JimRaffel.com » process capability

Industry Meeting Displays Power of Many

JimRaffel — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:45:06 +0000

Earlier this week I attended two days of meetings focused around graphic communications industry specifications, standards and best practices.

There is nothing glamorous about this work. Almost 30 of us crammed into a small conference room. Not at a fancy hotel but graciously offered at no cost by Kodak (one of the member companies of the organization). Additional members joined in via Webex and a conference call. For two days competitors, customers, trading partners all put those hats down to do what’s best for the community as a whole.

In retrospect it’s rewarding work. Our graphic communications industry (the printing and pre-press parts of it) have been hit hard by the economy and the radical shift in the way people communicate and get their news. As a group we discussed and worked on ways to help make the people and companies in the trenches lives a little easier.

I went looking for a way to help and give back to an industry that has been so good to me. I found it by offering my social media expertise to the organization. As much as I may know about color, several of the people in that room have forgotten more about it than I will ever know. It’s beholden on all of us to find what we can offer to the community and give freely. I’ve written about “give to get” before and if you’re here you get that concept.

Everybody in the room contributed over the two days. Perspectives, ideas, and comments came from all quarters. As a result our industry is a little better today than it was on Monday. The lesson is to show up somewhere you normally don’t go and see if you can make a difference.

Where can you make a difference? Head over there and give it a shot then stop back and let us know how it turned out.

Feature Post: Printing (on paper) vs. Google

JimRaffel — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:44:38 +0000

Authors Note: If you do not work in the printing industry, read this post from the perspective of accepting change in your industry and recognizing who your real competitors are.

Your competition is not the printer down the street. Your competition is Google. Right now, they are kicking your butt.

The Situation – The last decade has not been an easy one for the Graphic Communications (we used to call it Printing Industry). Many organizations failed to accept that changes in information delivery are permanent and ever increasing. Others were slow to adapt and now are scrambling for their very existence. For those companies with a real, authentic and sustainable business model built to sniff out change and hustle to adapt – good times are ahead.

For large segments of the population electronic communication is overwhelming. Use of email, and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter will increase, but the noise that must be overcome for your advertising signal to be heard make these mediums less than ideal for advertising and promotional dollars. On the internet you get about 2-3 seconds to capture the prospects mind so they commit to look further at your message.

The Opportunity – How many emails do you delete each day without even opening them? That is after spam filters have captured a large percentage of the noise for you. Now, take a look at your postal mailbox. If your pile of mail is like mine it is about 1/4 to 1/3 the size it used to be. There’s so little junk mail I actually look at the pieces now. All of them.

Some of the junk mail I receive is beautiful printing. Extended gamut, die cut, spot coated, hyper-personalized so that the piece speaks to my needs and solves my problem. Occasionally pieces are so impressed I hang onto them and show my wife. Yes, that matters – a marketing touch is a marketing touch. Do that with an email I deleted.

Direct marketing merchants are still printing catalogs, lots of them. Each catalog may have fewer pages and mail to fewer recipients but that just means there are more targeted higher quality versions of the catalog. The direct merchants know that a printed catalog increases the likely hood you will visit their web-site and continue to browse and ultimately purchase. Their catalog is no different than a pay per click ad, designed to drive traffic to the point of action where you can spend your dollars.

The Plan – I have worked with the leaders, the followers and the “now out of business.” I have watched, listened and learned in my almost three decades in this industry. If you have a sales staff that can sell and do the things listed below together we can be successful, very successful.

1. The golden age of printing is ahead of us not behind us, so you can stop whining and complaining now.

2. Stop watching re-runs on TV and read one business book a week instead. Yes, one a week, it’s a cake walk when you turn the TV off.

3. Learn what your competition is doing – not the printer down the street, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. (Hint: If you don’t have accounts on all four of those – do it right now. You don’t have to love them, but you have to understand them before they eat your lunch.)

4. Embrace the G7 methodology and learn what GRACoL is all about. (have you read all the FREE documents here?) There will be plenty of commodity jobs to fill the presses that require GRACoL and G7. With the first four steps you just became a break-even printer.

5. In order to achieve and maintain the GRACoL master printer status you will need a top notch continuous improvement and process control program in place. Without a such a program in place the next step is out of your reach so don’t even bother.

6. To print stand out pieces extended gamut, die cutting, spot coating and hyper-personalization are the future. Do you understand the technology and consumables you will need to get there? (Hint: The future is now and you are already behind if you don’t have the a plan.)

7. Pick your suppliers and outside experts carefully. Ask yourself if they have skin in the game. If they are drawing a paycheck as opposed to holding an equity stake in the business the answer is no. Your local dealer rep (working for a mega dealer) scrambling to meet his sales goals and sell you more of the consumable you already use (that are less than ideal for your environment) seldom has the time or motivation to help you with the six steps above.

So, there you have it seven steps to create you own golden age of printing. If you decide to join me steps 1-3 can be completed by the end of the day and you can be well on your way to step 4 by this time tomorrow. The hard work will not even seem like hard work when you start to see the results.

Comments are open on this and all posts at JimRaffel.com. Join the conversation and let me know what you think about the above post and how implementing the steps is working out for you.

Hard Work: A Year In the Making

JimRaffel — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:07:25 +0000

Tomorrow morning a press release will announce that ColorMetrix and SpotOn! Press have agreed to work together on a project to provide enhanced interoperability between our two products. There will be lots of flowery prose and 50 cent words in the release so I will spare you the sales talk here. Tonight I will write the story of how two “competitors” agreed to work together to provide an enhanced value proposition to our customers.

A little more than one year ago I began talking with my friend Bruce Bayne about how his SpotOn! Press software and our ProofPass.com color verification and process control system, while competitive products on some levels, really solved two different parts of the color verification and process control puzzle. It was a great conversation and right away I knew I was dealing with a kindred spirit.

At the time Bruce was busy dealing with the release of his version 1.0. I was busy ramping up work on one of our largest customization projects. We continued to have conversations as our paths crossed. Sometimes months would go by between calls or emails but the lines of communication remained open. As Print ‘09 approached it was clear that to survive in this marketplace I would need to once again re-invent ColorMetrix and forge new strategic business relationships as some tried and true partners from the past went different directions, including directly competing with me.

At Print ‘09 Bruce and I along with a couple members of his team sat down for a cocktail supper high above Chicago at ROOF, the year-round rooftop lounge on the 27^th floor of the theWit hotel. In hindsight a lofty venue was the perfect place to launch almost three months of work hammering out the details of getting two technology products produced by two small businesses working together.

Over my 23 year career in the printing industry I have worked with the good, the bad and the ugly. At a couple of key crossroads I have been lucky enough to have mentors who nudged me in a slightly different direction than I would have gone on my own. (There is a reason I have an MBA and not a Masters in Computer Science.) I have worked with smart people, people of integrity, personable people, fun people, serious people, you name them I have worked with or for them. This interoperability agreement really works for one reason; Bruce Bayne and Jim Raffel trust each other and get along.

We entered into this agreement because it is real, authentic and sustainable. Tomorrow morning our joint press release will tell the story of two separate companies that will work together to sell each other’s products. Sunday we will debut the interoperability of the two products at the PIA Color Management Conference in Phoenix. I am not positive what the future holds but I know it’s a lot brighter working side by side with Bruce Bayne and SpotOn! Press than going it alone.

#68: Sustainable Green Printing

JimRaffel — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:46:57 +0000

What is this new and latest buzzword sustainability? If I have offended you by calling it a buzzword I am not apologizing. Please do not misunderstand me; I think sustainability is a good thing. Smart printing businesses have been engaging in most if not all of the components of sustainability for years. The reason is quite simple – PROFIT.

Recycling is a key component to a sustainability program. Has anyone reading this been around long enough to remember the late Roger Dickeson’s War on Waste (WoW) waged by web printers back in the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s? Did they do this to be “green” or “sustainable?” Personally I think not – they did it to MAKE MORE MONEY!

Did the web printer I worked for in the 80’s and 90’s commit more resources to better segregation of waste paper streams, including office paper, to be green or sustainable? Did we find ways to recycle even the cores from our rolls of web paper to be more sustainable? No, we did these things to reduce the cost of waste disposal and increase the revenue received for recyclable product. The net result of course was that we became more sustainable and green.

I suspect the sustainability ‘consultants’ out there are screaming right now that he does not get it! While you may be right, I do understand that there are other components to a complete sustainability program including a social responsibility component. I am sure even the social responsibility component of sustainability, when properly executed, can and will result in more of that dirty word – PROFIT.

What caught my interest about sustainability is that improvement must be measurable. Then I got to thinking – if the sustainability movement repackaged WoW, what else have they repackaged and re-labeled? Deming’s Statistical Process Control (SPC) that’s what. The past twelve years of selling and servicing ColorMetrix color verification and process control software has provided me with a good knowledgebase in this area. I have also written quite a bit about the topic on this blog.

Since you can read all the past posts, I will keep my explanation of using process control in a sustainability campaign short and sweet. Following is a simplified ink jet proofing example:

Establish a baseline of ‘bad’ proofs as a percentage of the total produced.
Utilize color verification and process control tools like ColorMetrix and ProofPass.com to verify color quality of all proofs produced.
Review process control charts and other data to establish when and why variation/drift is occurring.
Fix/Improve the causes which can be fixed and improved, and learn to ignore the special causes.
Return to step one and compare current results with the baseline.

SPC works and Quality is NOT free, it is instead an investment with a return.

#58: I Still Love the Smell of Ink in the Morning

JimRaffel — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:45:21 +0000

I have been so immersed in virtual proofing over the last several posts, that I had almost forgotten how much I still love the smell of ink in the morning. Last week I had the privilege of spending two days assisting a customer in the set-up of our software primarily for use as a pressroom monitoring tool.

The experience reminded me of #55: Just Measure It! The customer is a web offset shop and has the same problem that most of our digital printing customers have (Oh, I love the smell of toner in the morning too!). The problem is that their press product is finished product and has no trim. Color bars are not an option on production work, and changing the design to incorporate color swatches would also be impractical at this time.

The solution turned out to be the same solution we employee with our digital printing customers. A test form is put on press twice a day and the results of those measurements are used to verify conformance to density standards across the web. A second control strip can be scanned to gather other print metrics like TVI, Print Contrast, etc.

The results in a sister shop have been improved consistency from day to day and the ability to monitor changes in density and TVI from morning (cold press) to afternoon (warm press). In a perfect world I would love to see color bars on every job, but we thought outside the box and found them a solution that allowed us to measure. Once they started measuring quality and consistency improved. Profitability and productivity are never far behind quality and consistency improvements.

I raise the challenge againâ€¦today start measuring something in your color workflow that you are not measuring today. Within seven days those measurements will point the direction you need to go to improve the quality and consistency of that process.

#51: Proper Press Fingerprinting takes Commitment

JimRaffel — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:17:22 +0000

In this installment we will address the third question Dale raised in #47. Dale’s first two questions got answered in #48 and #49 which can be reviewed at JimRaffel.com.

Now, onto Dale’s third question:

3. In fingerprinting our presses, we’ve run up against the dreaded “Hurry up and do it, but don’t put too much work into it.” What are your recommendations for impressing upon the higher ups that doing color balancing and working out the calibrations takes time?

I would suggest you have your management read JimRaffel.com. The reality, however, is that the culture required for completing successful fingerprints starts at the top and does not get worked up from the bottom. I spent the better part of the first ten years of my career trying like heck to change the culture of a printing company (now out of business I might add) from the echelons of lower and middle management. While I hesitate to use the words “can’t be don” (and not because my Mom the English teacher told me to never use contractions), I believe this is one place where this expression applies.

I have been very fortunate in my career. At 21 years of age before I had even graduated from RIT I was able to observe one of the press runs used to set the early SWOP press standards. A lot of very smart people participated in this run and the scientific procedure was impressive. Then, not a year later I was the guy doing all the print quality measurements on a brand new Baker-Perkins G14 that cost about 9 million dollars back in 1986. While I was just one member of a very large team, the owner of the company made it quite clear that he was not making his first lease payment until we had a press that was printing correctly.

Over the next 3 years I had the same responsibility as 2 more new presses started up in that facility. In both cases, the purchase contract was very clear that we did not make lease payments until the press met our print quality standards. While the company in general had an difficult culture, in the case of all three of these press start-ups the message from the very top of the organization was “Do whatever it takes to get a solid press fingerprint.” The reason was simple, without a solid benchmark at start-up how could we ever know what condition the press was in later?

Dale, it takes a great deal of time, money and a great team to perform a successful and meaningful press fingerprint. During the press start-ups above, the fingerprinting process could go on for a week or more. The press was fully crewed and lots of paper was run during this time. All the support staff had to be available from pre-press, plating, maintenance, materials handling, and more. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that these fingerprint cost $100,000 or more.

Now, not all fingerprints need to cost that much. I took part in a very successful fingerprint within the last 30-days that probably cost no more than about $10,000 including our software and professional services time. It is, however, a matter of scale. The client for the 10K fingerprint was simply making the first investment in end-to-end color process control. All the key players in this organization participated in the meetings and remained on-site during the 2 (14 plus hour) days required to complete the fingerprint.

The results on the second day (and in follow-up calls the last three weeks) continue to be impressive. In the case above the press is not brand new but instead a fairly old and well worn pieces of iron which is now printing at an impressive level.

My conclusion is simple. If senior management of a PRINTING company is not willing to invest the time money and effort necessary to perform a proper PRESS fingerprint, one must really question the value of performing the fingerprint.

If you found this article helpful please visit my Company ColorMetrix to learn more about color process control solutions that work and deliver spot on press fingerprints.

#48: Make Proofs That Match Your Press

JimRaffel — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:53:41 +0000

Since #45 in December we have been discussing resolutions to improve the quality of your proofs. In order to gain the full benefit of this installment one should have read and implemented the suggestions in #46 & #47.

Proceeding forward it does not matter if you are utilizing a methodology like GRACoL G7, or a more traditional color management approach. In either case you will include a target on each print job with the same color bar swatches that you output on the proof (#46). This will allow you to measure the press ok sheets and compare them to the proofs, thus building even a larger statistical database to call upon.

When utilizing software like our ColorMetrix and ProofPass.com products for process control and print certification purposes it does not matter if you are using a methodology like G7 or traditional color management. While there are some new formulas out there to run the collected data through the tried and true colorimetric data (L*a*b* and derivatives along with some version of Delta E), do a great job comparing two similar or dissimilar imaging systems.

Unlike density and dot gain values which must be used with pigment sets designed for 4/color process printing, L*a*b* values allow the comparison of an inkjet proof and an offset press sheet. This is possible because we are looking at the actual colors, not values derived from a formula which assumes a certain pigment set.

Not only will you be comparing the measurements of the proof to the press sheet, but you will be building a history of what is a “normal” print condition of each press and paper combination. Some refer to this as finding the “sweet spot” of the printing press.

Overall, as your volume of collected data grows you will be able to refine the system in small steps by reviewing the proofing and press information both independently and together. Using numeric results, charts, and graphs you will be able to see small differences in color that can be adjusted for over time. No system is stable over time, so continuous monitoring is a must in order to maintain stable color.

#44: Why process control works

JimRaffel — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:55:22 +0000

Earlier this month I was visiting a customer who utilizes multiple ColorMetrix licenses to monitor and control; plate making; proofing; and pressroom. Several years ago this customer used ColorMetrix in his plate making operation to uncover a processor replenishment problem that not even the plate vendor was able to unravel. During this visit, he told me about a recent experience involving a pressman who came to him asking for a new plate so that he could achieve a match on press. For some reason he could not get the cyan to fall in appropriately. My customer consulted his ColorMetrix plate database and confirmed that the plate was properly made. He then measured a press sheet provided by the pressman and compared it to his historical data for that press and paper combination. The cyan dot gain (TVI) was about 10 points away from the expected values.

He agreed to make a new plate with an adjusted curve in the interest of getting the job off press with acceptable color, but also suggested the pressman take a long hard look at the cyan printing unit. Before the plate was even processed the pressman returned and said to never mind he had uncovered a roller problem in the cyan unit.

Yes, all the data collection our client does takes time and effort, but what is an hour of your press time worth? He pointed out that this is not an isolated occurrence. Just having a densitometer and measuring density and dot gain would have done no good in this situation. My customer and his pressman needed to know what the expected density and dot gain would be on the press and paper combination being run.

By simply measuring the OK sheet from most jobs, within 30 days you will have a very substantial database to fall back on when problems like the one illustrated above occur. So, process control is not free, but instead an investment with a fairly easy to calculate return. There are more examples of how process control has saved our clients money at here at JimRaffel.com, so feel free to read the archives.

#37: Monitoring Digital Presses

JimRaffel — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:19:29 +0000

At ColorMetrix we have some new and potential new customers who will be using our products (both ColorMetrix and ProofPass.com) to monitor and control digital presses like the HP Indigo, Xerox 8000, and NexPress. During our sales presentations most of these folks have expressed concern that the device is constantly self calibrating and correcting itself, so why would I need to do external process control?

My short answer: “Do you really want to let the fox watch the hen house?”

For the most part the internal controls on digital presses are built to keep the device in calibration. While these devices are different than conventional printing presses, they are not so different that we conventional printers do not understand them. There is a certain amount of variation that a conventional press self adjusts for like automatic register controls and the like. So, if we follow this augment to a logical conclusion that would mean process control would be useless on a conventional press as well. If you are reading this article I am fairly certain you do not believe that.

In general the act of process control requires the user to view the device (press in our case) as a black box. By measuring the resulting print the device produces, we are taking into account everything that happens in the device and the environment the device is in.

For example, several of these devices ‚Äúself-calibrate‚Äù by imaging on a drum or a belt between actual substrate impressions. It seems to me we have removed a pretty important piece of the quality puzzle from that equation. What if our substrate is stored in a warehouse with no air conditioning and our press is in a climate controlled room? A week or so ago it was almost 100 degrees with very high humidity in the mid-west. If we bring that paper from the warehouse into the production room and do not provide 24 hours for the paper to acclimate, do you think we would get the same print result as we would with paper that had been acclimated?

If you said NO, please call me for a free trial version of ColorMetrix or ProofPass.com so you can measure it yourself.

In conclusion, all the variables that contribute to a printed piece like; faulty RIPs, toner changes, device wear and tear, paper changes, etc are viewed by a process control system like ColorMetrix as a black box. Process control systems like ColorMetrix measure the finished piece in order to accomplish two goals:

Confirm that the finished print quality is within acceptable quality guidelines
Provide detailed enough information to track back the problem portion of the process when #1 above is not achieved

Overall, the goal of the manufactures self-calibration procedure to stability of the imaging process itself. The goal of a system like ColorMetrix is overall print and color quality of the printed piece you put in the hands of your customer.

#32: Tales from the Press Trial (Part 2)

JimRaffel — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 16:49:18 +0000

This week I will be providing more information about the MacDermid Printing Solutions Stabil-X press trial April 17th and 18th . This week I will review the variation data from two of the trial conditions:

STX opt – Stabil-X blanket run at optimum packing level
Press std – The set-up of the press when we arrived

The TVI graph from last week showed the mean 50% dot gain for the STX opt. to be 24.817 and the Press std. to be 25.556. In addition to the lower overall dot gain with the Stabil-X, the standard deviation of the Stabil-X opt. was only .752 compared with 1.088.

The density of the two runs are very similar as well as the associated standard deviations: STX opt. 1.489 and .018; Press std. 1.522 and .016.

These two graphs plot each of the 10 samples measured for each trial condition. The graphs also show the mean as well as 3 standard deviation +/- control lines.

If you would like more information about the MacDermid Stabil-X blanket, please contact me and I will put you in touch with the right people at MacDermid.