When It Comes to Workflow Productivity, Start With Finishing

You’ve seen those old joke signs that read “PLAN AHEAD,” where the beginning letters P-L-A are written big and wide, but at the end the A and D are squeezed in or written on a separate line. It’s a good metaphor for thinking about finishing, especially in the digital age. Bottlenecks in finishing—a common complaint—are often the result of poor planning further upstream, and not the fault of the equipment per se. But when bottlenecks are the fault of the equipment, it’s because the PSP didn’t do their homework when shopping for finishing—or bought on the cheap.

“When print service providers invest in a printer, they do a lot of research,” said Si Nguyen, VP of Sales for Duplo USA, “but when it comes to finishing, it’s an afterthought. We sometimes think we’re the red-headed stepchild.”

It’s also tempting to want to use legacy finishing equipment designed for offset, but that may end up causing more problems than it solves. Today’s new features such as automation and, essentially, push-button simplicity are designed to—and actually do—increase efficiency and productivity, helping avoid the bindery bottleneck.

“You have to look at the finished product first, then work your way back,” said Paul Steinke, National Sales Manager for Standard Finishing. “That includes using smarter solutions on the finishing side and incorporating workflow, and the JDF workflow specifically, to maximize the efficiency of the finishing process. That goes all the way back to imposition.”

Printers also need to be able to see “over the horizon” (so to speak) when planning their finishing investment.

“The biggest challenge for printers purchasing digital finishing lines today is to not only understand their current production needs but also predict what their needs will be in the future,” said Jason Elliott, Vice President, Sales, for manroland web systems. “The print engines are getting faster each year and continue to bridge the gap to short run offset. Equally, the workflow systems are developing at an alarming pace and the level of personalization and customization that we will see in the next few years is unfathomable to the possibilities we imagine today.”

Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose—Not

While it’s true that finishing processes haven’t changed all that much—stitchers still stitch, binders still bind, folders still fold, booklet makers still make booklets—but getting rolls or book blocks to that point has changed quite dramatically. The nature of those rolls and book blocks has changed as well.

“In a digital environment, we’re printing to order and printing to quantity vs. overprinting, which is what has typically been done on the offset side,” said Steinke. This means that there is little or no room for error, and one damaged sheet can mean the need to reprint, lest John Doe not get his transactional document.

The difference between offset and digital workflows becomes acute when we think about “unassembled print output”—which is what offset is—vs. “assembled print output”—which is what digital is. Digital printing equipment typically yields cut sheets, collated sets, or book blocks that are ready for finishing, rather than “raw” output that needs to be “prefinished” such as folding and gathering, cutting imposed signatures, and so forth. So finishing equipment that is geared for the offset way of doing things may not be compatible with digital output.

“To try to fold the digital output into traditional offset output is very inefficient and is a cumbersome, labor-intensive process, especially if you have a very short turnaround time,” said Steinke. “In digital print, you rarely have overruns to compensate for mistakes.”

“You have to be very strategic in how you get the product from press to bindery,” said Andrew Fetherman, Director of Digital Solutions for Muller Martini. “Work-in-progress management is important to manage productivity.”

Raising the Bar

As a result, barcode-enabled finishing has become essential to managing the finishing process.

In the prepress stage, you encrypt a barcode—be it QR or some other kind of code— with all the information about the job: what equipment is required, untrimmed size, trimmed size, thickness, what cover goes with what interior pages, and so on. This code is printed like other types of printer’s marks. It’s scanned by the finishing equipment, which then automatically sets up the job parameters on the machine. “It allows you to eliminate makeready in the bindery,” said Fetherman.

It’s also more and more necessary track where each piece is in the shop, not just for internal productivity, but for customer communication and online job tracking.

Invisible Touch

Barcoding also reduces touchpoints, or the number of times a human operator needs to intercede in the finishing process. Although we like to think we have a better opinion of our employees, the fact remains that the more automated a process can be, the less the likelihood for errors. And when you’re printing books of one or any of the other kinds of variable-data and personalized materials that digital printing enables, there is literally no room for error. These automation capabilities are also why looking for cut-rate used equipment or trying to utilize legacy offset finishing equipment may end up costing you in the long run.

Older equipment, even older digital finishing equipment, may also not be as flexible as you may need it to be. That is, to what extent can finishing keep up with changes and upgrades in printing equipment? Unlike offset equipment, digital equipment doesn’t stay around for decades, and changes in product demand likely will drive users to invest in new printing equipment. (The economics of digital equipment—leasing vs. buying—also contributes to the frequent turnover of print engines.) Is today’s finishing equipment future-proof? Legacy finishing equipment was less modular and less upgradeable. Today’s equipment is designed with scalability and flexibility in mind.

“Simply put, technology is king,” said Elliott. “Printers buying the latest technology increase their profitability, productivity, automation, format possibilities, customization, and personalization when compared to used equipment. All of these points lead to developing your market value and overall profitability in what is a very competitive market.”

“We have developed more scalable solutions,” said Fetherman. “If you buy a folder for a 30-inch-wide inkjet press, you don’t know if, in the future, you’re going to go to 42-inch-wide. We have the ability to add modules to make a folder 42 inches or even 60 inches.”

In or Off?

Another change being wrought by digital is that where once inline finishing was the desired configuration, offline or nearline is becoming the preference. The difference between nearline and offline may be open to interpretation, but “nearline” can refer to on-premises finishing while “offline” refers to finishing done in another facility. In some cases, “nearline” can refer to barcode-driven finishing. However you want to define it, it’s driven by the need for flexibility.

Nearline does tend to be rule today—but there can be exceptions that prove the rule.

“When the job requires things like instantaneous reorder, 100-percent accurate mail match, or security concerns where you get into pharmaceutical or HIPAA applications where you have to literally take out every touch, then I understand inline,” said Lance Martin, Director of Sales at MBO America. “But most of our lines tend to be rather complicated and have a lot of operations.”

“We believe in most cases that an inline solution is best from a productivity perspective,” said Elliott. “As a general rule, you can expect about 25-percent greater productivity from an inline system compared to an offline solution. That being said, each printer is different in their needs relative to producing inline, nearline, or offline.” That is, it depends on what you’re producing. “For example, in the book market it probably makes sense in many cases to run inline as you can maximize page output based on the speed delta of the print engine compared to the finishing line. On the other hand in the direct mail market, you might decide nearline or offline production is a better fit. In this market, the level of customization and tracking can change from job to job.”

Still, nearline gives you much more flexibility.

“You’re no longer doing six-by-nine books all day everyday,” said Fetherman. “Now you’re doing all different sizes and thicknesses. It gives you the flexibility to run multiple machines. It also gives you the ability to just let the press run book blocks or rolls and then finish it in the bindery.”

“Offline or nearline avoids bottlenecks,” said Nguyen. “A print services provider will get told ‘You have to go inline because there’s less handling.’ When it comes to production, that’s a mistake. They’re not going to yield more productivity by going inline, especially when they have really high volume.” The speed of inline finishing equipment is often limited by the speed of the printing equipment (or vice versa), plus, by definition, it can only work inline with one print engine at a time. “Why not invest in a nearline solution so you can maximize the speed of that nearline solution and at the same time accommodate several printers,” said Nguyen.

This is especially the case with continuous-feed inkjet. “In many cases, going nearline is better because the nearline device works faster vs. coupled to the print engine,” said Steinke. “If a print engine’s uptime is rated at 95 percent, and the finisher’s is rated at 95 percent, when you take an average, overall uptime is 90 percent. If you decouple those components, you can get 95 percent uptime on the printer and 95 percent on the finisher. So your efficiency nearline can be a little higher.”

Nearline or offline also helps account for potential operator skills mismatches. “An operator who’s running the press tends to be digitally-oriented and is used to pushing buttons and working on computers,” said Martin. “Then there’s a finishing guy who has to know how to fold, glue, perf , and so on to produce a complicated mailer. You’ve got two completely different skill sets trying to run the machine, which that tends to drive people toward offline.”

Spin the Bottleneck

Because finishing is the last stage of the production process, it tends to be where the bottlenecks occur. Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear shops lamenting how the bindery is the bottleneck. Often, through, it has nothing to do with the finishing process in general, or the equipment in particular.

“Why there is traditionally a bottleneck in finishing is because jobs are not getting to the finishing department at the time they’re planned to get there,” said Steinke. “The number one way to eliminate bottleneck is better planning of the finishing work. When designing a product keep in mind what it takes to finish that product, and look at what you have capability-wise.”

Finishing technology tends to be out of sync with printing technology, as well. “There’s a time lag between what happens in the press world and what happens in the finishing world,” said Martin. “We’re always playing catch-up. We’ll get calls from customers who say ‘I’ve got this new press coming in and it’s going to go 30 percent faster. Can you guys do this this and this?’ That happens quite a bit.”

Duty Now for the Future

Still, no matter how good our planning may be, it will inevitably be up to the finishing department to make up any lost time. That’s simply the nature of the beast, and why efficiency, flexibility, and automation are imperatives for today’s binding and finishing equipment.

“Invest in the right piece of equipment in the beginning,” said Nguyen. “When [PSPs] invest in a printer, they should at the same time see what finisher can accommodate that printer. A finisher should accommodate up to three times the speed of the printer they’re investing in.”

“In general, it‘s important that you do not fall into the trap of buying ‘an adequate’ solution that appears to fit your business needs today,” said Elliott. “Technology and the needs of your customers are going to develop quickly over the next years.”

“Don’t wait until you choose your press to choose your finishing,” said Fetherman. “Look at the finishing first.”