What are the key ideas for achieving greater efficiency in prepress?

[J]

Hi,

What are the key ideas that printshops should embrace for achieving greater efficiency in prepress? Maybe some common, continuing, obstacles you have encountered and have solved?

Regards, J

[MJNC]

J,
I am no expert, but have been in the prepress industry for almost 30 years. The most important thing I notice that people always forget is COMMUNICATION, imao.
When there are new projects starting, have a meeting with everybody! Even if they will never touch it. Keep all in the loop all the time; and make sure everyone is always on the same page. Have meetings for everything that possibly makes sense; and open things up for questions. Bring donuts. Make all feel equally informed. That is my best advice.
Best of Luck!
Peace to the PrintPlanet!!
_mjnc

[splenguin]

Automation, automation, automation.

[prepressguru]

Hey J

For us it is information. The more proper info we have on the docket the easier our job is. This begins with the production planning department if they take the time and get it right then the steps after usually work better (prepress.. etc). As well you may want to look how prepress is organized, how you work with files and making sure each operator is working the same way. This is pretty standard stuff now.

Having good files from clients is also a bonus. Luckily most of our clients do have good files so we can prep them with minimal effort.

Computer hardware makes a different as well, bigger is better to crunch, open, flatten all those multi layers/effects photoshop wonder files from designers, placed into everything.

Automation - for us is no use. We don't have dailies, weekly, or monthly repeat jobs. Most of our jobs require some human intervention. We are short run sheefeed shop.

You could look into JDF stuff, but then again if you don't have your info nailed down this becomes a bottleneck.

Goodluck!

[Colorblind]

Automation, automation, automation.

I agree with you as long as human quality control supervises the automated process. I've seen pretty ugly results coming out of mis-configured automated workflows...

[zoran]

I agree with all above, Information, Communication, Automation, somewhat in that order.
I would just like to add that major advantage in prepress is properly trained and motivated operator.
You would not believe difference in efficiency between good and bad Prepress Operator.
It could be 10-fold in productivity and even more in quality.
My 2 cents.

[mattbeals]

Automation for the sake of automation does not yield "enough" benefit. Communication is only good when it is meaningful. Otherwise it's just a bunch of noise that you have to sort through.

So what to do? You need a combination of automation and communication. As someone pointed out you need to make sure the actual art matches the job ticket. Once that is known you can properly plan the job not only for the manufacturing itself but the time also. The key is to know as soon as possible after the job is received what the status of the art is. Once you know that everything else falls into place. How do you do that? Automated systems like some that I have built using Enfocus PowerSWITCH. As soon as jobs are uploaded to the system we are able to determine what kind of job it is (InDesign, Illustrator, PDF, PostScript, Quark, etc). We can convert them to a PDF and then preflight the job. If you want to preflight the native file(s) we can use Markzware FlightCheck Pro. If you want to preflight a resulting PDF we can use Callas pdfToolbox Server and Enfocus PitStop Server. Once the preflight is done we have the information we need. That information can be sent to customer service, the sales person, planning, who ever we want. Even back to the customer.

There are all sorts of options that we can plug into a workflow like SWITCH. Yes, a workflow... We can monitor web upload directories, FTP servers (internal or external), network volumes, email addresses, SWITCH Client applications and the like. We can talk to MIS systems, databases, web services, etc.

I love it when people talk about automated workflows... Apogee, Prinect, Prinergy and the like only automate what happens inside the RIP and if you're lucky the press itself (in the case of Prinect). Never mind that the automation the achieve is only after a ton of time has been spent just getting it there. If you want to realize real benefits of automation you have to work on the first two thirds of the workflow. That is the process involved in getting the job into the shop and then planning/estimating (as someone else pointed out) and prepress. I build automated workflows that focus on getting the job in as quickly as possible and giving feedback to concerned parties about the status of jobs coming in or that are already in the plant. Of course not everything can be automate, nor should it be. You have to be smart about what you're automating and realize that at some point a human has to be there to check the work.

I've taken workflows from 7 hours to get results to less than 5 minutes. I've taken large scale systems where jobs are coming in at the rate of 2,500 per day and given technical preflights (different than a human determining they are really able to manufacture the job) to less than 30 seconds per preflight start to finish. The results are huge. ROI's in as little as 30 days for some systems. Others have taken up to a year. There's money being wasted out there that isn't in the RIP or on the manufacturing floor. It's ahead of all that.

If you want to achieve greater efficiency stop looking at only the press room and prepress. Those are important areas but have had decades of automation already. Start looking further up front. I've seen the results, it's dumbfounding...

[toronar]

I would have to say (as others already have): information and communication. Technical expertise and the right tools are already there (and still can be improved further as always).

As I always put it: we (prepress) can do almost everything, we just have to know about it.
Otherwise we will often do a job twice: the first time (without information/communication about some really crucially important details), and, after that (and a lot of money burned) - the right way.

[gordo]

Most of you say that Communication is a top priority. What have you done, or are doing to improve it?

best, gordon p

[oxburger]

Step 1: shoot the sales staff
Step 2: see step 1