Has Your Pressroom Outgrown its Current Colour Control Solution?

Why You Need Colour Quality Management In Print?

Print buyers and Brand owners are requiring continuous improvement in colour quality as they look to maintain their brand identity with unique design and colours across product lines. Differentiation is key to brands and they are pressuring printers to produce their work with extreme consistency and accuracy in colour.

Printers are being asked to prove their accuracy over a job run by providing detailed reports that shows the printed results within the agreed set of tolerances. Achieving colour predictability and repeatability through a print process requires more than having the best press operators.

To maintain colour within the customer’s specification, with consistency, run to run and job to job, whilst keeping and eye on waste and productivity requires a high level of care. It is not impossible, but there should be a plan to implement best practices in the press room.

Has your press room outgrown its current colour control solution?

We have identified key areas for you to look at in order to answer the above.

• Printers complain that it is difficult to maintain consistency over a press run and across multiple presses
• Too much time is lost with Make Ready trying to get the colour right
• There are many customer complaints that the printed package is not within their colour tolerance or specification
• Brand owners and print buyers are starting to ask for reports to prove their job was run within tolerance or to 'spec'
• The current colour measurement devices and reporting mechanisms cannot provide what your customer is asking for
• The measurement devices being used are at ‘end of life’ - cannot be serviced, supported or recertified
• When questions are raised about why one press or one press operator is better or worse than another it is difficult to provide any hard data to prove why or what or where the problems are
• If your business has grown through mergers or take overs and you now have multiple sites, each site might have different ideas, goals and colour control tools - this reduces your ability to provide uniform reports with centralised targets and standards

How can you plan to implement Best Practice Colour Quality Management in Print?

You have high expectations and you need change now! Implementing new procedures, with training requires a culture change and should be driven from the top down (From senior management to the workers on the shop floor).

Once you have team ‘buy in’ with best practices, your colour control procedures will be easier to ‘grow’ and will become useful to the press room staff and all stake holders (Management, Production, Quality Dept, Supervisors, Press Operators, Sales staff, Customer Service, etc).

Everyone is then aware of the correct goals for customer expectations. Quality measurement in print and reporting will aid in identifying issues and problems that can nipped in bud before they become out of control. 

Where to start?

• 
  You will need to review your current and complete colour and print quality procedures and processes. This may require a bit of background work and there could be parts of the workflow and reporting that can be used with your new solution
• Do a study to find out currently what works and what does not. If you have multiple locations software in the ‘Cloud’ with Analytics will be required
• What users or staff currently participate in the quality in print process? Who else should be included in the new solution? What are their needs? It is likely this will mean new and extra work for some staff. You will need to carefully manage the introduction and usage of any new ‘solution’ so that it is effective and gets used properly.
• Create a vision of what your 'perfect' quality in print process would look like. You then might need to step back from colour perfection to production reality. There is limitations and constraints in any print production process. Therefore you cannot set tolerances too tight or too low. Do not be afraid to reach out and speak with trusted industry colleagues and suppliers to see what can be provided and what is available. In your vision who would be included, what integration is required and what are your reporting requirements?
• Your new solution will require a plan with a time line for implementation and 'deliverables'. Secure support from top level management to ensure funding and buy in throughout the organisation.

To realise the full benefits of printer calibration and printer colour management please contact us at info@colourgraphicservices.com