A moderately edited version of this piece originally appeared in the NAPL's Special Report "Path to Progress, a Workflow Special Report", published October 2008, beginning on Page 3.
This is the original manuscript.
By Chuck Gehman
"Long gone are the days when people believed ideas such as Computer-Integrated Manufacturing were not applicable to printing."
The concept of the Digital Smart Factory has become mainstream. As we rapidly approach 2009, it is a good time to take a quick look back, take stock of where we are now, and think about where we are headed. For those not well acquainted with the DSF concept, it’s about applying computers and software in an integrated, end-to-end solution, to address problems facing the printing operation; with the specific goal of making printing companies more efficient: customer-facing web applications, business systems and manufacturing systems. There is a broad range of technology, as well as process methodology, that fall under the umbrella of the Digital Smart Factory.
Long gone, thankfully, are the days when people actually believed that ideas like Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) weren’t applicable to printing. Instead, we now have venerable industry associations leading the charge for Lean manufacturing, embracing “green” concepts, and advocating high-tech solutions like VDP, ERP systems and Web-To-Print. Clearly, the R+E Council of the NAPL and its role in establishing the importance of the Digital Smart Factory, has had a major impact on the industry.
More than a handful of very successful printing companies have proven that there is a business case for making the transition from craft-oriented job shop to efficient, high tech, well-run, and scalable print manufacturing enterprise. This Digital Smart Factory idea—¬that was so foreign for so long— is¬ the direction leaders want to take their printing companies today.
As a reminder, Digital Printing is not the entire focus of the Digital Smart Factory. Adopters often employ multiple printing technologies, today including toner-based, inkjet and, of course, both sheetfed and web offset. Virtually any shape and size of printing operation can benefit from DSF concepts and the application of its technologies.
When we first began the DSF, print-on-demand was a far-out idea. Makereadies took 45 minutes. There was no E-Bay or Craig’s List. Energy costs were low. Phone companies charged by the minute for long distance. A mobile phone cost $800 and had a battery that weighed more than your laptop does now. You had to buy two Indigos for $1 million and have a technician on-site to fix them. A lot of printers still used film! Today? Print-on-demand is ubiquitous. Makereadies can take under 2 minutes! Craig’s list dominates classified advertising. Gas is $5.00 per gallon. Long distance is “free”, and so are mobile phones. You only have to buy one Indigo now, and it is reliable! Film? What’s Film?
Between then and now, those printers who are still around discovered that the way to cope with the changing business environment was to adopt new business and production processes. The industry has embraced the transformation from “Job Shop” to “Manufacturing”. Mass Customization can legitimately be used to describe the type of manufacturing being done in our industry
Today, there are many printers using manufacturing techniques, CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) processes, in conjunction with automated equipment and technologies like JDF (Job Definition Format) that can deliver immediate and recognizable benefits from streamlined operation for companies that produce a wide variety of jobs.
The transition to manufacturing discipline helps printers to identify opportunities for optimization and understand which product types they can most efficiently produce. They can then focus business assets on developing sales and marketing strategies that target specific customers with more attractive offerings.
There are still many hurdles to overcome, and many challenges that still exist. Although many printers have adopted CIM techniques, there are many unique attributes that characterize print production that are absent from many other types of manufacturing operations. To a large extent, this explains the necessity of CIP4’s JDF format. But it also requires even more discipline in applying CIM techniques of any type, to maximize the benefits that can be gained.
Whither Specialization?
The idea of specialization has been a path to success for many printers, and isn’t new. But the drumbeat we hear today is more about “diversification” and adding services: becoming a “marketing communication service provider.” But whether you choose to focus on a particular market, or go “horizontal”, you can benefit from specialization in manufacturing. Specialization can remove a lot of complexity from an operation. Single-use machines require fewer changeovers and less or no wrench-turning, for example. It can decrease requirements for staff training, or even for temporary labor to fill peaks and valleys, and for unique, expensive skill sets. A great example of the benefits of specialization is that you may not need new JDF-enabled equipment and software if your company only produces a limited range of products — in other words, you operate a specialized manufacturing environment.
Specialization can help you sell more effectively. Once you’ve determined what your optimal product mix is from a manufacturing perspective, you can target specific vertical markets. You can more easily sell value-added services by creating a product portfolio across one or more client industries. Implementing this kind of product strategy will, however, require that you put other resources in place beyond an efficient manufacturing operation. These may include sales and marketing staffers, Web-To-Print systems and enhanced customer service capabilities, or adding services like fulfillment to round out the offering. This leads you into deploying programs that can be sold at higher margins than “bid to win” jobs, and may be replicated across multiple clients.
Roadmap to DSF
Automating inefficient processes simply solidifies them and makes them more difficult to improve and change. This is what happens when you drop a new piece of equipment or computer system into an existing operation without a carefully crafted strategy. Before you can benefit from equipment, computers and software, you first need take a number of steps to make your company ready for CIM:
• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in production.
• Identify and eliminate issues that impact quality, put processes in place to achieve the highest quality possible
• Standardize all steps from job intake through delivery
• Begin to automate certain operations, move toward “global” automation
There are a number of ways you can approach this streamlining exercise, with the key thing to remember being that you don’t have to do everything at once. Look for the most obviously cumbersome process. Ask a lot of questions, and get some quick wins under your belt. Don’t try to “boil the ocean.”
Quality Systems
ISO, TQM, Six Sigma are all methodologies from which you can choose to implement the steps described above. Which one you choose is dependent on a number of factors that could be unique to your operation, so it’s important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.
ISO 9000 (International Standards for Quality Management Systems) is a family of standards that is acknowledged worldwide. More than 90 countries have adopted ISO 9000 as their national standards. Many printing companies, of all shapes and sizes, have adopted various “flavors” of ISO.
Total Quality Management (TQM) was pioneered by manufacturing guru W. Edwards Deming as a way of improving the production quality of goods and services. This has become less popular with printing companies today, but there are still many practitioners.
Six Sigma is a quality improvement and business strategy that began in the 1980's at Motorola and is perhaps best known for its application at General Electric, where legendary CEO Jack Welch was a key proponent. The primary goal is to improve quality to the point that “defects” occur only 3.4 times out of a million. Six Sigma is viewed by many as overwhelmingly complicated and expensive, requiring specialized staff, but it can work for printing companies.
There is also a combination of Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma that some printing companies have implemented, called Lean Six.
Each of these methodologies, in addition to having direct benefits, provides marketing benefits for printing companies that deploy them. If you have large corporate enterprise customers, your choice of which to implement may be based (in part) on what they are using, because those customers tend to gravitate toward suppliers who are “compatible” in this area.
Just in Time and Lean Manufacturing
There are several manufacturing “philosophies” that can provide improvements. Lean is arguably the most popular, and in some ways easier to implement. Lean manufacturing’s primary goal is to identify and eliminate non-value added activities in design, production, supply chain management and customer interaction. It is one of the easiest ways to see immediate benefits in a printing operation. Its application in printing can be summarized as a critical view of the following areas, and the reduction, elimination or replacement by automation, of unnecessary activities or results in those areas:
• Material Waiting
• Movement of Inventory
• Movement of Personnel
• Equipment Waiting
• Personnel Waiting
• Overproduction
• Underproduction
• Performing extra steps
• Waste or Spoilage
The term “lean” was first coined by an MIT team, to describe the principles of the Toyota Production system (TPS). There are many books that discuss all the aspects of lean manufacturing and TPS, including Value-Stream Mapping, the concept of the 5S Method, Visual Control. Pull, Equipment Changeover (setup reduction), Mistake Proofing, and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) are also important concepts. My own book, Computer Integrated Manufacturing: Realizing the Benefits, published by the NAPL, can give you an overview of all of these topics.
If there were one reason to turn your own plant into a Digital Smart Factory and embrace CIM concepts, it might just be to eliminate mistakes that cause costly production errors. The cause of poor performance (in the view of lean), is wasteful activity. Lean is a time-based strategy and uses a narrow definition of waste activity as that which does not produce value from the perspective of the customer. An example often sited is moving work-in-progress from one side of the plant, to another (instead of situating production equipment in adjacencies that make sense for the workflow). Efficiency (and lower costs, and competitive advantage) is improved by focusing on converting raw materials into finished product as quickly as possible.
Waste, as described in the Lean view of the world is:
• Production errors
• Internal and external delays
• Unnecessary duplication of effort
• Unnecessary movement of digital information or physical materials
• Unclear and confusing internal and external communications
• Incorrect inventory of digital information or physical supplies
Customers become part of the manufacturing process
In today’s competitive environment, it isn’t enough anymore to focus solely on streamlining what happens inside the plant. Understanding that a lot of the problems in the print manufacturing process are caused by the customer participation in the process, because of customers delivering bad files in a variety of cumbersome digital file formats, Digital Smart Factory printers also focus technology efforts on reducing or eliminating these problems.
One approach to this problem is to limit customers’ selection of product types, and offer a limited selection of customizable attributes for those products. Using a Web-To-Print storefront, it is possible to provide a graphically rich, appealing set of choices that fit their specific needs and/or the vertical print-buying market that your company targets. This approach almost guarantees success, because you are completely controlling the input to manufacturing. However, it may be too rigid a structure for many customer relationships.
For relationships in which a large number of one-off projects take place, another approach to facilitating quality input from customers is to mandate the use of PDF and to provide templates and instructions for customers on how to produce a PDF file that the plant can use to drive manufacturing processes. PDF is still the best file format for printing, and provides great benefits. It lets many of the manual processes of preparing files for production be automated through software. Most printing company customers now know how to create a usable PDF file.
In the digital output world, many systems are either converting “office”-type documents into PDF at the entry to the workflow, or are helping customers to create usable PDF files with desktop print drivers or Acrobat Plug-ins. Similarly, offset workflow has moved to PDF, with native files from high-end designer applications being converted to PDF as they enter the workflow.
Deploying a Web-To-Print workflow has additional benefits for both the printing company and customers. Customers are impatient, and like the instant gratification that self-service on the web offers. They can also come back to the site to obtain job status, and shipping information once the job is completed. For printers, the obvious benefit of Web-To-Print is its ability to increase order flow, positively impacting top line revenue. But the ability to offload sales and customer service personnel to higher value activities beyond order-taking is also a key benefit. Web-based e-commerce can make getting paid easier, too, by accepting credit cards and/or by interfacing with customer e-procurement systems. Once the ready-to-print order has been paid for by the customer (another great advantage—getting paid before the job is even printed), it can be automatically scheduled for production. Like jobs can be optimized into print runs, and targeted at specific machines for the most efficient processing. In an ideal world, there’s no prepress or prep work necessary, especially for digital jobs.
Summary
The big difference between the Digital Smart Factory now, and many years ago at its inception, is that we’ve solved many of the problems that led to its ideation. But new challenges have arisen, and new solutions continue to evolve.
Join the many thousands of printing companies who have embraced the Digital Smart Factory, and you, too, can immediately start reaping the benefits. If you don’t know where to start, call the NAPL, or attending one of their many events throughout the year.
