Mistakes

[pworlledge]

Does your prepress department/plant make a lot of mistakes? If so what drives it? If it was a past issue what fixed it?

We seem to be in this situation. Too many reprints or errors. It happens in all departments as well as my own. Good help? Yes for the most part. Could be better in some places. It seems we're always running to meet deadlines but so are all of you. Probably push it too hard too often. Anyone want to weigh in with advice or comments? Are any of your operations in the same boat?

PS We are also wanting to revamp our job tickets. This is truly one short coming we all seem to agree on. Would anyone mind sending me a blank job ticket so we can get some ideas?

 

[Tom_print]

Unfortunatly I know what its like to be going through what you are at the moment..
I've noticed that ever since we have gone fromg the old style of making plates which was years and years ago to the ctp style and every thing on computer's more mistakes are being let through..
We have had to re do 140 plates in 3 months due to art work errors,most of the errors get picked up by us printers and as a pressman I am sick to death of it,,, Why is it that it can get past the designers, past the production manager who is the plate out putter.
If us printer's were to make 1/4 or those mistakes, and each time needed reprinting we wouldn't have the job anymore...

What makes designers/pre press supirior to this rule....???

The only idea's I have to fix the problem is
1 make pre press do a proper proofing check + rule up a sheet.
2 who ever puts out the plates should do a full proof check as well
3 Press men do a rule up sheet when doing makeready, and also have a quick glance over the job...

As far as I'm concerned you may as well forget about having the tick boxes checklist and sign here sheets, as we have them everything is ticked and its still wrong

Sorry
rant over,, maybee someone else has advice rather then a rant....

 

[Hopkins Printing]

Hi pworlledge,

There is a tool we use in every department that helps us reduce errors...a job checklist. It's all on one sheet, broken down by department starting with job planning, then prepress, then press, etc. and is included with every job.

It's ever changing and we add and/or remove checklist items as are deemed necessary.

Something else you could do (if you aren't already) is to track the errors/mistakes. From this you can brainstorm ideas on how to reduce or eliminate the bigger errors/problems.

Cheers,
Jon Morgan
Hopkins Printing

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Remember with cut backs in staff there are more secretarys and marketing staff struggling to make print ready PDF's. They are often overwhelmed with all they need to learn they miss the basics, such as spelling etc.
They want you to give them an A4 explaining all the possible pitfalls… and A4 to replace 20 years or so work experience… what do you expect ;P

 

[GiveUsPDF's]

The answer to your question begins with Lean Manufacturing. Check out the new area of the forum on this topic. Standard Work is an amazing yet simple tool.

 

[Luc St-Pierre]

Rtft

Rtft

We have put together a RTFT (Right the first time) program. The idea was to document all error types and sources and then be able to pinpoint specific problems therefore find solutions to them. The program also had a reward program for the most RTFT performant people. (not just the stick, also carrots . . ..)
We reduced errors a lot and, by the way, improved a lot specially in the way we handle information.

 

[prepress-mdwest]

At our pre-press company, we have 2 check off boxes on our job tickets. One is for the initials of the operator that works the job, the second is for the initials of another operator that checks the first one's work. We also have a QA manager that checks over the job (and initials it) before it goes out the door or back to the planner. When you initial something, you are taking responsibility for it. Our re-work/spoilage is 1.4% and we are working to reduce to under 1%. It seems tedious, but in pre-pressing for many, many printers, it can be very detrimental if a job is wrong. We don't print, so we can't make up those mistakes at press.

 

[MGB_LE]

I would agree with other posters who say that mistakes have to be categorized, tracked and discussed. Our spoilage is less than 1% consistently. We report the errors, we discuss them to ensure that there are consistent, correct procedures in place to avoid the errors, and we have goals in place to reward employees for meeting the goals. This keeps everyone's eyes on the ball, because they're personally invested. A side advantage is that using such a system helps identify those employees who are not on board with being a successful company. Help correct their attitudes or get rid of them, because their behavior and performance would affect the outcome of incentives for all the other employees.

We use team meetings (prepress team, csr team, sales team) on a weekly basis to discuss team performance regarding errors, on-time, and other team-related matters, to keep everyone engaged. Signage across the plant reinforces our progress toward goals, and spells out what the goals are. The entire plant meets monthly to discuss progress on our goals. I'm saying communication, and sometimes OVERcommunication, is the key to reducing errors. It's important to understand the "why" of a mistake, not just the "what."

 

[LoweringTheBar]

Mistakes-

Mistakes-

"Does your prepress department/plant make a lot of mistakes? If so what drives it?"

I think I can answer that question... IT'S CALLED BEING HUMAN!!!! AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!

As a prepress supervisor struggling with this issue, I once asked my "superiors" a simple question. If I could accurately measure all of the mistakes made in prepress and reduce them to 1%, would that be good enough? They looked at me like I was nuts and didn't know what to say. Finally, the owner piped up and gave me an honest, yet narrow-minded, response. "As long as my jobs aren't the 1%." he sneered.

At that point I realized that no matter what I did to improve quality control in my department, nobody would look at the 99% efficiency. They would only see the one time somebody forgot to overprint a dieline while ripping their pocket folder. (Purely an example... I would never do anything that stupid... really.)

At what point did our industry become so intolerant of imperfection? Brain surgeons don't live under this kind of stress. If they accidentally leave a sponge in my skull, the doctor simply tells me something like this... "Well son, the surgery went pretty well, but we're gonna need to do a little "follow up" procedure and clean out some debris. Nothin' to worry about, plus your insurance will cover it. Hell, I'm late for tee time... take some aspirin and I'll see you next week."

I've been saying this for a few years, and people around me laugh, but if things don't start to lighten up, I'm not going to start working on a project without my attorney present. Already, I document my every move, and make copies of the job ticket so I can prove that the production manager changed the layout on me AFTER turning the ticket into prepress.

Here's where we are headed. Better pour yourself a drink. Back in WWII the US army had a big problem with parachutes not opening and soldiers were plunging to their deaths like human lawn darts all over Europe. The solution to this problem was simple and effective. They made the people who packed the chutes go parachuting with randomly chosen chutes that they, or their coworkers, had packed. Guess what happened? Deaths from improperly packed chutes dropped to 0%! Applying this scenario to our own industry, the only effective way to guarantee that we won't screw up a project is to hold us financially accountable for any mistakes on press. YIPPEE.... I LOVE MY JOB, I LOVE MY JOB!

Sadly, only perfection will silence the vindictive voices of our critics, which is why I keep my resume up to date and drink like a fish.

To view similar thoughts on this fascinating and infuriating subject, please see the thread below.
http://printplanet.com/forums/manag...-discussion/15387-prepress-mistakes#post94499

 

[pworlledge]

How much do you let your customers drive you? They send in files poorly, hold on to proofs a long time, want alts done and to ok a new proof, and still want the due date met. I have to put a lot of resources into getting a job on press in the required time to meet the due date. Other jobs then may sit too long. This certainly adds to the chaos but isn't anything any of you experience. How does your people handle this?

 

[Tom_print]

Yeah of cause there are going to be mistakes here and there,, but when it gets to the point we are seeing it's just a great waste of time and money, due to someones lack of quality control.....
If a press man was to leave wheels in the print area and it marked , or have scumming up or a lack of colour control or a wrong PMS colour printed constantly they would have their ass kicked,, some of which are all easy things to do if your not paying close attention to the job.

Maybee pre press don't understand how frustrating it is to have to have to reprint a job or wash up and take the job of and have to put it on agian later that day, and still be expected to get all that days work done..

Pworlledge:
I feel our company lets the clients drive us to much,, As far as I'm concerned for a business to operate smoothly it needs guidelines and one main one I fell we let clients break constantly is the due by date the jobs needed,, this I feel should be altered if a client holds off on signing the proof off.. not lets drop everything to rush a job through because a client has mucked around pre press,,,

 

[David Dodd]

The answer to your question begins with Lean Manufacturing. Check out the new area of the forum on this topic. Standard Work is an amazing yet simple tool.

I completely agree with GiveUsPDF's. This topic would be very appropriate for the Lean Manufacturing forum. I also completely agree that Standard Work (one of the principal techniques used in lean) can be a powerful tool for reducing mistakes (defects). For those of you who haven't read any of the posts at the lean manufacturing forum, the ultimate objective of lean is the elimination of waste from all business operations. Lean defines waste as any activity or condition that consumes resources but creates no value for customers. Mistakes (wherever they occur) make it necessary to correct defective work, and the time, effort, and money spent to correct defective work is waste.

MGB_LE and Luc St-Pierre have also made a very critical point. In a lean organization, the objective is not only to identify or "catch" mistakes or defects but to determine what caused the mistake to occur and then to eliminate that problem. If you don't find the root cause of the mistate or defect and eliminate the cause, the mistake will just occur again.

One final thought. It is all too easy to blame individual employees for mistakes or defective work. Sometimes, of course, mistakes do result from inattention or oversight. But, more times than not, the fault is with the process used. So, if you're dealing with defective output, look first to improving the process that produced the defects.

If anyone has other thoughts or questions on topics such as this, please consider posting them in the Lean Manufacturing forum as well as this one. Some of the responses may give you a somewhat different perspective.

 

[Mark]

More crap files coming in and being pushed through without the customer really looking at the proofs.(or not even wanting them!!)
Gee I wonder why anything ever has an error.

 

[prepressguru]

Excellent post! Yes this industry is way to wound up and it would be nice to have a light view of itself.

Your shute is ready! =)

"Does your prepress department/plant make a lot of mistakes? If so what drives it?"

I think I can answer that question... IT'S CALLED BEING HUMAN!!!! AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!

As a prepress supervisor struggling with this issue, I once asked my "superiors" a simple question. If I could accurately measure all of the mistakes made in prepress and reduce them to 1%, would that be good enough? They looked at me like I was nuts and didn't know what to say. Finally, the owner piped up and gave me an honest, yet narrow-minded, response. "As long as my jobs aren't the 1%." he sneered.

At that point I realized that no matter what I did to improve quality control in my department, nobody would look at the 99% efficiency. They would only see the one time somebody forgot to overprint a dieline while ripping their pocket folder. (Purely an example... I would never do anything that stupid... really.)

At what point did our industry become so intolerant of imperfection? Brain surgeons don't live under this kind of stress. If they accidentally leave a sponge in my skull, the doctor simply tells me something like this... "Well son, the surgery went pretty well, but we're gonna need to do a little "follow up" procedure and clean out some debris. Nothin' to worry about, plus your insurance will cover it. Hell, I'm late for tee time... take some aspirin and I'll see you next week."

I've been saying this for a few years, and people around me laugh, but if things don't start to lighten up, I'm not going to start working on a project without my attorney present. Already, I document my every move, and make copies of the job ticket so I can prove that the production manager changed the layout on me AFTER turning the ticket into prepress.

Here's where we are headed. Better pour yourself a drink. Back in WWII the US army had a big problem with parachutes not opening and soldiers were plunging to their deaths like human lawn darts all over Europe. The solution to this problem was simple and effective. They made the people who packed the chutes go parachuting with randomly chosen chutes that they, or their coworkers, had packed. Guess what happened? Deaths from improperly packed chutes dropped to 0%! Applying this scenario to our own industry, the only effective way to guarantee that we won't screw up a project is to hold us financially accountable for any mistakes on press. YIPPEE.... I LOVE MY JOB, I LOVE MY JOB!

Sadly, only perfection will silence the vindictive voices of our critics, which is why I keep my resume up to date and drink like a fish.

To view similar thoughts on this fascinating and infuriating subject, please see the thread below.
http://printplanet.com/forums/manag...-discussion/15387-prepress-mistakes#post94499

 

[prepressguru]

Hi Jon I would really like to see this checklist. More so for production/planning department. I'm in prepress and the attitude is that all mistakes happen here, but I have tried to point out we are mostly victims of production's poor docket information.

Thanks!

Hi pworlledge,

There is a tool we use in every department that helps us reduce errors...a job checklist. It's all on one sheet, broken down by department starting with job planning, then prepress, then press, etc. and is included with every job.

It's ever changing and we add and/or remove checklist items as are deemed necessary.

Something else you could do (if you aren't already) is to track the errors/mistakes. From this you can brainstorm ideas on how to reduce or eliminate the bigger errors/problems.

Cheers,
Jon Morgan
Hopkins Printing

 

[prepressprinting]

The best thing to do is to break down each and every file that is in that page that why we ask for the native files and if they're not availbale I break the pdf into pieces just to make sure and there is a way to do it in Illustartor, from photoshop make sure it's tiff cmyk (if you're running process) in 300 dpi not more because you'll be wasting your mb for nothing, check the illustrator files make sure all fonts are to outline(the safest way), check the black overprints, bleeds etc... all that before you make your final pdf, believe me works like a charm and the pressman will love you. and that's how you do it, forget softwares that does the job for you, do it yourself.
Old school sometimes is the best.
Cheers

 

[pworlledge]

Hi Jon I would really like to see this checklist. More so for production/planning department. I'm in prepress and the attitude is that all mistakes happen here, but I have tried to point out we are mostly victims of production's poor docket information.

Thanks!

I do have to say this is a big place to start for us. Our job tickets coming in are laden with errors! Thanks for all the input here! Keep it coming. This is a good read. I will also look at the lean manufacturing part too.

I do agree with having standards and hoding customers to them but our industry is a tough one. We can be busy but our competitor isn't therefore he can get the proofs out immediately. He can get it on the press quicker etc. Therefore that becomes the benchmark we have to achieve, or at least the customer perceives he wants us to achieve.

 

[cepsdave1]

So it sounds like, we should get rid of the middleman. Because nothing was wrong with the job from the time it came in to when it went out to the customer?

 

[sadonovan1]

I am a pre-press mgr. for a mid sized commercial printer.
We dont have a sales dept., we deal with brokers who come to us with jobs.
Quark, InDesign, pdfs., Publisher, Word, Powerpoint, Excel...., even 1 job that was done in Greeting Card Designer, (Thats a whole nother story unto itself!).

Anyway, anytime a job gets to press and is bad, or even worse, gets to the customer and is bad. Right from the start its the pre-press depts. fault.

Yes, I will admit we make mistakes. We do approximately 8,000 to 10,000 jobs a year.
Approx. 20% of our work is traditional old school pre-press, camera, film, shoot, and strip, 10% are exact repeats where we just pull the old negs (remember those?), and burn them, but about 70% is electronic pre-press.
We employ 3 in the electronic side of pre-press, and 1 in the traditional side.

Yes, we do the sign off sheets, the checklists, and we even have a QC guy too.
But there is just no way around mistakes. We are human, we miss things.
Part of the problem stems from the fact of the crappy files we receive, "Suzy Secretary doing 4 color process, 40 page books in Word", or "Marty the IT guy at my company did this job in Powerpoint".
Part of it goes to the person who OKs the proof, when they want a proof at all!
Id also say 20% of the time, all we get is a file, nothing to follow from the salesperson/designer, etc. to compare our proof too.
We even send out proofs, the proof is OKd, it gets printed, the customer receives it, and complains about a problem on the proof they OKd.
Is that the fault of pre-press?

There are SO many areas in printing that things can go wrong.
Sales people, Order Entry, Order Write Up, Pre-press, Plating, Press, and Bindery. But it seems like pre-press gets blamed if it has anything is wrong before it gets to the bindery, but even then we are not immune (crossovers, folds, etc.).
Alot of these problems can and should be caught in the office! How many colors, how many pages, overall size, etc.?
Alot of the time we call the salesperson with questions, and their reply is to "Follow the file!". OK, we follow the file and its wrong! So at that point is it the fault of pre-press or some lazy ass sales dork who cant do his job? In my 23 year career, its never the sales persons fault, its always pre-press.

Yes you can do checklists, sign off sheets, and QC people.
They will help. But they are not the be all and end all.
They will let you know who is the problem, and what the problem is.

So many new pre-press people only know how to "use" the programs.
They dont know PMS/CMYK/RGB.
They dont know trapping.
They dont know vector/raster.

They only way to achieve fewer mistakes, is to have people who know what they are doing, and what to look for.

OK, Ill get off my soapbox now, and wrap this up.
Later all.