How Do I Persuade The Management That We Need Colour Management?

[Benk]

Maybe I am just over enthusiastic, I don't know.

We (as in our pre-press department) had some in-house colour management training by an outside Colour Management Expert. He was great. I left the sessions inspired and ready to bring our print factory in line with the "rest" of the world. (Workspaces, calibrations, profiles, tonal cuves, Delta-E...)

My enthusiasm was gladly received by my immediate supervisor but that's as far as I got. It appears that there was and still is a great reluctance from the management to invest the time and money into something that may only seen a return after a few years.

Personally I can only see the benefits. Is it just me or am I missing something?

I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Ben

 

[Possumgal]

If management had to pay for your training, you might say that surely we want to implement the training they paid for. If you work in an area with competition on color-critical large print jobs, hint that those customers will gravitate toward somebody who knows what they're doing with color.

However, if you work in a smaller town or smaller print shop, there just might not be the money available. Just be willing to try to implement what you can and hope that the money or enlightenment comes through later.

 

[jlee]

In my experience, senior management doesn't really understand the benefits of any prepress software until you can quantify the benefits. With what you're talking about the quickest perceived benefit would be waste reduction. You should try and understand the cost of makeready both material and labour and try and see if the colour management would reduce any of these over a year and see if you get the return on investment for prepress equipment and time. As our pressroom manager always says "You guys can spend 5-6 hours doing that prepress magic and it would be less than an hour of cost in our pressroom!". Another thing to consider is rejects due to colour, theoretically a sound colour management process will create consistent and predictable results which equals fewer rejects. Finally, what are your competitors up to? Have they gone down the road of colour management? Have they become certified in some methodology (G7, ISO 12647, etc...). In our business some of our customers will not do business with you unless you have some type of print certification.

Keep in mind that this road is not an easy one, it's critical to have buy-in from pressmen. Also, if they're not accustomed to measuring stuff then they will be an immediate roadblock.

Remember, you're talking about a business and if there are no benefits to the bottom line then why would your management release the funds. When you state that you may only see a return after a few years, have you actually done the math? Have you considered multiple angles rather than just what's obvious?

Hope that helps,
JL

 

[Benk]

Thanks JL,

I will talk to my supervisor to see where colour management can really save us money. You are absolutely right about doing the maths. It is after all about the bottom line. I hope I can pull some meaningful figures from my research.

Thanks again

Ben

 

[akalaray]

Speak with your suppliers, see what services and expertise they can provide. Between our ink supplier and our plate supplier we pay next to nothing and they come in to help with our fingerprint and color profiling

Thanks JL,

I will talk to my supervisor to see where colour management can really save us money. You are absolutely right about doing the maths. It is after all about the bottom line. I hope I can pull some meaningful figures from my research.

Thanks again

Ben

 

[curiosity]

Thread: How Do I Persuade The Management That We Need Colour Management?

Thread: How Do I Persuade The Management That We Need Colour Management?

Ben,

Reduced makeready (paper, ink, time) might add up to be your greatest monetary benefit. We're down to 125 sheets or so (40" presses, 4 over 4, run lengths between 500 and 50k).
But how much do you need to invest?
Does your press need an upgrade? That could get expensive.
How about prepress? As in software for customizing plate curves.
And finally, the tools for measuring and the applications related to it.

 

[chevalier]

Speak with your suppliers, see what services and expertise they can provide. Between our ink supplier and our plate supplier we pay next to nothing and they come in to help with our fingerprint and color profiling

Our plating vendor and ink vendor both bring in people who work jointly with us to calibrate annually (for free). The software we purchased our selves. It's just a cost of doing business these days.

 

[chevalier]

My enthusiasm was gladly received by my immediate supervisor but that's as far as I got. It appears that there was and still is a great reluctance from the management to invest the time and money into something that may only seen a return after a few years.

A lot of the customers I deal with honestly have no clue what GRACoL, G7, SWOP, FORGRA etc. actually mean BUT they do require one to be qualified/certified to even qualify as a potential vendor. For us it would be a huge opportunity cost.

 

[jlee]

A lot of the customers I deal with honestly have no clue what GRACoL, G7, SWOP, FORGRA etc. actually mean BUT they do require one to qualified/certified to even qualify as a potential vendor. For us it would be a huge opportunity cost.

I thoroughly agree Chevalier, a majority of our customers want some type of certification. But none of them really know what any of this stuff means. Considering that you and I are both in packaging, I love the dirty little secret that none of these certifications really address spot colours which is primarily what we print in packaging!

 

[motormount]

Hi Ben.

Seven years ago,i was working at the prepress department of a publishing company.

The production manager had taken the color management issue very seriously.

We had calibrated eizo cg's,controlled lighting,our epson 4800 was checked in monthly basis,the only thing missing was that the prepress department was not paint grey-on the contrary it was full of color posters with our ''creations'' but the other guys wouldn't let anyone mess with that.

So when i left and came to the printshop i currently work,with heidi's top notch workflow i thought that i came to the right place to practice what i've learned from the color management experts who kept our monitors and proofer running right.

To my surprise i learned pretty early that we were not doing any kind of color management.

We were setup to ignore file profiles and just keeping the numbers intact and turn rgb's automatically to cmyk with a perceptual rendering intent.
Proofer wasn't and -hasn't - been checked since first calibration and i'd really not like to speak about my monitor.

I told the management my point of view on the subject,got laughed at and quit all efforts to change their mind,being sure that one way or the other things would led them to reconsider their attitude.

Seven years later,i'm really sorry to say that only a few months ago we lost a customer due to the lack of a color managed environment-mainly because we don't do ''certified'' proofs -the ones with the color patches and the delta -e declination sticker.
If we did, i don't think they'd care to ask us how we color treat the customer files.

One might think that we deal with low quality stuff,but we have at least three multinational companies as regular customers.

What comes first for them is cost,then delivery time and way back color -sometimes even in terms of consistency...

So like others said,try to calculate a real world benefit translated to your country’s currency and if management likes it,then may you’ll get your chance…

 

[Benk]

I am glad to see that I'm not the only person out there who has noticed the lack of real world color management. I love the whole subject and I really hope my bosses can see the benefits of a well managed color controlled workflow.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

 

[Bvanani]

Hi Ben

I have found that upper management some times do not understand color management. You have to explain things in layman’s
term.

Here is the approach i would take: I would go to them and be very serious when you say this.
Say if we do not get in to color management then I will go color blind. This is contagious and slowly it will creep in to everyone
in the shop including all machinery and we will be seeing things black and white. There after all we will be able to
print and manage is black and white.

 

[Benk]

That is a fantastic idea.

Try explaining to the clients that we can only print in b&w...

 

[Bvanani]

Hi Ben

Thank You, Yes I know but my attempt was to wake upper management up

 

[Benk]

I'm finished for the weekend.

I will get on the case with a renewed sense of purpose starting first thing Monday morning.

Cheers and have a great weekend!!

 

[maas]

I am intrigued to know how you got on Ben, from my own experience if you intend to provide an ROI to senior decision makers involve the company accountant, they will have P&L spreadsheets hopefully where you can drill down to start up waste etc which are key selling points when trying to get a solution across the line

 

[Puch]

To the original question: the only way to persuade the management is to show them on plain and easy graphs and calculation sheets how much money (and time) wasted because of the missing color management. The problem lying here is the data collection: for a longer period of time, you have to meticulously record the time and effort it takes to prepare a job to be ready for production. Eg.: you make a daily chart of jobs done, how many minutes took the preparation of each, which operator did the fixing. Then you can calculate how much money spent on prepress.

But hey, you can only save a fraction of that cost. Building a 'totally' automatic workflow, which can make intelligent decisions in every case is not a small feat, and involves a lot of software, investment in training and of course, you have to deal with the cost of having the system working all the time.

In the end, you will have some raw numbers, eg.: your company spent hundred thousand USD on prepress in a year, and the average job took 12 minutes to be press-ready. On the other hand, you will have a lot of quotations for software developers and system integrators, showing that you can build a potent system for fifty grand and the make-ready time will be reduced to seconds. Wow! Breakeven in half a year! (All numbers are imaginary.)

Please remember that you will still have to have the most qualified operators (with high salaries), as the most difficult jobs won't go through your sophisticated system. And they have to be trained to be able to dinamically change parameters in the system (and build new workflows when the need arise). So the breakeven might take years to happen.

The whole thing comes down to this: if you have a lot of jobs and the cost of trained persons is high, then you have the opportunity to persuade your management. If labor is cheap, and the prepress department is only 50% filled with jobs, then no decision maker will invest into a new system.

 

[Benk]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for all of your input, it has been very helpful.

I realise that any large investment in colour management is probably not on the cards for now. I would like, however, to propose a bare-bones system of colour management. Is there anyone who can advise me on how to go about creating a simple and effective colour management workflow, whilst keeping costs to a minimum.?

I realise that management may see CM potential once I manage to implement some kind of low cost system.

Thanks

Ben

 

[Puch]

Hi Ben,

if you stick with manipulating PDFs, then you have a limited number of software packages to choose from:

- GMG ColorServer,
- Alwan ColorHub,
- Colorlogic ZePrA,
- Callas pdfToolbox (server version if you have a lot of jobs) with Device Link add-on.

From the above list I suggest you to take a serious look at the last one. Not only you get a proper solution to normalize colors of incoming jobs, but you get a chest of tools which might fulfil most (or all) your needs regarding PDF "massaging". You can start with the Desktop version of the software (which is not a big investment), then you can move forward implementing the Server, if you have to process a lot of files.

If you need more sophisticated setups and conversions, then you should evaluate ZePrA from Colorlogic. In it's current incarnation it does anything you might dream of, including normalizing, on-the-fly Device Link generation, flattening. There is an option which tries to guess the profile of untagged images, for even more proper color conversions.

GMG is still considered the best option, though the price can be prohibitively high in your area.

If you prefer editing source files, then common operator knowledge and strict policies are the best solution: open up everything, check embedded profiles, tag everything properly, watch conversions (and don't let them happen, if you don't need it). It's cheaper, but can be very-very time consuming, as you already know.

Cheers,

Peter

 

[Benk]

Thanks Peter,

The software you have recommended is definitely worth investigating. I am looking for an integrated solution to manage colour output from multiple devices ranging from offset to digital. We use Prinergy Evo for our offset work. Our digital presses have a separate rip over which I have not been given control....yet.

Ben