We’re throwing away too much paper – as offcuts, and as spoiled sheets on the press and in the bindery. How can we reduce it?

There can be some very obvious areas of materials waste. Sometimes Vision in Print’s (ViP) engineers go into a printer’s facility where there are problems in their warehouse – maybe space is tight and stock is getting damaged by forklifts or pallet trucks as they manoeuvre. Perhaps there’s damp or a leaky roof, or the warehouse isn’t temperature-controlled and the paper ends up being damaged by environmental conditions. Sometimes pallets are the problem, a broken pallet can cause a lot of damage if a stock of work slides off it.

But material waste can come from all stages of the production chain, not just storage. On the buying side, it could be a case of looking at the size of stock purchased and the amount of offcuts. The pre-press department, the estimators and the materials buyer if there is one, should work together to calculate how to maximise on-press impositions and reduce trim. On the press, makereadies can be a major waste factor, so we look at how to optimise that process.

ViP offers a five-day material waste reduction programme that works with representatives from every part of the printer’s operation. A typical team, facilitated by a ViP engineer, would include an estimator, a materials buyer, a pre-press worker, a press operator, a bindery operator, and a warehouse person. They map out the process from receipt of order to despatch and identify all the causes of waste in the internal supply chain.

The team will then examine how to quantify the waste and, following that, identify where the biggest areas of waste are. After the first day, they then spend four weeks of ordinary working time starting to collect data on waste. Then follows a four-day period of working with the biggest waste-generating issues, bringing in lean manufacturing techniques and hands-on practical measures wherever possible to reduce levels of waste.

Dan Sherwen

---

One of our customers wants to give us a lot more work. While it would be great in some ways, it means they would account for 30% of our current workload. How can we protect ourselves if they withdraw the work in the future?

This is a very complex question, and one which hundreds of printers face each year.

In the first place, you need to assess the level of risk there is of losing the business. Is the service you are providing a strategic one to the customer – in other words, is the product you’re supplying a core item to their business? And is yours’ a sufficiently specialist service that they would struggle to place the business elsewhere? If the answer to both those questions is no, then it might be too risky to take that percentage of business from them.

But if you decide you do want to take it on – and there’s an argument to say that if 30% of your business is for one customer, that gives you an automatic specialism in their area – then it’s a question of developing a relationship with them in which you really get to grips with their individual requirements, and so provide them with some very good reasons not to stray elsewhere.

Foresighted printers are moving towards a business model of having fewer, deeper relationships with their clients because they are more profitable than more relationships of a simply transactional nature. Once you have a good understanding of that customer’s requirements, you can leverage that and develop other customers in their field – another way of spreading the risk.

If you don’t want to go down that specialist route, another approach would be to increase the business you do with other clients to boost your turnover and make that 30% a lesser proportion of your business. This is not a strategy that will have any meaningful results in the short-term, however: it could take years to build up enough sustainable business to balance this proportion.

Tim Wilkinson

---

I’m sure I have read somewhere about a machine that can print 4/4 and foil, or am I going mad? I want to print 4/4 plus foil with hologram and fancy doing it all in one process to save money.

You’re not going mad. There are three inline foiling units on the market now – basically, they’re devices that take up two units of the press, with the first unit printing a pattern of cold glue using an ordinary offset plate, and the second unit laying foil over the top of it, with a rewind that takes up the unused foil. The units are made by OFT Technologies (Foiltone), Heidelberg (FoilStar) and MAN Roland (InlineFoiler Prindor), and to date there has been a total of around thirty UK installations of the units, usually on B1 sheetfed presses, although they are also available for B2 machines. Komori, Mitsubishi and KBA operate OEM agreements with OFT, so inline foilers are also available for these presses.

The devices usually lay down a silver foil, which is then printed onto by the successive units (for this reason, the device is usually mounted on a six-colour machine). The foil shows through the ink on top, giving a wide range of (what look like) foil colours.

The problem with the job you describe is that none of the machines currently offer the facility to index the foil to the sheet, which is necessary if you’re putting a single hologrammatic image down. The foil is pulled through on a like-for-like ratio, so if you’re only foiling a small area on each sheet there’s a lot of waste. If your foil area is small, the savings you make in single-pass production can often be less than the money you spend on unused foil: you might be better off keeping the job off-press on a platen or cylinder.

Barney Cox