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Bravo, Erik. Or perhaps, "Bravo Zulu, Erik."

A serious question... does it seem to make any difference? I have seen times that someone may have a similar product that they wish to market and will say things like "The only information I have is that it says 'RustCo Item 25437'". That's a really good starting point for reverse engineering...

I have heard it. It's a fine fare thee well. They usually go broke within five years afterwards.

Ay, what a disgrace! To live in a Mediterranean country and not have "real" coffee. I pity you. We have a Keurig and an espresso machine. In the middle of the desert. And we'll occasionally brew up a round of fine-powder Mid-Eastern brew if it's wanted... in a cezve or just in cups. Coffee is...

The Plockmatic 104 lists at about $6,900 USD last time I looked.

DEFINITELY use a mail house for all the services that you can on your first mailings. You will save your customer and yourself loads of money and trouble. There are many "little" things that can trip up even the simplest project. (Like the raffle book problem, pictures of children, the...

What I have found infuriating about PMS is its use of reflex blue and rhodamine red as part of its basic colors of printing inks. It seems PMS makes no effort to educate designers that their beauteous creations could take "forever" to dry, smudge customers' hands, or change color when going...

I was about to say that Pantone's Couleur de l'Année is their yearly attempt to get printers to buy a new Pantone book. That is not necessarily true. My inner cynic has been somewhat bested. On the Pantone website it explicitly says that the nearest printing ink match to 2017's color is PMS...

Yes, Craig's way is the usual. There are plenty of trade shops that specialize in calendars like this. I suggest you price a trade shop if this is at all out of your usual range of work.

Looking your reply over once again, I see that you have essentially been given the job of quality assurance. Apparently it's because anyone else who could be approached with the task refuses to take the responsibility, for good reasons or bad. You might want to look at the notion of someone...

Right_Red_Arm My sympathy goes out to you. But: recognize that you have an opportunity to become the manager that it seems no one else wants to be. Maybe not in title, but in reality. It's not easy. There's no visible glory in it. You can lose your job because of people who feel threatened...

Ah, the beauty and freshness of a new color that makes the old color books obsolete and starts another feverish round of lemmingish purchases of new color books and formula books! Whenever Pantone needs a cash infusion they simply add a few new color formulas and market them.

Red_Right_Arm, As I remember, you are in a flexo shop. So these are all flexo plates, right? There will be a higher remake rate on flexo plates than litho plates, but not horribly high. (From my flexo days, I'd imagine 10% would be REALLY high. Then again, we were often running some really...

Indeed, Erik is right: The system dictates the variation. Without changing the system, the best you can do is kludge inside the system to get the best possible performance. As a rule, a bright person on the shop floor has to resign him/herself to the fact that he/she cannot make substantial...

Generally, this stuff is nondescript. Which is exactly what will please all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time.

True to a point. Also quite untrue to a point. Not all of value is measurable. ;)

You can't. That is an overstatement, but it's near the truth. You need a comprehensive baseline in order to know what to do next. If you have no baseline, you have no sure counsel for what to do to improve things; all you can do is "make changes" rather than make a change that you know ought...

In the meantime, you may wish to read anything you can by W. Edwards Deming. Deming is the American statistician who taught Toyota how to make cars dependably. His methods work in any industrial process. There are several YouTube videos that cover some of his ideas: the Red bead experiment and...

Qbot: Around here the entrepreneurs (sales people) are constantly asking for one off's. I consider no one an entrepreneur unless he/she has money to lose on an action as well as money to gain. By this definition, most salespeople are not entrepreneurs. Most don't pay for their one-off gambles...

Thanks everybody! Anyone have any "production standards" info? As far as I can see, hand processing takes something like about one hour per 2,000 linear inches of 3/8" thick material.* Triple the time on the length of any insets. So a 2 foot stack of 5" x 7" simple, smooth-curve die cut...