Increase web printing productivity - As job lengths decrease, effective print job preparation is a must

RICHARD C.HOLLIDAY Contributing The old timekeeper clearly remembers the heyday of web printing. At that time, it rushed to the market. At the time, press customers found that they could not complete an ever-increasing catalogue, magazines, brochures, books, or even packaged printing jobs through large sheetfed, letterpress, and gravure presses. Web printing companies are examples of the success of the printing industry in the 20th century. Obviously, these companies did not stand still because of their past successes. They saw what they would do next to roll up sleeves at the factory and pressroom managers and restore market awareness based on web productivity. Because it is difficult to make meaningful measurements and develop the productivity of the press shop, they can only draw some logical conclusions. There are about 4,000 web printing companies in North America, and most of them are printed short editions. With print customers developing one market after another, on-demand printing and other communication strategies have emerged. At the time, many printers were aware of this trend, but not everyone recognized the challenges of productivity that were directly related to the short-lived benefits. Although some printers think of ignoring print job preparation, some costs can be reduced without any loss. But customers did not get a little benefit from it. As the length of the job decreases, the printer must adjust the corresponding print job preparation. If you can't reduce your print job preparation time at a reduced job length, your print production will take significantly more time to prepare for the print job than it does for production. So how to increase the productivity of the web printing shop? The first thing you should do is start with the goal of definition improvement. You should know what you are managing. One way to do this is to compare the yield of a given press shop with its potential, which we call computational productivity entropy (PQ). The potential production of a web-printing shop depends entirely on the nature of the job (job length, number of colors, overprinting complexity, etc.) and management of printed book policies. In addition, the slow production schedule will have an impact on delivery and customer satisfaction. In order to determine the entropy of the PQ equation, you need to figure out how many hours your production can provide. Here's an example: Calculating by 7 days a week, multiplied by 85% of productivity, and eliminated 10 days of holidays a year, you can provide 7242 hours of production a year. Second, define a typical or standard job and job printing time. Assuming the use of 4 color 75000 prints, 45 minutes of job preparation time, printing at a rate of 35,000 per hour, 15 minutes of standby time per job (including interrupts, changeovers, minor repairs, etc.), so that each standard job is 3.27 hour. A total of 2,215 jobs can be completed in 7,242 hours per year, with a total of 16.610 million signatures. If the press shop produces 100 million signatures per year, PQ is 100 divided by 166.1 or 60%. So how to increase to 70%? What about 75%? You can get an answer by lowering one of four conditions: job preparation, operating mode, repair and maintenance, and job progress. The above four conditions are related to management and actual work behaviors in addition to the progress of the work. Some people may ask, is the printing delay and customer acceptance the fifth condition and factor? We tend to call it homework. We call the entire time from the stop of the previous job counter to the start of the next job counter as job preparation. It includes the time it takes to print plates, top plates, whole sheets, transfer inks, and more. Many people will only speak nicely about their preparations for the job. In fact, they do not pay attention to it at all. We believe that a successful job preparation process should begin with a correct understanding of the influencing factors. It includes factors that affect the quality of the plate, the printing conditions and characteristics, and the motivation and ability of the worker. Plate quality When the inferior printing plate is sent to the printing shop, it will cause the entire process to fail. The staff refused to accept the plate, and the replacement of the quality plate would inevitably cause a waste of time; or they accepted the plate, and printing with this plate would also increase the time for job preparation, and the operation would not reach the promised quality. Print conditions and characteristics Plate installation is not a good job preparation problem. Any high-volume production machine, such as a web press, should be routinely inspected, adjusted, and maintained to ensure predictable operation. Most of the old and deactivated Heatset presses are well worth the rebuilding recovery, reaching the standard state and predictable state. Moreover, some rebuilding presses can improve performance even better than new presses. These performance improvements shorten job preparation time and reduce sheet damage at the same speed. As the importance of job preparation in the operational equations continues to increase, feedback on the potential for job preparation cannot be ignored in management. It is true that the new printing manufacturers have dramatically increased the speed of printing operations in the past 15 years. But for most printers, of course, those who are reluctant to buy a new printer, the most important developments are those who reduce job preparation time and waste. One or two exceptions are the refurbishment of existing presses. Significantly updated components include ink fountain remote adjustment system: 1. Ink fountain - preset software, access to prepress data connections, and ink fountain without plate or film scan; 2. Avoid Stiffer ink fountain prepared for repeated work, which can accelerate ink fountain bending; 3. Precise dusting device and continuous water roller; 4. No watermark version of the operation; 5. Rubber roller cleaning device; 6. Inter-cell regulator; 7. Flight version replacement adjustment; 8. PLC-based printing control can provide flexible color ink roll and water roller settings for automatic color sequence; 9. Closed-loop color registration; 10. Closed-loop ink density control; 11. Automatic paper cutting and clamping device; 12. Automatic roller positioning control; 13. Simplified folding flip; 14. In-machine adjustment, especially adjustment of folding plates. In addition, closed loop guides, tension control and cutting controls have become commonplace. User engineers are another option for setting up the press and its job preparation components to facilitate personnel entry and reduce job preparation time. Personnel ability and motivation Do not underestimate the importance of the ability and attitude of the printing staff. We often find ourselves in a printing shop using old equipment. Due to the purposeful and rich experience of personnel work, the results can achieve better job preparation time; on the contrary, although there is new equipment in another workshop, there is no work experience. And the purpose, the result requires a longer time for homework preparation. Because the characteristics of short-lived work and the importance of job preparation continue to increase, managers may not need to remind you. First of all, managers should clearly establish a sense of operational readiness that is central to the company’s productivity improvement. Of course, the implication is that management is integrated into operational readiness to improve engineering, increase attention, and recognize individual and collective special capabilities and success. Second, managers and staff members must break, study, and analyze the job preparation and time of designated tasks. It allows to arrange work materials, tools and schedules to streamline the process. When the printer is in an abnormal state, it reduces unnecessary movement and minimizes idle time. Finally, staff training. Printers can sometimes be compared to racers. If optimizing the productivity of the press shop is your responsibility, you know that it is as important to get the press back in good condition and get the car back on the road. So, isn't every employee aware of what to do and how to handle it when the press goes out of its normal state? Isn't every employee having the required products, plates, and tools at hand? Are people trained as a team? Do they have good leadership skills? Job preparation, unlike fast or slow mode of operation, is synchronized with people. If a member is tired and slows down, then he slows down the progress of the entire group. When the press is in an abnormal state, it needs leadership skills and the ability to continually strengthen team morale. Operating Mode We define it as a good working time. The operating mode interval refers to the standby time required for the web break, rubber roller cleaning, plate replacement, and other necessary printing adjustments. If the operating interval is related to the job, then it belongs to the time of the job. If it is not related to the job, it belongs to the scope of the maintenance and repair of the printing press. Unlike job preparation, it is synchronized with the machine and does not depend on the accuracy of the process and training of personnel. In general, most print shop operating modes are more acceptable than job preparation productivity. The reason why this is said is because most printing shops have focused on the speed of the printing press. Here are some common scenarios and possible solutions: 1. The run time is too short - it is not worth using the high speed mode, and the secondary job preparation cost has reduced the running time by 10 or 20 minutes. Solution: For new machines, harder ink fountains and increased ink gradients can prevent the loss of color when the machine is at high speeds; for the rebuilding machine, see if its mechanical integrity causes printing or folding failures as the speed increases. 2. This is a weakness of the press. If the speed is increased, it may cause the web to break, marks to appear, blisters on the ink film, and/or paper jams in the folding plate. Scenario: The press needs to be restored and at least partially rebuilt. Reduced failures and waste can quickly recoup reconstruction investment. 3. The person who prints the delivery unit cannot keep up with the printing speed. Scenario: Check your stacking paper and binding equipment or other signature processing equipment. How many sensors are used to reduce the overall printing speed and make the machinery, personnel and support structure reach the same speed. 4. The printer feels relaxed at the right speed. Program: The rhythm can keep up, but the work is not efficient. How comfortable is it? You are letting yourself run and laid off. It is undeniable that some printers can save a lot of time in their preparation for printing. They can still achieve high productivity without high-speed printing. However, if printers continue to maintain such a low printing speed, they should consider wasting expensive high-speed. On the printing press and ancillary equipment and additional investment. Maintenance and repairs The purpose of maintenance and repairs is to reduce time waste, especially unpredictable time. The less time is wasted, the more efficient it is. We think that the waste of time, including unforeseen time, is related to the existence of a good overall maintenance (PM), but not to the life of the machine. To reduce wasted time, maintenance of the machine must be performed, and necessary maintenance must be performed even when emergency operations are completed. Many production plants often cannot find maintenance personnel and necessary components when problems arise. The time was wasted, and the workshop workers had to stop working. This is an unpredictable interruption and maintenance responsibility. In summary, the profitability of low productivity is not stable. We can improve productivity by 10% to 20% by managing these issues. If the average value is 15%, it can save 600 web presses in North America (in North America, there are 4,000 machines multiplied by 15%). With annual machine wages and maintenance costs for each machine and other funding of 600,000 U.S. dollars, 600 machines will cost 360 million U.S. dollars a year. This shows the importance of increasing productivity. Of course, we cannot predict too much about the number of people who are unemployed due to the technical improvement of web printing. In fact, we expect that as the length of the job continues to decrease, the entire web printing process can maintain a large number. However, the output of each press will continue to decline, and the number of presses will increase. When most printers put the difficulty of selecting experienced people first, the problem of improving overall productivity will naturally be solved.