Labor Doesn't Have to be Laborious
Two significant challenges are facing the print industry: Labor shortages and inefficiency. They are related, and there is a path to manage them, but it takes more than trying to find people to hire and tightening business and production workflows.
The industry needs a new approach to understanding business bottlenecks. It also needs innovation, powered by automation, that leverages available data to assign staff only where they are needed. It’s a tall order, but there are good reasons to consider changing how your business operates. Adding observational platforms can facilitate that change.
Labor shortages will not get better.
Unemployment numbers in the United States continue to improve, which might make you think we are out of the woods. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 4.2% unemployment rate for November 2021 as 210,000 jobs were filled, continuing the trending improvement. While that improvement is welcome, the impacts are not the same across every industry or type of worker.
Many professionals continued to work through the last two years because they moved from the office to home. Some left jobs that didn’t offer remote working options and found work in the 90,000 professional and business services jobs added in November 2021, along with 13,000 in financial services. Jobs in construction and manufacturing also increased in November but still lagged the February 2020 employment levels. Meanwhile, overall printing industry employment increased a mere 1% from September to October 2021.
The day-to-day reality for many business segments, including the printing industry, is constant labor challenges coming from every angle. Inflation and current market conditions continue pushing up the cost to hire. The lingering effects of the pandemic push workers to look for flexible hours, while others are pushed out of jobs as companies downsize to accommodate new business realities. Employment data shows that there are plenty of potential workers (roughly 14.5 million) disconnected from mainstream employment. They may look for work within an industry they know, move to gig work or start their own businesses.
Where does that leave print shops needing customer service workers, equipment operators, shipping/fulfillment clerks, salespeople, estimators and other critical roles? For many companies, the immediate focus is on shifting labor to cover production needs while scrambling to find new employees. It makes sense to review employee skillsets and leverage that talent where it is efficient and effective. Based on our years of print shop assessments, it is likely that your employees are not as effective as you think, because of the inefficiency built into your process. Observational platforms help remove the laborious processes from production based on a constant flow of data that allows supervisors to improve operations continuously.
Leverage technology to build efficiency.
Look at the examples of the largest corporations with massive labor requirements. Those companies continually optimize their processes by leveraging technology to identify the best use of available labor. You may see it where you shop. Walmart, Target and other retailers rolled out self-checkout kiosks to reduce reliance on cashiers, especially during periods of high traffic. Amazon uses robotics to augment warehouse staff. Some printing companies leverage industrial robots to transport paper to the shop floor and move work-in-process between stations. In each instance, technology stands in for people, allowing them to be deployed to more valuable work.
Companies are also removing labor from repetitive administrative and back-office processes using software “robots.” You may use autopay, repeat delivery and other options in managing your household. Printing companies can leverage similar automation within the business workflow to process data fed from production processes that ensure accurate billing. Whatever the method, companies are removing and augmenting labor in every facet of the business anticipating that some of the current labor challenges are likely here to stay.
Augmenting, shifting or eliminating labor requirements in a print environment where variables change from one job to the next is more complex than manufacturing industries like automotive that have less product and process variation. One key to finding labor gaps, bottlenecks and opportunities is observing, monitoring and measuring how the work flows through the shop.
Gathering shop floor data manually as part of print MIS activities traditionally provided the who, what, when and where data for each job. Machine operators and other team members were often tasked with noting job status as each element was completed. They might use spreadsheets, notepads or mobile apps, putting the burden on the staff to remember to capture the data at the right time in the right way. Any person or process using that data had to rely on an essentially unreliable data gathering process.
Today, more of that data is captured using a combination of equipment-logged machine data, sensors, software and occasional employee input. Collecting data is an observational event that forms the basis of modern observational platforms when paired with technology to automate the process. Combining data inputs in these observational platforms provides a more holistic picture of operations allowing supervisors to fix bottlenecks and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs).
What can observational platforms tell us?
- Number of processes
- Time on task
- Time between processes
- Process variances
- Labor variances
- Time variances
- Consumable usage (ink/toner, paper)
- Consumable variances
- Waste quantities
- Equipment performance metrics (speed, uptime)
- Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)
Modern Approaches to Observational Platforms for Print
Capturing information about the jobs, operators and processes interacting with the work as it goes through the print shop provides valuable and actionable intelligence that can improve operations and optimize the deployment of people. Observational platforms can highlight the sequential and non-sequential (e.g., proof correction) steps during job production and shine a light on the process variations that often impact job profitability.
This segment of the market is still maturing, with many vendors starting by offering dashboards specific to their product lines. Basic dashboards are the starting point for modern observational platforms. They combine available data and present it in a graphical format to provide fast insights into the current status. As far as they go, they are useful.
The reality is that dashboards are typically tied to a single vendor and may ignore the other activities and equipment used in today’s mixed vendor print shops. Luckily more vendors are starting to provide interfaces, like APIs, for PSPs to access and repurpose data into other software solutions. To create an optimal environment, look for observational platforms that provide an open interface to all hardware and processes.
Two Observational Platforms with Open Interfaces
Since 1989, SpencerLab Digital Color Laboratory has been testing and analyzing imaging and print products, developing an understanding of the data that lies beneath the surface. With the introduction of SpencerMetrics data collection and analytics solution in 2014, they launched into providing deeper insights from the data available on modern print platforms. In the summer of 2021, SpencerMetrics released JobHub, a new feature for their multi-vendor, mulit-technology LYNK and CONNECT solutions.
JobHub is a good example of applying an observational platform to the printing and packaging industries. It builds a map of each job production step, tracks the cost and resources for each step, flags issues and provides insight into whether that type of work can be produced more efficiently with other processes or equipment.
“We believe in helping print service providers find the right data out of the vast amount available so they can see the best actions to take to improve their operations and profitability continuously," said CEO David Spencer. "The SpencerMetrics platform uses edge computing and an IIoT platform to offer this in an easy-to-implement and easy-to-use package."
JobHub is in the class of observational platforms that adds analysis to data capture to help management better understand their true production costs. Like all observational platforms, it does require human insight to categorize and contextualize the information being collected. When the equipment reports downtime, what was the cause? A person needs to tell the system whether the lost time was due to equipment malfunction, an employee break or one of the many other potential causes. Most platforms, including print MIS solutions with shop floor data collection, take this human-centric approach to capture and categorize what happens on the production floor.
Some solutions take a machine-centric approach where sensor-equipped machines and machine learning through AI reduce the amount of input needed from operators. HP Indigo’s Auto Alert Agent 2.0 is one example of many in the industry, building intelligence into the equipment. This solution can detect, categorize and take corrective action for print defects, including automatic purging and reprinting defective sheets. It takes a mere 500 milliseconds from identification to purging, followed by a correction, to keep the equipment running efficiently. The result is better equipment productivity and efficient utilization of scarce labor hours.
“Our goal with features like Auto Alert Agent is to make the equipment smarter to reduce the reliance on the operator’s time and skillset so they can focus on higher-value tasks,” said Gershon Alon, head of HP PrintOS.
Observational platforms make your employees, management and print operations smarter, more efficient and productive, whether using the human or machine-centric approach. If the past two years indicate what is ahead in the printing industry, labor challenges will persist, forcing us to streamline and automate our processes freeing staff to perform their highest and best work.
