Ok..

As the manager of our digital print department, I think I have felt all the pains that a print on demand type of business can dish out at one time or another. Still feeling some of them. I am curious to hear what are you biggest pains that you struggle with everyday.

Is it your schedule work to and having it change every hour?
Is it the color consistency from month to month?
Is it the impossible demands?
Is it the education of you sales or customer service people?
........

Or is everything just run smooth everyday?

What is your number one cause of reprints or missed deliveries?

How do you handle scheduling your jobs when you have many machines and many jobs? Are you using a software to schedule or are you using a workflow such as FreeFlow or Prinergy? How is that working for you?

Can you share some of your experiences with us?

THanks!


Dale Zahnke

I think the biggest challenge is scheduling the work appropriately. There are so many factors that go into scheduling that traditional offset doesn't have to worry about.

Due date, quality expectation, paper stock, paper size, spot color matching

Then there are the standard scheduling challenges

file prep, paper order or in stock, finishing scheduled, cutting pre and post press, proofing, etc

As long as we calibrate the presses, they are consistence month to month, and don't have to worry about color consistency.

We don't have to worry about front to back registration anymore either

Sales education was a challenge at the start, but having a digital press analogous to offset in quality and gamut makes that much easier.

The due date demands are usually the toughest part since we are typically less then 24 hour turn these days from proof to print (if we even do a proof)

Number one cause of reprints is human error. Usually programming mistakes not caught before production of VDP work.

We do everything through prinergy and are using JDF / JMF to drive the Nexpress from Prinegy. Time will tell how well this works, but it should eliminate a lot of the human error factor as well as help with the scheduling and status updates for jobs back to MIS.

Thanks for the honest feedback. I have felt all those pains..

What checks and balances do you have for checking to be sure programming is correct and all your variable jobs are correct. Do you use a checklist? DO you us a proof reader? Do you have someone else check the finish piece or data. What about issues like longest lines or truncated text do you have fail safes in place?

What are your thoughts on Prinergy? I am considering.. Do you use it as it is intended integrating Traditional print, Digital print and your Mis Systems? From what I pick up from most is that they only use like 20% of it's capabilities either by engorance, lack of commitment or they just don't know better. Is JDF being used through your company and how is that working out?

Thanks as always for your feedback. I just wish we could get more to participate..

Dale Zahnke

Yeah, no kidding, hopefully more will participate.

JDF is tough, but doable.

We try to have as much proofing and signoff as possible. VI programming is tough, and Kodak is working hard to make some of the challenges easier in future stuff that they showed at Drupa.

Getting VDP work to use JDF is even tougher, but not impossible. Kodak actually does have a working solution using Storefront and iVDP through Prinergy to Nexpress. Completely lights out, but with options for stopping and proofing both hard and soft proofing.

We do all kinds of different testing for VDP work, just depends on the complexity and repeatablity of the work. If its a one off job, the print run is all that matters, but if its something that repeats, we focus on workflow and automation of those tasks. We certainly aren't where we want to be but we get things done.

Our goal for the end of the year is fully utilize JDF from start of a job through JMF and JDF Audit to completion of job where JDF and JMF and/or JDF Audit can be generated from the devices / servers in the workflow process.

Its a tough challenge, but we will see how it goes.