Every year, end-of-year lists are made and New Year speeches are prepared. Attention is drawn to what went wrong, and how we want to address this in the coming year. Similarly, there is a reflection on what went well in the past year, and how we want to maintain or further improve that trend. What you know, you can indeed maintain, adjust, or also discard. But how does a graphic company know if its printed materials are of good quality?
How do you know if you need to address certain processes next year to achieve better quality, or will it be another year of 'business as usual'? How is such a baseline for print quality determined, and more challenging still: how does one know if it is met for every job? Does your production department even know how it performed in terms of print quality over the past year?
Audit: Snapshot versus trends
“Measuring is knowing” remains a ubiquitous expression. What you measure is indisputably established and can be objectively analysed. Many companies conduct periodic measurements: their ‘audits’ of print quality are thus limited to measuring a situation at a specific moment in time. If the quality has dipped below the threshold since your last audit, you obviously have no idea when exactly, or why. So, at most, you could say in the year-end speech that the quality was “OK or not OK at the last audit.”
Many companies have already connected the necessary measuring equipment continuously to their printing presses and are storing quite a bit of data. Very often, that data is stored in nice databases, but those databases are fragmented in their environment, so that relationships between certain measurements never become visible. A downward trend is not picked up; on the contrary: an audit can only be a snapshot.
Printspector: Continue monitoring.
Printspector brings all your data together in one overview. All data stored in your company is collected: we establish connections between all your measurement systems. In addition to the measurements from your colour measurement system (think of spectral and density values), we can assist you in capturing various aspects such as used substrates to per type, as well as environmental factors like temperature or humidity in your production hall. Everything is also linked to your existing software packages such as ERP, PIM/DAM.
Every action within your production environment is recorded in this way. Printspector collects all data and presents it bundled by job, by customer, by printing press, by colour, etc. All your data is continuously captured and stored in the cloud: your information is always and everywhere available, so you have a constantly up-to-date and transparent overview.
Jobscore & proactive monitoring
Printspector can capture a wide range of data per job. Based on this data, the tool will assign a score to each job according to a number of company-specific parameters and priorities. Furthermore, the tool can compare the data and score of the current job with historical data. In this way, Printspector will automatically recognise similar jobs, weigh them against each other, and mark jobs as 'risk jobs' if there are deviations or negative trends. These will then require extra attention or even a corrective action.
From now on, the operator will no longer intervene after the periodic audit, but will instead respond very quickly through the continuous monitoring of Printspector and take immediate action when a job shows a deviation. A small adjustment in the process raises the quality back up again, and the chance of reaching a lower limit is extremely small. Printspector thus enables the people in the printing house to proactively and specifically monitor their print quality.
Worksheet for specific monitoring.
An operator does not need to continuously monitor all data. Using self-created 'worksheets' within Printspector, you can track the improvement process for each operator. One operator needs to improve their setup times and consumption, while another focuses on colour quality with a personalised worksheet.
Comments like “That colour always runs wrong, doesn’t it!” are gradually fading into the background and are being replaced by proactive questions such as ‘For this job, it’s best to clean the grid roller before we measure a too low density?”
In your New Year’s speech, you no longer talk about “the last audit” but can now refer to that one colour or that substrate on that printing press or to that specific period. Your desired goals for next year are thus substantiated and clearly measurable, and you can follow up on and achieve them together with your employees day by day!
Would you like to know more about this? Contact us. We are happy to help you further!