not far adrift. Video is growing exponentially while mobile spend alone has reached £181 million, though is almost all focused on search. Google’s most recent quarter included sales of more than $1 billion from advertising, but only $150 million from mobile. There is huge growth potential there.

The message is clear: print can never

recapture the volumes or share of the adver-tising spend that it once enjoyed. This was taken up by Ingram. “My interest is about the most effective way to reach audiences. Nobody has an interest in the survival of a medium that cannot or does not deliver,” he said. The lesson, he added, comes from Sun Tzu, writer of the Art of War: “He who knows when he can fight, and when he cannot, will be victorious.”

The challenge is Then to under-stand where print can be victorious and what it needs to do to achieve that victory. Sitting out recession in the expectation that some kind of normality will return as the economy picks up is simply wrong.

The transition to digital for ephemeral print is well underway. The UK market for paperback books in the first 40 weeks of this year was stable compared to last, but only because of the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey titles. Without these, the market would have been 23% lower. On the other hand volumes of case bound books have risen by 7% in the same period. Print is valued for its longevity and the industry should focus on that.

One of the most important factors in selecting which advertising channel to use is what Ingram called Access Cost, the amount it takes to reach a potential customer. In this

digital is unbeatable and print is floundering. Ingram explained: “If your print product is about access cost only, you will lose. There-fore you should accept managed decline and invest in areas where it’s the user’s experi-ence that counts and it’s not access cost sensitive, where consumers can get the best rewards.”

He explained this by pointing to the cinema, where the arrival of first video and then DVD and Blueray reduce the access cost of watching a film. It should be a sector that is disrupted by this technology because of the access cost issue. But advertising spend in cinema is increasing because admissions have grown. Moreover the average price has risen “because cinema owners have focused on delivering a more rewarding experience, with better screens, better sound and better management. It is about delivering a more rewarding, shared experience than watching the same movie at home.” In the US this has been accompanied by a reduction in the total number of screens as older less suitable loca-tions have been eliminated, while there has been investment in modern digital facilities able to cater to the audience’s expectations.

PrinT can equally confound expectations that it must be overtaken by technology, if it can concentrate on the experience and reward aspects. Ingram explained how different media are consumed in different ways, that online activity is a lean forward engagement whereas print is ‘lean back’, that consumption of print is about the sensory qualities of print, its smell and feel. “It’s about my time rather than news time,” he said. “Print is about permanence and evoking memories. You can escape from the digital world to somewhere calming and enjoyable. This is what lean forward media cannot achieve.”

Print is equally powerful in appealing to the emotions. There is little impact in

real value of print

speakers at the Print Power and two sides autumn seminar had some sobering but constructive advice

for printers.

Print Power/two sides


The print and paper industry needs to spend more, a lot more, on research-ing and promoting the effectiveness of printed communication, the

Print Power/Two Sides autumn seminar at Stationers’ Hall was told. Julian Ingram, EVP EMEA at McCann Worldgroup, went further: “You need to fund real research to prove the real value of print. Increase Print Power’s budget fivefold and you might see some results.”

His was a sobering assessment of where print is failing to win ground against on-screen communications and followed on from an even gloomier presentation from Jeremy Dain, strategy director at PWC and who is focused on media, print and digital. PWC produces an annual survey of trends across 120 countries in the sector. And this makes depressing reading for those reliant on a thriving demand for print. “Every company needs a digital strategy,” he told an audience drawn from paper and print. “It is no longer about print or digital – it’s all captured into one. This is the end of the digital beginning.”

Advertising growth globally is around 5-6%, lower at around 3-4% in the mature economies and at 12% in the rising coun-tries. “But growth is driven by digital. In the UK all the growth is about digital, print is in slight decline.”

The mass media baTTle may have been lost. Paid search is the fastest growing arm of advertising with social media advertising not far adrift. Video is growing exponentially while mobile spend alone has reached £181 million, though is almost all focused on search. Google’s most recent quarter included sales of more than $1 billion from advertising, but only $150 million from mobile. There is huge growth potential there.

The message is clear: print can never

recapture the volumes or share of the adver-tising spend that it once enjoyed. This was taken up by Ingram. “My interest is about the most effective way to reach audiences. Nobody has an interest in the survival of a medium that cannot or does not deliver,” he said. The lesson, he added, comes from Sun Tzu, writer of the Art of War: “He who knows when he can fight, and when he cannot, will be victorious.”

The challenge is Then to under-stand where print can be victorious and what it needs to do to achieve that victory. Sitting out recession in the expectation that some kind of normality will return as the economy picks up is simply wrong.

The transition to digital for ephemeral print is well underway. The UK market for paperback books in the first 40 weeks of this year was stable compared to last, but only because of the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey titles. Without these, the market would have been 23% lower. On the other hand volumes of case bound books have risen by 7% in the same period. Print is valued for its longevity and the industry should focus on that.

One of the most important factors in selecting which advertising channel to use is what Ingram called Access Cost, the amount it takes to reach a potential customer. In this

digital is unbeatable and print is floundering. Ingram explained: “If your print product is about access cost only, you will lose. There-fore you should accept managed decline and invest in areas where it’s the user’s experi-ence that counts and it’s not access cost sensitive, where consumers can get the best rewards.”

He explained this by pointing to the cinema, where the arrival of first video and then DVD and Blueray reduce the access cost of watching a film. It should be a sector that is disrupted by this technology because of the access cost issue. But advertising spend in cinema is increasing because admissions have grown. Moreover the average price has risen “because cinema owners have focused on delivering a more rewarding experience, with better screens, better sound and better management. It is about delivering a more rewarding, shared experience than watching the same movie at home.” In the US this has been accompanied by a reduction in the total number of screens as older less suitable loca-tions have been eliminated, while there has been investment in modern digital facilities able to cater to the audience’s expectations.

PrinT can equally confound expectations that it must be overtaken by technology, if it can concentrate on the experience and reward aspects. Ingram explained how different media are consumed in different ways, that online activity is a lean forward engagement whereas print is ‘lean back’, that consumption of print is about the sensory qualities of print, its smell and feel. “It’s about my time rather than news time,” he said. “Print is about permanence and evoking memories. You can escape from the digital world to somewhere calming and enjoyable. This is what lean forward media cannot achieve.”

Print is equally powerful in appealing to the emotions. There is little impact in

real value of print

speakers at the Print Power and two sides autumn seminar had some sobering but constructive advice

for printers.

PaPer forum


sending an iTunes voucher by email as a birthday present. “That is not personal. This is where print can offer real value. The power of a handwritten letter is greater than ever before. This is the emotional power of giving,” Ingram said. “Moonpig and Blurb cannot function without print. Without print they cannot deliver their business model. And life is not automatically easy for digital businesses. Zynga and Facebook both have seen falls in their share price. Consum-ers are as fickle in their behaviour as ever.”

Print can also be associated with status in a way that screen cannot. “The Economist is holding on to magazine sales quite well. In the past it was a publi-cation that you read because you might be on a distribution list. It had no real kudos and was a lean forward medium. The land-mark advertising campaigns changed this. Reading The Economist became associated with business success and managers would want to be seen reading because it was an indication of success. It was entry to an exclusive club communicating consumer value far better than the digital alternative.”

Ad agencies, however, need reminding of the impact print can have, and they need the hard evidence to prove that print works in delivering the message for them. Print needs also to be easier to specify because “remov-ing the cost of complexity is a big issue in our industry” he said.

The digital media are of themselves accountable in that activity can be measured and tracked, and media buyers are becom-ing used to this sort of interactivity and feedback. Older heads within the agencies understand that print works, but lack the supporting evidence to counter with. This is why Ingram called for a boost to the effort behind Print Power. “The danger is that psychologically you are written off. Print is fast becoming unfashionable as a new

generation of media buyers has no affin-ity or emotional history with print. This industry needs to have a compelling story, consistently over a long period of time,” he explained. “But print cannot be all things to all people, it has to find complementary roles to digital, to focus on areas where the printed product adds value in an emotional way, where it is about the sender and the user. You need to build on the emotional relevance that print has.

“And you need a better understanding of how end consumers behave. You need the high quality research to demonstrate the benefit of using print. Our researchers have found nothing usable. I shouldn’t have to search for a reason why my clients should use you. You should come to me to show why we should use print.”

such statistics as are available are published in the Print Power magazine which is aimed at agencies and designers, particularly young designers who lack that understanding and believe print is not sexy, said Martyn Eustace, head of the Two Sides and Print Power campaigns in the UK. The most recent issue, he announced, looks at the impact of special effects in print with case studies about the use of print.

He also provided insight into the impact that the Two Sides campaign to influence attitudes that had placed paper as a resource destroying forests. Through display ads in magazines and newspapers across Europe, the message was getting through and educat-ing readers.

Whether it changes minds as to the influ-ence that print can have is another matter. The irregular magazine is nicely produced, but probably not enough on its own to change attitudes. In his call for more effort and resources Ingram recognised that. Whether such effort will be forthcoming is another matter. n

The design PersPecTivedaniel freyTag, partner in Glasgow design agency Berg, has the same experience. “Digital is more measurable and it is safer for a marketing manager to commission digital,” he says.

The agency was set up as a small operation, though both partners have experience of working for the largest agencies, with the aim of producing interesting work with print very much to the fore. “The way that print should be sold goes hand in hand with how we sell our business,” Freytag says. But the problem is that print is not necessarily sold in this way. Too many printers rely on old ways of selling print, talking about price and machinery, not impact.

Clients, he says, may like print, but do not care how it is produced. This can explain the revival in letterpress and even thermography as technologies that marketers have not come across. “Clients want a point of difference, something tactile and beautiful without spending vast sums of money. So we have to find ways to achieve that,” he says. And as print has to work hand in hand with screen based media, the aim is deliver a single strong message using print, on an interesting stock, and to follow through with links to the website where there is a greater chance to communicate.

“Printers need to communicate with design agencies using the same language that designers use to speak to their clients. They must use the same visual vocabulary. GF Smith has done this to the point where their samples are kept and Justin Hobson at Fenner is speaking our language through his blog. In Glasgow there are not so many printers changing the way they sell.”

The agency is working on a project with Fedrigoni which will promote the use of print as a high quality, highly effective marketing tool. The idea is based around the FSC certification of taking identifiable trees from the forest and tracking them to a numbered printed piece at the end of the journey. “It’s about promoting our design studio, the paper merchant and we want to work with a printer as it will show what we all can do,” he says. “It sells print and it sells paper. It’s no longer about mass volumes, it’s about touching people at a bespoke level and building relationships, understanding where the consumer is coming from.

“Inevitably some projects will be worth more than others. However, it’s like selling a brand: there is no instant return when using print.”

martyn eustace, who heads the Print Power and Two sides campaigns, is targeting young designers who believe print is not sexy.

Designer viewpoint


Chris Bowen, managing director of Taylor Bloxham, was at the Two Sides/Print Power autumn seminar, listening to presentations which

pointed to the challenges print faces as advertising spend migrates elsewhere. “The message from Julian Ingram was that if we want to have a healthy printing industry, we have to move forwards. We have to talk to customers and understand exactly what it is end customers are trying to achieve.”

Taylor Bloxham markets itself with the emphasis on high definition litho printing and while litho printing remains the engine for the Leicester business, it is the digital side that shows what can be done through innovation. “In PoS we have these sorts of conversations where customers are looking for real stand out design which is adding real value. Can we use different materials and inks? The smarter printers are not just talking about print and we all have to move with the times and understand the different channels. It’s about impact. There are brochures and there are stand out brochures.”

Hackney printer Jigsaw places itself firmly in the stand out brochures camp. It prints for the fashion and property sectors where the emphasis is on quality and impact, where luxury brands want printed literature to match.

It is a world away from a price-led approach. “Print has shot itself in the foot,” says Paul Martin. “There has been a massive dumbing down in the industry, when it really needs to be more savvy and embrace what it is best at.”

That means printing to the highest stand-ards on papers from the likes of GF Smith and Fenner Paper, materials that call on a differ-

ent level of skill to print on, and crucially to prepare to print on. While Jigsaw receives PDFs from designers, it is not taking in print ready CMYK pages. It wants to work on the RGB images to optimise the final results depending on the paper, the ink and the press used. Its baseline screen is at 200dpi regardless of the paper being printed. “Designers do not want to spend their days printing out colour. They need to give that job to the people whose job this is,” says Martin. “The art of colour has gone out of the industry in general because we didn’t make the best use of the tools we have. Whereas at Jigsaw we embrace the traditional skills in a digital world.”

paper is a key part of the conversa-tion with designers, specification is discussed and suggestions made to fall in line with the budget, even to printing fewer copies to trim costs in order to use the best paper for the job. Some designers welcome this educational approach, others have more experience says Martin. “We help them choose from samples. It’s about making it easy for them to have that conversation. Print’s strengths lie in captur-ing the senses through smell and touch as well as visually.”

This is a long way from the lean manage-ment approach of maximising press usage and driving out down time to achieve the highest productivity levels across equipment operated around the clock. This is bespoke tailoring in an age of off the peg shopping. Printers looking for this need to not only have the print and paper handling skills, they need also to realise that communication with customers is important.

“It is a niche,” says Roy Killen from Bermondsey printer Push, but it’s not an easy option. “We like to work with designers,

we get what they are about. We believe that print is an integral part of most communica-tions and our focus is on making something beautiful.”

The company prints for It’s Nice That, a business started by design students as a blog to highlight good design and which has developed into a business around the website, events, a magazine and now an annual hard cased book, printed at Push. Will Hudson, who started the company, is clearly a lover of all things ink on paper and sees a continuing future for the medium.

“Good print will continue to exist,” he says. But again the emphasis is on making print work. As the company is preparing to launch the magazine with a wider circulation than through mail order, there is the issue of making magazines as a nice objects in them-selves. Wallpaper and Monocle have to a large extent done this, and It’s Nice That is follow-ing suit. “It has to have a point of difference, to make it like nothing else on the news-stand,” he says. “Production values were so so critical to us. The magazine is, I’m told, saved on shelves in studios around the world. For us, it’s about being clever with materials and what we are trying to print. If we had wanted something disposable we’d have used cheaper materials.”

tHe sense of permanence is impor-tant also. The website shines a spotlight on designers and their work for a few days before new work pushes this down the list. The magazine needs to go into more depth and works in a way that the website cannot. Now there is the End of Year book which looks at 135 projects that have featured on line during the year. “We considered going abroad for the print. It would have been cheaper, but by

Making an iMpression

the area in which print cannot be beaten is at the quality end of the market. Designers and consumers love the tactile, emotional

qualities that a piece of top notch paper delivers.

Designer viewpoint


Chris Bowen, managing director of Taylor Bloxham, was at the Two Sides/Print Power autumn seminar, listening to presentations which

pointed to the challenges print faces as advertising spend migrates elsewhere. “The message from Julian Ingram was that if we want to have a healthy printing industry, we have to move forwards. We have to talk to customers and understand exactly what it is end customers are trying to achieve.”

Taylor Bloxham markets itself with the emphasis on high definition litho printing and while litho printing remains the engine for the Leicester business, it is the digital side that shows what can be done through innovation. “In PoS we have these sorts of conversations where customers are looking for real stand out design which is adding real value. Can we use different materials and inks? The smarter printers are not just talking about print and we all have to move with the times and understand the different channels. It’s about impact. There are brochures and there are stand out brochures.”

Hackney printer Jigsaw places itself firmly in the stand out brochures camp. It prints for the fashion and property sectors where the emphasis is on quality and impact, where luxury brands want printed literature to match.

It is a world away from a price-led approach. “Print has shot itself in the foot,” says Paul Martin. “There has been a massive dumbing down in the industry, when it really needs to be more savvy and embrace what it is best at.”

That means printing to the highest stand-ards on papers from the likes of GF Smith and Fenner Paper, materials that call on a differ-

ent level of skill to print on, and crucially to prepare to print on. While Jigsaw receives PDFs from designers, it is not taking in print ready CMYK pages. It wants to work on the RGB images to optimise the final results depending on the paper, the ink and the press used. Its baseline screen is at 200dpi regardless of the paper being printed. “Designers do not want to spend their days printing out colour. They need to give that job to the people whose job this is,” says Martin. “The art of colour has gone out of the industry in general because we didn’t make the best use of the tools we have. Whereas at Jigsaw we embrace the traditional skills in a digital world.”

paper is a key part of the conversa-tion with designers, specification is discussed and suggestions made to fall in line with the budget, even to printing fewer copies to trim costs in order to use the best paper for the job. Some designers welcome this educational approach, others have more experience says Martin. “We help them choose from samples. It’s about making it easy for them to have that conversation. Print’s strengths lie in captur-ing the senses through smell and touch as well as visually.”

This is a long way from the lean manage-ment approach of maximising press usage and driving out down time to achieve the highest productivity levels across equipment operated around the clock. This is bespoke tailoring in an age of off the peg shopping. Printers looking for this need to not only have the print and paper handling skills, they need also to realise that communication with customers is important.

“It is a niche,” says Roy Killen from Bermondsey printer Push, but it’s not an easy option. “We like to work with designers,

we get what they are about. We believe that print is an integral part of most communica-tions and our focus is on making something beautiful.”

The company prints for It’s Nice That, a business started by design students as a blog to highlight good design and which has developed into a business around the website, events, a magazine and now an annual hard cased book, printed at Push. Will Hudson, who started the company, is clearly a lover of all things ink on paper and sees a continuing future for the medium.

“Good print will continue to exist,” he says. But again the emphasis is on making print work. As the company is preparing to launch the magazine with a wider circulation than through mail order, there is the issue of making magazines as a nice objects in them-selves. Wallpaper and Monocle have to a large extent done this, and It’s Nice That is follow-ing suit. “It has to have a point of difference, to make it like nothing else on the news-stand,” he says. “Production values were so so critical to us. The magazine is, I’m told, saved on shelves in studios around the world. For us, it’s about being clever with materials and what we are trying to print. If we had wanted something disposable we’d have used cheaper materials.”

tHe sense of permanence is impor-tant also. The website shines a spotlight on designers and their work for a few days before new work pushes this down the list. The magazine needs to go into more depth and works in a way that the website cannot. Now there is the End of Year book which looks at 135 projects that have featured on line during the year. “We considered going abroad for the print. It would have been cheaper, but by

Making an iMpression

the area in which print cannot be beaten is at the quality end of the market. Designers and consumers love the tactile, emotional

qualities that a piece of top notch paper delivers.

PaPer


ing about knowing who printed it,” he says.Through all this there is the idea of

delivering a project which makes best use of papers. Runs are shorter so more of a budget can be directed towards the sort of paper that specialist merchants sell. And well out ahead of its rivals is GF Smith. It has recently secured the UK distribution deal for Heaven 42, a Scheufelen paper, taking it from Paperlinx where it had been one of the main premium grades handled. There will be a much better fit with GF Smith.

The merchant has a history stretching back 127 years and remains independent. In recent years it has tended towards grades from simi-larly independent mills and has accelerated this with the onset of recession realising that it ought to concentrate on its strengths. “Like everyone else, we have been hit by recession,” says joint managing director John Haslam. “But because we understand our market and having been building our brand through spending thousands in inspiring and educating the market, we have been able to ‘create desire’.”

It has been a contInual effort, creating eye catching samples and sponsor-ing events which engage with designers to inspire them to use GF Smith papers. The point is not to try to hold back the tide of digital marketing channels, but education about the role that print can play as the market evolves. “It’s about the combination of digital marketing and good paper with good printing techniques and effects like embossing and foiling. It’s why the luxury brands spend so much on the touch and feel of paper they use.”

There is some way to go. The mail order market, exploding with the use of websites to market clothes for example, continues to use papers bought on price, and this, feels Haslam, is not a fair reflection on the quality of the products that they sell. If the same papers are used for mass market mail order catalogues and the up market clothing cata-logues for example, it is no surprise that the consumer does not make a distinction. “The printer needs to intervene,” he says.

There is a perception gap also in that recently graduating design students do not have the background in paper or print tech-niques. They have for example rediscovered letterpress, die stamping and thermography, techniques that were pushed into the shadows by litho. “Young designers have never seen this before. Our challenge is to educate these university graduates about print. We need to educate and inspire and that creates the desire to use our papers. Once you want and desire the paper, you are in a different

ball game,” he says. The printers that GF Smith deals with are among those that are sympathetic to this long term strategy. The jobs may not have the longest of print runs, but they do have stand out quality. “We have to produce new products and new types of product. This is print’s best defence moving forwards because for marketers it’s all about return on investment.”

Fenner Paper has taken the same path as GF Smith, but without the wherewithal for the sophisticated marketing effort. At one time it was a regional general purpose paper merchant but as the merchant busi-ness consolidated, marketing director Justin Hobson says “We moved away from supply-ing the bash and crash papers to work with designers and printers on projects where the aim is to create something special.

“The luxury brands are faring well in this economy and need good bits of literature.”

WIthout the large budgets, the marketing effort supports a popular blog, Justin’s Amazing World at Fenner Paper, which highlights these sorts of project, whether or not Fenner has supplied the paper. It is about the inspiration that Haslam talks about. For Hobson this level of print remain important. “We are not supplying the paper to companies that are supply-ing cheap motor insuarnce, but if you are buying a carefully put together personalised medical insurance package, as a consumer you want that nicely presented in a folder. If you are buying a £15,000 a night penthouse suite in a top London hotel, you expect the case bound, well printed book to show what you are paying for.”

Substrate, he says can make the difference. The company supplies materials for high end greetings cards publishers, the sort that sell in the Conran Shop. “They are producing designs that are like nothing else and want to use different materials,” he explains.

While this is not really the market that Premier Paper targets, it does sell Fedrigoni papers to printers, relying on the Italian company’s own sales operation to back sell to designers. For marketing director David Jones, the opportunity comes with digital print where the company has been growing rapidly. It can decide on a new substrate and stock it within weeks thanks to short deci-sion chain. “We have a lot to offer with part finished products like Mohawk Panoramic, a paper backed with a cohesive glue and used for high quality photobooks, and with differ-ent types of product as printers begin to explore what their digital presses are capable of and start to offer new services as they start to understand the needs of their customers.”

there Is groWIng Interest among designers about the potential for B2 digital printing. Samples from the first Indigo 10000s installed at Precision Colour and Pureprint especially are eagerly awaited, because this opens up more possibilities.

And it ties in with the direction that more and more people think the industry should go. Haslam was at the conference organsised jointly by the NAPM and BPIF. “It raised some good points,” he says. “And there is good stuff produced by Print Power. We need the supply chain to work together and take a customer oriented approach. All the problems come back to that. Being driven by volume is not the way. The inertia of this industry is its biggest handicap.” n

empress Litho printed the literature for Designer Pudsey, a fashion look-book and auction catalogue to raise money for the BBC Children in Need appeal. The job was printed on arctic’s Munken Pure 150gsm, 240gsm and 300gsm, donated by arctic Paper. Pudsey bears were given to 30 luxury brands to dress in an exclusive style.

Piccolo Press


I have interviewed Michael Johnson in a wide range of places in the years since he joined the printing industry as chief executive of the BPIF, but none

has been as outwardly bizarre as a high class wedding fair in Battersea Park.

Johnson, of course, is no longer chief executive of the BPIF, having retired at the end of his watch. But he has not stepped down from the industry. Last year the former naval man bought Piccolo Press from Tim Honnor, another with the Royal Navy in his blood, and Johnson finally became a printer.

Piccolo Press has been a highly regarded social stationery printer with top notch customers, including most of the the UK government overseas in the form of 100 British Embassies. It has modernised prem-ises in Nairn in the far north of Scotland, a dozen highly skilled people and the sort of equipment needed for engraving, embossing and, of course, letterpress printing.

Johnson bought the business in April, intending to be senior partner to his daughter Gemma Pearce who would run the business. But the idea of sitting back when he could be running around drumming up support and delivering the message is anathema.

In six months a lot has happened, and a lot has not. The lot that has happened is a change of name to the sleeker Piccolo, the relaunch of a website and expansion into social stationery for all occasions rather than just of the “Ambassador requests the pleas-ure of” type.

Which explains why on a damp autumn day Johnson can be found in a pavilion in Battersea Park hosting the London Designer Wedding Show alongside photographers, caterers, videographers, hotels, and provid-ers of the sort of table decorations that spell the difference between success and failure to certain types of bride and her mother.

Piccolo wants a slice of this market where print can be used for ‘save the day’ notices, the invitation itself, the order of service, menu cards, place settings – all printed beau-tifully on very nice paper.

“Tim had run Piccolo Press as a lifestyle business,” says Johnson. “It has 12 staff, produced a £12,000 profit last year and has become a sound business over 20 years.” The future he intimates will be rather different. The shooting star of the social stationery world is Smythsons, shop in New Bond Street, engages the skills of Mrs Cameron and is producer of must-have hand bags. It has recently been acquired by luxury leather goods company Tivoli and is on its way to becoming a global brand. It also produces some nice print, especially personal station-ery, at eye watering prices.

“there is potential for piccolo to grow,” Johnson says, explaining that adding £100,000 in sales is within its grasp. Growth to follow Smythsons or to match the revenue of some of the larger companies in the sector seems unlikely.

While at the BPIF, Johnson had frequently

pointed out that print was among the leading UK industries in terms of value added. High class stationery sits at the top of this because price is not really a determining factor. He was also keen on moving printers from selling on price to becoming customer centric and then customer focused. The terminology may have slipped, but the delivery is there. Piccolo is most definitely at the customer focused end of the spectrum, though not perhaps in the way that his old Powerpoints had intended. Then he was aiming at the use of technology, cross media and variable data marketing messages. Today the technology is strictly craft driven. “There a wonderful air to letterpress and to die stamping. We have all the equipment that’s necessary, it is a beauti-ful operation.

“this has to be a design and marketing led business. Waiting for the phone to ring is not the way to run a busi-ness. Previously this was all theory, that this was the way the industry should evolve. Now I’m on the front line having to invest in the business.”

For Piccolo the future is about breathing new life into the social stationery it offers through new designs and building a series of collections for personal stationery and so on. There are ten so far with more to follow as momentum builds. Each will be displayed on a newly developed website that has been a £25,000 investment to achieve the sort of quality experience associated with the prod-ucts. “We have had a sort of Volkswagen website before,” says Johnson.

Once produced the assemblage of enve-lopes, invitations and paper is tied with purple ribbon and packed in a protective box. The customer feels the wow factor when the package arrives and is unwrapped. The website will be responsible for 30% of Picco-lo’s business in three years, says Johnson.

This is the external change to the business.

Practising his Preaching

Former BPiF chairman Michael

Johnson has jumped over the fence and bought a printing company. gareth

Ward finds out if he is taking his own

advice.

Piccolo Press


I have interviewed Michael Johnson in a wide range of places in the years since he joined the printing industry as chief executive of the BPIF, but none

has been as outwardly bizarre as a high class wedding fair in Battersea Park.

Johnson, of course, is no longer chief executive of the BPIF, having retired at the end of his watch. But he has not stepped down from the industry. Last year the former naval man bought Piccolo Press from Tim Honnor, another with the Royal Navy in his blood, and Johnson finally became a printer.

Piccolo Press has been a highly regarded social stationery printer with top notch customers, including most of the the UK government overseas in the form of 100 British Embassies. It has modernised prem-ises in Nairn in the far north of Scotland, a dozen highly skilled people and the sort of equipment needed for engraving, embossing and, of course, letterpress printing.

Johnson bought the business in April, intending to be senior partner to his daughter Gemma Pearce who would run the business. But the idea of sitting back when he could be running around drumming up support and delivering the message is anathema.

In six months a lot has happened, and a lot has not. The lot that has happened is a change of name to the sleeker Piccolo, the relaunch of a website and expansion into social stationery for all occasions rather than just of the “Ambassador requests the pleas-ure of” type.

Which explains why on a damp autumn day Johnson can be found in a pavilion in Battersea Park hosting the London Designer Wedding Show alongside photographers, caterers, videographers, hotels, and provid-ers of the sort of table decorations that spell the difference between success and failure to certain types of bride and her mother.

Piccolo wants a slice of this market where print can be used for ‘save the day’ notices, the invitation itself, the order of service, menu cards, place settings – all printed beau-tifully on very nice paper.

“Tim had run Piccolo Press as a lifestyle business,” says Johnson. “It has 12 staff, produced a £12,000 profit last year and has become a sound business over 20 years.” The future he intimates will be rather different. The shooting star of the social stationery world is Smythsons, shop in New Bond Street, engages the skills of Mrs Cameron and is producer of must-have hand bags. It has recently been acquired by luxury leather goods company Tivoli and is on its way to becoming a global brand. It also produces some nice print, especially personal station-ery, at eye watering prices.

“there is potential for piccolo to grow,” Johnson says, explaining that adding £100,000 in sales is within its grasp. Growth to follow Smythsons or to match the revenue of some of the larger companies in the sector seems unlikely.

While at the BPIF, Johnson had frequently

pointed out that print was among the leading UK industries in terms of value added. High class stationery sits at the top of this because price is not really a determining factor. He was also keen on moving printers from selling on price to becoming customer centric and then customer focused. The terminology may have slipped, but the delivery is there. Piccolo is most definitely at the customer focused end of the spectrum, though not perhaps in the way that his old Powerpoints had intended. Then he was aiming at the use of technology, cross media and variable data marketing messages. Today the technology is strictly craft driven. “There a wonderful air to letterpress and to die stamping. We have all the equipment that’s necessary, it is a beauti-ful operation.

“this has to be a design and marketing led business. Waiting for the phone to ring is not the way to run a busi-ness. Previously this was all theory, that this was the way the industry should evolve. Now I’m on the front line having to invest in the business.”

For Piccolo the future is about breathing new life into the social stationery it offers through new designs and building a series of collections for personal stationery and so on. There are ten so far with more to follow as momentum builds. Each will be displayed on a newly developed website that has been a £25,000 investment to achieve the sort of quality experience associated with the prod-ucts. “We have had a sort of Volkswagen website before,” says Johnson.

Once produced the assemblage of enve-lopes, invitations and paper is tied with purple ribbon and packed in a protective box. The customer feels the wow factor when the package arrives and is unwrapped. The website will be responsible for 30% of Picco-lo’s business in three years, says Johnson.

This is the external change to the business.

Practising his Preaching

Former BPiF chairman Michael

Johnson has jumped over the fence and bought a printing company. gareth

Ward finds out if he is taking his own

advice.

Profile


Internally Johnson is quick to praise the skills of the team, including two young-sters learning the skills of engraving dies and letterpress printing. These are skills that are being passed on by Arie Fernhout, a Dutchman who trained as a master printer in Germany and is now located in the High-lands. Each morning there are “Prayers” in the naval tradition, a pre-work session where everyone meets to discuss the workload, offer suggestions and read out the compliments that have been received from customers.

It is a chance for everyone to contribute says Johnson, and to make sure that every-one understands where the business is and its direction. Even without Johnson present the meetings continue under Margaret Hendry, who drives the business on the day to day level.

There have been other production changes. Piccolo has invested in an Epson inkjet printer to produce films and a direct to plate inkjet PlateWriter from Intec. At once tasks that had to be outsourced are kept in house with noticeable impact on operating costs and on service levels. “We have to offer a 24-hour turnaround,” says Johnson.

But it has not been all plain sailing. The implementation of a strategic direction has

been child’s play compared to working with the financial and other institutions that ought to be assisting business. The first element was to establish banking arrangements with a particular view to handling online busi-ness and payment by credit card. He recalls: “We had looked at the business from top to bottom and looked at what we needed from the banks, checking a number out. As far as we were concerned, Barclays had a better merchanting facility and so we chose to go with them. But six months on, we are still waiting to open an account. They do not seem interested in our business. It feels that we are dealing with someone in their 30s who is not accountable to anyone and to whom I’ve said ‘you clearly don’t want my business’.

“The message is ThaT the big banks have to reform. They can’t simply be a processing machine and a self preservation society. I wanted them to be able to provide a safeguard during the ebbs and flows of busi-ness. I have been a customer for 50 years and have my mortgage with them. The business has no debt and 90% of customers pay in 30 days. Antalis and GF Smith have been very supportive, but not the bank,” he says.

It insists, says Johnson, on seeing a two-

year business plan. The bank insists on working this way, even though there appears to be a compatibility issue. The result is that the customer is at fault. When Piccolo’s email server managed to loose emails for six weeks, it made the quiet summer period almost silent, but there was no overdraft to help with wages.

Likewise the first question when approach-ing the Highlands & Islands was “Can we see your two-year business plan?” “These people have no understanding of how a small business operates,” says Johnson.

iT is The aggravaTion that all small business owners endure and that may not be realised until it is actually experienced. For this reason, in his only comment on his previous job, Johnson remarks: “Any future head of the federation needs to spend three months working in a company to really understand how difficult it is to manage an SME in this industry.”

That said, he is relishing the challenge. “It’s been a fascinating experience, all the basic principles are in place. The key for us is to be creativity led. We have a world-wide market and can add £100,000 sales comfortably.” n

CATS SoluTionS


For ten years Cats Solutions has been expanding, based around a rapid turnaround digital print proposition from a site in Swindon supported by

on the spot print or near to customer satellite print units where necessary.

On the way, its Swindon hub has grown from a small industrial estate unit to a

substantial business with prepress customer service and IT perched above the produc-tion floor. Swindon has a smaller sister site in London, meeting the needs of that client base, while both can also support the on site and satellite operations with longer run or more complex jobs.

Over the last couple of years things have begun to shift as demands on service have increased, as some printed documents have been replaced by online and the opportuni-ties for growth in the traditional areas have begun to flatten out.

Managing director Greg Smith started to cast around for ways to build on what Cats had achieved. The success of Moonpig provided inspiration to buy online card retailer Yoodoo.com. but Smith had no inten-tion of trying to compete with the established market leader.

“We don’t Want to print cards, even if it’s a massive market,” he says. “We have been much more interested in using the business to see what other types of print we can personalise.” So far this has involved printing personalised packaging for a choco-late pizza, printing around and on vintage slot cars, and looking at presentation pack-aging personalised to the gift receiver.

This is building on the experience that Cats has accumulated of digital printing from a line up of presses that at one time stretched to 22 Docutechs, backed by colour machines. Negotiations about replacing these

stalled, leading the company to cast around for replacements. Smith is glad he did. Today the company has six Océ 6250 mono cut sheet press, three Canon ImagePress C6010VPS colour machines and three Océ CS620 colour machines from a previous generation of tech-nology, more suited to lower volume work. All are joined through an Océ Prisma work-flow which has been integrated with the MIS software that Cats developed to manage its business.

The 6250s are dual engined cut sheet machines that Océ promised would be twice as fast as the Xerox machines that were being replaced. “In fact they are at least two-and-a-half times faster,” says Smith. “When we went out we were looking for the best mono machines, the best colour and the best wide format.” There’s no doubt that he negotiated the best deal as well, as support is a crucial element of how Cats Solutions works. Its customers are dependent on the print that the company supplies.

this is not promotional print that at times can be a day or so late, much of the work has a mission critical element to it. But this is not always reflected in the tendering process which will specify price, but not the response times that Cats is focused on. An additional benefit to switching to Océ was perhaps less expected. “Our monthly elec-tricity bill has come down 30%,” he says.

The Prisma workflow also connects to the Océ Arizona 360 flatbed inkjet press, repre-senting one future direction of the business. Around two years the company started to produce point of sale for a major retailer and had Roland DG Soljets for the print output, which was then laminated to create the final display. The Arizona closes down that step and opens a world of opportunities.

“It will print on anything,” says technical director Dale Titcombe. To prove the point,

up close and personalised

Cats Solutions fast tracked success by replacing its digital line up with océ and

Canon for perfect personalisation.

Profile


Cats has been printing clothing for Rugby Bum, a streetwear brand started when the Smith family was on its way to a Bath rugby game and had no suitable attire. “When I was at the game I phoned the factory, found the URL hadn’t been registered and we bought it there and then,” says Smith.

While T-shirts, hoodies and trackies may not appear to have much in common with the acrylic signage, training manuals, reports, forms, banners and business cards that form the majority of what Cats prints, scratch a little and the similarities are clear.

“It’s produce on demand. No wastage from having to order in volume and finding that some sizes never sell and the there is never enough of the most popular size,” Smith explains. “It’s exactly the same transition as from offset to digital in print-ing. Digital takes away the risk and the expense of holding stock. We produce on the fly, just as we do in paper.”

And the garment operation relies on the same website front ends that have been developed and refined for document print-ing operation over the last ten years. The final piece in that jigsaw has been Océ’s PrismaPrepare workflow. “We took six or so elements that we had developed over the seven to ten years and integrated them with Prisma,” says Titcombe. “We now have the best digital workflow around.”

Jobs are submItted through a web interface, the PDF is generated on the fly and provided to the customer to sign off and agree. Once confirmed the order flows automatically to the most suitable machine and the transaction logged in the servers, together with the order details for the production software.

A key element is the company’s home-grown MIS. As all its work is based on known prices, either through the contracts that form the basis of the print business, or the consumer pricing on the websites, there

is no need for the estimating element that dominates most MIS. Nor is there any need to think in terms of plates as most MIS from an offset background will, hence the decision to create and maintain the inhouse system.

The incoming jobs are taken from the host of client or consumer websites and fed directly into the production system. Each is assigned a unique barcode that is used to track the job through the factory. For work to the presses this is a completely automated system, feeding the job to the most appropri-ate press, depending on colour naturally, but also on paper and the delivery schedule.

over the years InterventIon in prepress to check incoming files has diminished and with the new Prisma based workflow has been all but eradicated. The jobs follow the specified paths. The artwork has been signed off by the customer viewing PDFs generated on the fly shown through the browser. So once submitted, the job is sure to print. Quantities, other production details and delivery information, are added through online forms and the transaction is completed either by online payment or by registering the job to the client account by authorised purchasers. As these buyers are not part of a professional print buying department, but can be spread through the organisation, software needs to account for this, assigning an order to a cost centre if required, and making everything as simple as possible for the user.

There is more and more colour work being pushed through the C6010VPS presses, making these the most productive of their type in the country. Yet even though Cats is pushing beyond their rated capacity the presses are proving remarkably reliable, resil-ient and consistent in producing the colour

that the spread of clients needs. “We are not jobbing printers, this is a different market place to most printers,” he says.

At the start of this year Cats was facing renewals for no fewer than six key contracts. As reassurance it entered tenders for another half dozen contracts.

“It was a nerve racking time,” Smith recalls. As it happened the company soon had a different problem. It retained its existing contracts and won those it had pitched for. “And we did this without have to compro-mise on price,” he says.

The production structure has proved up to the task. Each job each of the 10,000 jobs a month on average amounting to 30 million mono pages and 3 million colour pages, emerges from the press with a unique barcode printed. This is used to scan a job into the next process and to scan it again when the task has been completed. In this way the management system can track where any job is in the plant and how close it is to completion.

the fInIshIng process is almost entirely by hand, Smith saying that this remains faster in coping with the range of jobs that Cats has and offers greater flex-ibility. The company maintains at least two of every machine it has to guarantee that a job will get out the door and to the customer. “We are responsible for the job until it reaches the customer,” he says, “and in many cases that can be our customer’s customer.”

This point was proven when the electricity sub station serving the industrial estate was put out of action this year. Computers auto-matically switched to battery power while the mirrored servers in London took over until a transformer truck arrived and took over. The company lost an hour’s production, which was easily recouped with ultimately no disruption to customer service. “Customers cannot afford to be let down,” he says.

nor can cats. Smith praises the reli-ability of the Océ equipment as a major part of this. “These machines produce the quality and they just don’t break down, and if they do I need the support that Océ provides because I can’t offer that service without it.”

The company hasn’t been immune to the effects of recession. It trimmed 30 people from its staff, partly through further auto-mation of the workflow in prepress and because fewer people are needed to manage the print engines, with one person looking after several machines now. Says Smith: “We know that in today’s climate we have to stay fighting fit.” n

Cats managing director Greg Smith says: “our customers cannot afford to be let down. The océ machines produce the quality and they just don’t break down.”

MIS


Automation of the printing process has come a long way since the first remote inking systems allowed minders to change duct settings

without climbing up on to print units. Makeready minutes on a press are counted on the fingers of one hand and any further improvements to press set up are likely to be incremental. This does not mean that auto-mation cannot go further. It can. It is just that it is the business that needs automating, not the printing process.

This means taking a look at how MIS is set up and what it can do. It means looking at the costs involved in raising an estimate at one end and an invoice at the other; it means looking at all the touch points between first contact with the customer to receipt of the finished goods. And eliminating them. And it means taking the MIS beyond the walls of the print factory on to the road with the sales team, into the customer’s operations and into the home of stressed executives, so that if they have to continue working they can do so on a tablet computer while reading a good night story to the children.

The drive is naTurally the margin pressure that besets the industry and the need to minimise all costs, but also the speed of turnaround and the increased number of jobs handled. If a job has a 24-hour turnaround and it takes an hour to administer that order before production can begin, the printer is already at a disadvantage. “I see customers where turnover is down, but the number of transactions is up by almost a factor of two,” says Keith McMutrie, managing director of Tharstern.

His company is the MIS provider to ESP, recognised as probably the most automated litho printer in the country and which has

just set another productivity record with its Heidelberg XL105 press. It would not be possible without automating not just the physical aspects of the print job, but the administrative side as well.

The easiesT sTep is through web to print and a templated price matrix so that customers know what they are paying at the outset. A company can have a number of matrices set according to prices negotiated with different customers and perhaps for different websites that it can operate. “Short run and low value work is best suited to the matrix approach,” argues Shuttleworth joint managing director Paul Deane. And McMur-trie agrees that some form of managed pricing is necessary for this type of work. “If a company had two estimators it is quite probable that you would end up with two prices and two different production routes for the same job. Next generation estimating systems need to be much more dynamic in responding to conditions, perhaps in the way that imposition has moved away from librar-ies of templates,” he says. The company’s new Estimating Pro module is designed for just these circumstances, providing an easy way to create an estimate that does not

require the skills of a highly experienced estimator. The operator, who is likely to be a customer services rep or account manager, is guided through the choices according to the job spec and ends up with a choice of production route and profit levels to select from. This is true route based estimating not a price matrix, so can change as a company’s costs change.

This approach helps with standard jobs and is absolutely crucial when filling in tender forms for a print management contract. “An automated system can take in a spread sheet of the job types and apply some data and generate the necessary prices. Otherwise an estimator can spend two or three days per tender form,” he adds. “I can’t see why any printer should not be looking to use more dynamic estimating than basing prices on templates.

“The biggest cost after production is the cost of managing the transaction. When makeready time has been optimised, print-ers must look elsewhere to make efficiency savings.”

This is the role of the MIS. “Any automa-tion should go through the MIS in order to collect all the key information to measure and monitor,” says Deane. This can be provided through dashboard views of live data or analysed later to view longer term trends or make decisions about the work mix or client mix.

ColleCTing The daTa directly from shop floor equipment also has the bonus of tracking all costs that are incurred, includ-ing the extras that are often lost. “How many years have printers not been able to charge for extras?,” says McMurtrie. “Now they can prove where these were incurred.” Such monitoring can also point to bottlenecks in

Shorter runs and faster turnarounds mean a changing role for MIS, into the engine that drives profit.

Under control

MIS


Automation of the printing process has come a long way since the first remote inking systems allowed minders to change duct settings

without climbing up on to print units. Makeready minutes on a press are counted on the fingers of one hand and any further improvements to press set up are likely to be incremental. This does not mean that auto-mation cannot go further. It can. It is just that it is the business that needs automating, not the printing process.

This means taking a look at how MIS is set up and what it can do. It means looking at the costs involved in raising an estimate at one end and an invoice at the other; it means looking at all the touch points between first contact with the customer to receipt of the finished goods. And eliminating them. And it means taking the MIS beyond the walls of the print factory on to the road with the sales team, into the customer’s operations and into the home of stressed executives, so that if they have to continue working they can do so on a tablet computer while reading a good night story to the children.

The drive is naTurally the margin pressure that besets the industry and the need to minimise all costs, but also the speed of turnaround and the increased number of jobs handled. If a job has a 24-hour turnaround and it takes an hour to administer that order before production can begin, the printer is already at a disadvantage. “I see customers where turnover is down, but the number of transactions is up by almost a factor of two,” says Keith McMutrie, managing director of Tharstern.

His company is the MIS provider to ESP, recognised as probably the most automated litho printer in the country and which has

just set another productivity record with its Heidelberg XL105 press. It would not be possible without automating not just the physical aspects of the print job, but the administrative side as well.

The easiesT sTep is through web to print and a templated price matrix so that customers know what they are paying at the outset. A company can have a number of matrices set according to prices negotiated with different customers and perhaps for different websites that it can operate. “Short run and low value work is best suited to the matrix approach,” argues Shuttleworth joint managing director Paul Deane. And McMur-trie agrees that some form of managed pricing is necessary for this type of work. “If a company had two estimators it is quite probable that you would end up with two prices and two different production routes for the same job. Next generation estimating systems need to be much more dynamic in responding to conditions, perhaps in the way that imposition has moved away from librar-ies of templates,” he says. The company’s new Estimating Pro module is designed for just these circumstances, providing an easy way to create an estimate that does not

require the skills of a highly experienced estimator. The operator, who is likely to be a customer services rep or account manager, is guided through the choices according to the job spec and ends up with a choice of production route and profit levels to select from. This is true route based estimating not a price matrix, so can change as a company’s costs change.

This approach helps with standard jobs and is absolutely crucial when filling in tender forms for a print management contract. “An automated system can take in a spread sheet of the job types and apply some data and generate the necessary prices. Otherwise an estimator can spend two or three days per tender form,” he adds. “I can’t see why any printer should not be looking to use more dynamic estimating than basing prices on templates.

“The biggest cost after production is the cost of managing the transaction. When makeready time has been optimised, print-ers must look elsewhere to make efficiency savings.”

This is the role of the MIS. “Any automa-tion should go through the MIS in order to collect all the key information to measure and monitor,” says Deane. This can be provided through dashboard views of live data or analysed later to view longer term trends or make decisions about the work mix or client mix.

ColleCTing The daTa directly from shop floor equipment also has the bonus of tracking all costs that are incurred, includ-ing the extras that are often lost. “How many years have printers not been able to charge for extras?,” says McMurtrie. “Now they can prove where these were incurred.” Such monitoring can also point to bottlenecks in

Shorter runs and faster turnarounds mean a changing role for MIS, into the engine that drives profit.

Under control

AutomAtion


the plant and to differences in productivity levels between presses and between opera-tors. Automation can also cut out the lost productivity that occurs at shift changeover time. “The technology to do this is relatively inexpensive compared to the savings that can be made,” he continues.

It is a change in the role of MIS from a purely pricing, costing and stock control function to one where it is running the busi-ness and through the use of information helping to guide decision making. The job can flow into the printer with job tickets raised automatically as the files are flowed just as automatically to the prepress and onto press. Minimising the touch points in the production process keeps the costs low. The electronic job bag is a distinct possibility with bar code scanning to log jobs in at each production process and then to scan them as each step is finished.

Where the company or its equip-ment is JDF enabled, this is part of the network, but the early days of JDF had set great expectations for the format and auto-mation, as a result had run into the reality of affordability. Adding the interfaces has been expensive for equipment providers, though a logical step for MIS. “Automation today need not be all about JDF,” says McMurtrie.

For Shuttleworth’s Deane there is still a need for a printed sheet to accompany a job even if this is not a job bag in the traditional sense. “It’s a travelling document with some information attached to it,” says Deane. “People we find still want something like this.” But as screens become more prevalent around the printing plant, the need for paper instructions will fade. In a world where short runs and fast turnarounds can mean sudden changes to work to lists, nobody has the time

to change the schedule by walking around. It has to appear on the screen.

But this is still automation within the plant. The great change in the last year or two for Optimus is that its Dash and then Cloud developments have turned MIS on its head and according to managing director Nicola Bisset, have made MIS into a sales tool. Access to the MIS via a tablet enables a sales rep to check production details, the status of any outstanding estimates and product held in stock before going to a meeting with a client.

once there the order can be taken and placed on the spot. There is no need to drive back to the office with a form for an estimator to draw up the quote to send out the next day. And being on the spot raises a greater possibility of up selling. “This is a different type of automation,” she says. “It’s taking steps out of the administration process and moves automation out of the factory. This is not about production, it’s about the automation of the sales process.”

The biggest take up has been with non traditional printers, digital operations that can be agencies or exhibition companies. Some traditional customers like the straight-forward approach of the Dash system – “We can quote for any process on any substrate” says Bisset – to run this alongside the more traditional estimating systems. “The interest has come from mixed houses, not so much from traditional litho printers. They can have customers online, doing their own estimates and placing orders ready for production.”

It only works if there is then complete integration into the back office functions and then in the production workflows, something that Optimus has accomplished with its more traditional 2020 MIS as well as the Cloud and

Dash. In effect, workflow automation and integration is a given.

Automation beyond four walls is some-thing that EFI has been tackling. Marc Olin, general manager of the productivity software division, explains that over the last two years the company’s biggest demands have come from digital print companies operating across multiple sites. “In offset we are closely inte-grated with Prinergy so can drive the plate production side directly from the MIS. But the change is coming from digital where the demand is for print load scheduling across several plants, with sequencing of content and directly controlling the Fiery Rips. We manipulate the output queues to maximum benefit, according to a production time or to place jobs on the same stock next to each other so that you don’t have to stop the machine at all and only have to do so to change paper.

“In a web to print set up we can take the information about the job and tell the customer when production will be finished by the time he reaches the check out to enter his credit card details.” So far this level of automation is confined to digital companies with multiple plants across Australia, Europe and North America. “Most MIS offer the same core capabilities,” he says. “They just differ in the extent of automation of work-flows that is enabled.”

this is happening in digital print; there is interest in book production where partnerships to offer production in differ-ent countries are springing up and print on demand is becoming a reality. “And offset companies are starting to think about it,” he says. The recent purchase of Technique brings some of this capability in the EFI family. “But it requires a lot more discipline than in digital and means a lot more change.”

nicola Bisset’s optimus products are leading the way by automating the sales process, a major extension to the role of miS.

miS has brought production management and business management under the control of a central point in a business.

Paul Deane: the digital job bag ignores the practicalities of how people work. there is still a need for a hard copy document.

Supplier profile


Shorter print runS and faster turnaround times are becoming standard for the majority of printers, but for some it is already a fact of life. But instead of struggling with the welter of jobs coming in and going out the next day or perhaps even the same day, the use of the most up to date MIS is allowing them to develop their businesses in new ways.

Tharstern is responsible for the MIS at ESP, generally recognised as the slickest, most automated printer in the country. But the MIS is not suited to just this sort of business and other Tharstern users are exploiting the MIS to help manage their businesses.

“The MIS is at the heart of Cestrian and runs everything,” says Phill Reynolds, co owner of the Cheshire large format digital print business. And it is the digital scheduling system that he praises for the impact that it has had on the business.

each of the preSSeS has a PC monitor, networked to the MIS providing data about machine loadings and the status of every press and also delivering the work to lists for every operator. When changes occur because a job arrives late or a machine is unavailable, the system updates automatically, then “there is no walking around the factory,” Reynolds says. “It has been difficult to do but the returns have been massive. Moving from the archaic Tcard system was a huge turning point for us.”

The time saving starts earlier than this. When jobs are submitted through a website, the MIS can strip production details and feed these as a digital job ticket through to prepress linked to the artwork for the job, while the purchase order drops into the MIS. There is no rekeying of job information for the account executives, saving time and promoting accuracy. “When there is only a 24 or 48 hour window for production, this allows more of this time to be spent printing,” Reynolds explains.

The company is handling around 60 jobs a day, some being simple work for small customers, others complex campaigns for high street chains. The method of logging in at each production station allows each to tracked through the factory. And now

thanks to an app for smart phones to read barcodes, delivery drivers can log that a drop has been made.

This has not happened overnight. Cestrian has been working with Tharstern for around ten years, developing the scheduling system and the Import Manager to take job details from online jobs. “It has made our customers’ lives much easier and has made us much more efficient,” says Reynolds. “Without Tharstern, we would be out of business.”

The sentiment is shared by 1st Byte in London which with its brace of Indigos and Xeikon web press is a different type of digital print business. Nevertheless the emphasis on fast turnaround, scheduling and communications to track jobs around the building. As the business is spread over several floors, knowing where each job is and the stage it has reached would be impossible without the MIS.

crucially the company workS from the delivery time, adding the amount of time a job should spend in finishing, on the press and in quality checking to determine the production schedule.

“When we started with scheduling seven years ago, we were offered an update every 12 hours, which was not enough,” says managing director Lawrence Dalton. “Now with IDC FastTrack everything is updated every 15 minutes. And we have put in a screen to show all the jobs that are in the building.” The operators scan in and scan out each job at each production step resulting in more accurate information than when before they

needed to key in details of each job. This could be forgotten. Now the simplicity and speed of the system means that it is used properly. “And we can tell customers where their jobs are,” says Dalton.

The MIS further provides dashboard views into almost every aspect of the business. “There are still things we want it to do,” he adds.

And it is continuing to move forwards. 1st Byte has become the first site to implement the new Estimating Pro module which offers a faster and simpler way of creating estimates. It is a route based on estimating rather than a matrix and template system which links with the rest of the MIS. The printer has been involved with development since asking for a wizard style estimating module. “

It’s 98% of what we want now,” says Dalton. “We have two skilled estimators, which can cause stress when one is away on holiday or is ill. Now our account managers can handle the simpler estimates freeing the skilled guys for more complex work.”

As the company continues to grow it is heading towards working more with designers and agencies as well as corporate customers, this is becoming more important. The latest Indigo 7600 has the white ink option and 1st Byte is producing more work with embossing and foiling for an added value finish, but still with fast turnaround to the fore.

This would not be possible without the Tharstern software. “It is the most valuable tool that we have,” says Dalton. n

Streamlining digitalTharstern smooths the move to MiS

At Cestrian the MiS strips production details from the jobs submitted to the website and create a digital job ticket.

lawrence Dalton says that 1st Byte’s MiS “is the most valuable tool that we have.”

Supplier profile


Shorter print runS and faster turnaround times are becoming standard for the majority of printers, but for some it is already a fact of life. But instead of struggling with the welter of jobs coming in and going out the next day or perhaps even the same day, the use of the most up to date MIS is allowing them to develop their businesses in new ways.

Tharstern is responsible for the MIS at ESP, generally recognised as the slickest, most automated printer in the country. But the MIS is not suited to just this sort of business and other Tharstern users are exploiting the MIS to help manage their businesses.

“The MIS is at the heart of Cestrian and runs everything,” says Phill Reynolds, co owner of the Cheshire large format digital print business. And it is the digital scheduling system that he praises for the impact that it has had on the business.

each of the preSSeS has a PC monitor, networked to the MIS providing data about machine loadings and the status of every press and also delivering the work to lists for every operator. When changes occur because a job arrives late or a machine is unavailable, the system updates automatically, then “there is no walking around the factory,” Reynolds says. “It has been difficult to do but the returns have been massive. Moving from the archaic Tcard system was a huge turning point for us.”

The time saving starts earlier than this. When jobs are submitted through a website, the MIS can strip production details and feed these as a digital job ticket through to prepress linked to the artwork for the job, while the purchase order drops into the MIS. There is no rekeying of job information for the account executives, saving time and promoting accuracy. “When there is only a 24 or 48 hour window for production, this allows more of this time to be spent printing,” Reynolds explains.

The company is handling around 60 jobs a day, some being simple work for small customers, others complex campaigns for high street chains. The method of logging in at each production station allows each to tracked through the factory. And now

thanks to an app for smart phones to read barcodes, delivery drivers can log that a drop has been made.

This has not happened overnight. Cestrian has been working with Tharstern for around ten years, developing the scheduling system and the Import Manager to take job details from online jobs. “It has made our customers’ lives much easier and has made us much more efficient,” says Reynolds. “Without Tharstern, we would be out of business.”

The sentiment is shared by 1st Byte in London which with its brace of Indigos and Xeikon web press is a different type of digital print business. Nevertheless the emphasis on fast turnaround, scheduling and communications to track jobs around the building. As the business is spread over several floors, knowing where each job is and the stage it has reached would be impossible without the MIS.

crucially the company workS from the delivery time, adding the amount of time a job should spend in finishing, on the press and in quality checking to determine the production schedule.

“When we started with scheduling seven years ago, we were offered an update every 12 hours, which was not enough,” says managing director Lawrence Dalton. “Now with IDC FastTrack everything is updated every 15 minutes. And we have put in a screen to show all the jobs that are in the building.” The operators scan in and scan out each job at each production step resulting in more accurate information than when before they

needed to key in details of each job. This could be forgotten. Now the simplicity and speed of the system means that it is used properly. “And we can tell customers where their jobs are,” says Dalton.

The MIS further provides dashboard views into almost every aspect of the business. “There are still things we want it to do,” he adds.

And it is continuing to move forwards. 1st Byte has become the first site to implement the new Estimating Pro module which offers a faster and simpler way of creating estimates. It is a route based on estimating rather than a matrix and template system which links with the rest of the MIS. The printer has been involved with development since asking for a wizard style estimating module. “

It’s 98% of what we want now,” says Dalton. “We have two skilled estimators, which can cause stress when one is away on holiday or is ill. Now our account managers can handle the simpler estimates freeing the skilled guys for more complex work.”

As the company continues to grow it is heading towards working more with designers and agencies as well as corporate customers, this is becoming more important. The latest Indigo 7600 has the white ink option and 1st Byte is producing more work with embossing and foiling for an added value finish, but still with fast turnaround to the fore.

This would not be possible without the Tharstern software. “It is the most valuable tool that we have,” says Dalton. n

Streamlining digitalTharstern smooths the move to MiS

At Cestrian the MiS strips production details from the jobs submitted to the website and create a digital job ticket.

lawrence Dalton says that 1st Byte’s MiS “is the most valuable tool that we have.”

people in print


Apprentice wins the printing gold medal at Skills ShowYoung printer Craig Clifford (right), an apprentice at Stirland Paterson, has won the printing gold medal at the Skills Show in Birmingham. As well as the medal, he also won a trip to the Heidelberg factory.

The contest ran over three days and was a close call between the four contestants: Jordan Moore from Phase Print, Ashley Howland from Hartgraph and Jamie Cleaver of Warwick Printing.

Martin Cusack, one of the judging panel and image and media manager from X-Rite says: “It was hard to tell who would win and it came down to the very last print run when Craig edged it with very good and consistent colour measurement results.”

The youngsters had to produce high quality work while being watched by an audience of parents, friends and teachers and students. The event was organised by Proskills to demonstrate career opportunities and was attended by more than 100,000 visitors.

Heidelberg UK managed the print area and marketing manager Mark Hogan says: “We were extremely proud to support a competition which encourages high standards in our industry and fosters the idea of apprenticeships. Our industry needs to attract and retain young people by showing what an innovative, creative and exciting business print is and that it offers a great career.”

l lord BlAck of Brentwood has taken over as president of The Printing Charity for 2013, succeeding Murdoch MAclennAn at the charity’s annual lunch at Stationers’ Hall.Lord Black is executive director of Telegraph Media Group, succeeding the chief executive of the newspaper publisher. At the event MacLennan said that spreading the word about the charity’s work is crucial. “The charity needs help ensuring that those who need help know there is someone they can turn to in difficulty.” His last official duty

was to present fionA MorriS, one of the charity’s trustees, with its highest accolade, the Pro Merito award. She has led the work with City University’s Cass Business School on its Knowledge Transfer Partnership which is guiding the creation of a new range of services.

l rAy pAyne has been named by J&G Environmental as a new member of its customer services team. Payne joins the waste management specialist business from Kodak where he had been involved with its

sustainability efforts, including working with J&G in Blandford.

l inforMA print & MediA Group has strengthened the sales team for the Cross Media 2013 event, due to take place in the Business Design Centre on 23-24 October.

Timothy Edwards is joining as sales manager, having more than six years’ experience in exhibitions with Emap prior to joining Informa.

“Part of Timothy’s role will be to explore new opportunities and expand the range of vendors that take part in the event, and I am confident that he is the right person to do that,” says event director Nick Craig Waller.

l peter renz is to step down as CEO of the finishing equipment provider that he owns and has been in charge of for 34 years. In that time the company has grown

to employ 350 worldwide staff. He will join the advisory board, while Michael Schubert will be the new managing director. He

joined Renz in 2006 as international sales manager.

l ricoh europe has joined Two Sides and Print Power, endorsing both its environmental emphasis and also the need

for education to position print as the most sustainable communications medium. Graham Moore, business development director of Ricoh

Europe, says: “The work and campaigns from Two Sides align with our goals and help our customers to develop more environmentally responsible ways of producing their print.”

l overloAd trAde ServiceS is to close after owners Barrie and Vesna Brock decided to take advantage of a break point in the company’s lease to “call it a day”. The company has provided decorative finishes to greetings cards printers and publishers for 18 years from premises in Abingdon. Rather than seek a buyer for the business, they decided on a controlled closure and will sell off the plant and machinery in the factory. In a statement the husband and wife team says: “We’ve worked with some amazing, talented people and couldn’t have done it without them. Our business focus on quality and service has enabled us to maintain respect, even through recent difficult times.”

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