Benefiting from an Automated Prepress

There’s no question that print shop providers (PSPs) are turning around jobs faster, often in smaller quantities, and with no less demands on quality. A great part of ensuring that effort happens in prepress. The good news is that the application of standards, such as SWOP and GRACoL, in some shops, has reduced surprises and eliminated major hiccups during the prepress process.

“The standardization of these printing applications coupled with modern PDF workflows has achieved the goals that were originally stated 20 years ago,” said Marc Welch, GMG director of strategic accounts.

There’s more good news: Prepress in many shops is now working more closely with the pressroom in the press fingerprinting, calibration, and profiling processes, to ensure the press is set up in a repeatable state, and that files are built or converted to match the press capability, noted Ray Cheydleur, printing and imaging product portfolio manager, X-rite. “This includes G7 calibration and ICC profiles for conversion from reference print conditions that also improve the press-to-proof matching,” he added. “As printing and packaging operations increasingly put automation, standard operating procedures, and statistical process control solutions in place, prepress can be the center of excellence and problem solve when issues arise.”

“Resources are always a challenge in prepress departments and because of this projects can take more time — and there are higher error rates that cannot always be charged back to the client,” said Graham Banks, director, business operations North America, Dalim Software. “These challenges are not related to available technology, but in the investment in people (training), process, and technology.”

Still, there are printers that are investing in technology, that that allow closer collaboration systems with their customers. “If a system is put in place that allows the customer to approve a file as it compares to the preflighted version, there can be fewer human touch points within their facility,” said Banks. “If the customer can visually approve the proof, for content and color accuracy when done, then all the printer has to do is reproduce that on the press. Once the customer sends an approved file, the printer will print, in an almost ‘lights out’ environment. We have a large printer customer who uploads content and sends it to the brand owner to approve content and color. If approved, the obligation is on them to print exactly what was approved.”

Efficient printers look at the whole system, and how prepress impacts the whole system. “They look at prepress as a cost basis, not just as an individual silo,” explained Dr. Mark Bohan, director, Prinect & CtP, Heidelberg USA, Inc

Heidelberg doesn’t consider Prinect a prepress workflow; it sits as a business intelligence platform with components of prepress, and leverages its strengths — its connectivity to the whole system, connecting seamlessly to CSR, through to production, press, and invoicing, said Bohan.

“We are looking to standardize and utilize automation to drive jobs through the process in a touch-less manager, or at least minimize the amount of steps,” said Bohan. “If we can minimize number of steps, we can minimize errors while also impacting (positively) downstream activities.”

Where are the standards?

Unfortunately, not all shops implement standards.

“If the printing application is less standardized, such as packaging with spot colors, then the prepress process has the traditional problems of long make-readies, inability to match a proof or previously printed package, and other unplanned issues that can cause problems on press,” said Welch.

This packaging scenario is far from atypical: within the commercial print and wide format vertical there’s still a lot of the prepress operation that happens manually and doesn’t benefit from an automated environment and its benefits: quicker turnaround, higher quality, less mistakes, and less waste.

Typically, the problems that plague shops are the persistence of manual activities that hamper the end result and are error prone. One major ongoing headache — some might say migraine — is clients’ PDF files that are far off the mark from being print ready.

“PSPs are fighting to stay alive and are willing to accept just about anything to make money,” remarked Fabian Prudhomme, Enfocus vice president and global sales & marketing director. “In 2008, there were close to 32,000 printers in the U.S.; today, there are about 18,000. The quality of the PDF file in many instances is not up to par; it’s the same issue as 20 years ago, and the reason why PitStop was created 20 years ago. Nothing has changed.”

 The challenge for many prepress operations is to implement more automation so they are handling exceptions rather than repetitive tasks. The work you handle day in, day out, is a great use of automated systems, which can easily handle preflighting, color management, trapping, among others, reducing touch points.

Automated prepress systems, such as Esko’s Automation Engine, can also tie into other systems via cross-platform integration, like MIS, digital storefronts, and asset management systems. “The distances we need to span today to communicate and collaborate with manufacturing, marketing, legal, and the different business partners for ongoing production is more demanding and diverse than 25 years ago,” described Larry Moore, Esko’s vice president, North America. “It’s nothing for a brand owner in New York City to communicate with a printer in South Carolina and a manufacturer in China.”

Automated systems also help reduce labor within the prepress area. The fact is, with automation there is less work for the prepress department to do, while gaining speed and consistency, said Banks. “More and more work is done by the content originator, with the expectation of print at a lower cost,” added Banks. “This is why many printing companies are creating more collaborative portals (like Dalim’s online collaboration tools) in which to work on print projects and force/encourage their customer to upload/preflight and ultimately approve content in a lights-out operation.”

However, some print shops are reluctant to make the capital investment in software, instead looking only to hardware. One Enfocus customer in China had 40 people manually checking PDF files, Prudhomme revealed. “The printer had no problem investing $1 million in a new press, but wasn’t doing anything at all about prepress. He finally saw the light at the end of tunnel, replaced 40 workers with PitStop, and was able to reduce his labor force by 12-14%.”

The color fix

Given cross-channel proliferation, the ability to control color appearance across so many platforms can be difficult. “All too often, prepress departments need to prepare files to match art that will be printed both digitally and with conventional print methods — but can’t do it due to deficiencies in practices,” noted Moore.

There is a demand from our customers to be able to replicate images consistently across many different print formats, acknowledged Moore. “Introducing Esko Equinox for expanded gamut printing is a great way to assure that flexo color meets digital color,” he added. “Also, Esko’s HD Flexo offerings make it possible to fully match flexo image quality with that coming from the digital press. These tools have been developed to bridge the gap between processes.”

“The diversity of choice in today’s print market has made the problem of color consistency more significant,” echoed Welch. “It’s difficult to assure that an offset pressroom is consistent every day. It is even much harder to create this consistency when you mix digital or flexo printing methods into the mix. Process control is the key factor of success today (regardless of the print method used). Good process control systems monitor all of the factors that create non-compliant work (ie: substrate consistency, ink formulation, proof to press match, standards compliance, etc). Color consistency is a byproduct of process control. Profitability is often a byproduct of process control, as well.

GMG and Measure Color have now connected prepress and pressroom process control together in a way that uses process control spectral measurement data to improve the press and proof quality, Welch said. “This technology can eliminate fingerprinting entirely and replace it with a direct connection of real time press performance data and the color prepress process. This connection is done with CXF or CGATS data interchange that enables anyone to connect easily. This is just one example of what we should expect in all future prepress systems. Interconnecting all of the process components is part of breaking down traditional silo-based work methods. If your process control systems and prepress color tools do not connect today, they will likely evolve to remedy this or face replacement in the future.”

Color consistency issues across devices or jobs could be the result of how the color is initially specified, remarked Cheydleur. “When a brand owner or print buyer uses spectral values to specify a color, the process is much more efficient,” he said. “Then prepress can validate proof accuracy using a spectrophotometer rather than relying on comparing the proof to a color swatch (which could be faded or damaged) or even a customer-submitted proof.

“Prepress is also working more closely with the customer to ensure that color is specified in a way that is understandable, and that the specified colors are actually achievable on the target substrate and with the printing technology that will be used,” said Cheydleur. PantoneLIVE Visualizer, a new software tool released in December of last year that helps graphic designers, brands, and print suppliers better compare, evaluate, and visualize colors across multiple substrates and printing technologies.

Meeting mounting challenges

Prepress, like the rest of the print shop, is challenged as jobs become smaller and turnaround times also shrink.

More and more jobs are coming in through the web portal; often these are “commodity” jobs requiring little finesse and barely any margin. To ensure the job is done quickly and accurately, your web-to-print solution needs to integrated with an automated prepress solution.

“A lot of web-to-print solutions are not tied into an automated prepress workflow,” said Prudhomme.  “We have evangelicized that you have to have the web-to-print solution tied in to automated prepress workflow, so there is no manual intervention. If you have a W2P portal without automated prepress system you are only halfway there. It’s like having the façade of your house look good, without electricity or hot water.”

One Enfocus customer is the largest commercial printer in India prints books for Amazon, Prudhomme reported. They don’t keep any inventory; any book you order on Amazon is printed on demand, and shipped within four hours of the order coming in. “They print hundreds of books a day,” he said. The end destination will determine whether or not the books are glued or stitched – India gets different finishing than the U.S. Covers are also different, depending on where the book ends up.

Enfocus’ Switch was bought for this purchase, so as you factor in all of these variables it is automatically pushed through the correct workflow. The entire process is data-driven; if the book is going to the U.S., then it gets stitched, a hard cover, and a thick back. If it’s going to India, it gets an entirely different set of conditions.

At a recent Heidelberg open house in Kennesaw, GA, printers saw firsthand how the entire process, including prepress, can be automated.

In one demo, the file was uploaded via a portal, preflighted with no manual interaction, and sent to CtP within one minute — because all the steps had been automated. While this isn’t possible for every job, simple or commodity jobs that come through Prinect can be processed extremely fast and efficiently, while more complex, creative jobs utilize staff to the full of their capability.

It’s important to understand that there won’t be one type of workflow for every job that comes through your shop. “You have to understand your business mix and define your workflows from that,” Bohan said. “The same workflow and structure may not work for every customer — some might have commodity work, others highly creative — with press checks, corrections, collaborative — so you’ll need a different workflow. You can’t apply that type of workflow to commodity products or you will lose money.”

And if you try to apply a commodity workflow to one that requires more attention, chances are you’ll lose clients.

The upshot. “You can spend a lot of time, money, and effort to have someone open up the files and check them, fix them if they need fixing, or maybe send them back to the graphic provider,” Prudhomme admonished. “Or you find a way to automate this process. It’s a no-brainer to stop having people waste time to do it manually.”