Posted on Thu, Sep 16, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
by Don Burns
One thing that’s become very clear over the last couple of years is that the digital inkjet revolution won’t be going anywhere without the right paper options.
Paper is simply too critical to be left as an afterthought.
For me, it’s almost an obsession. Because I’ve known for a long time that the Prosper 5000XL is the most important new printing press for many years. And I’ve also known that its revolutionary potential could easily be blunted if we failed to support it with a well-thought-out paper strategy.
For most printing businesses, paper strategy is business strategy.
If you use just a few papers, that points directly to a business model based on high volumes, high productivity, aggressive pricing, and operational efficiency. If you use dozens of different paper types, it will be because you are tackling many different types of work, probably for a wide range of customers. It will likely be your flexibility, your good customer service, your willingness to handle short runs, and your ability to offer buyers a choice of cost/quality trade-offs that will keep them coming back for more.
Most successful printers these days are committed to one or other of these business models – we could call the alternatives “throughput-based” and “service-based”. The middle ground between the two is an increasingly uncomfortable place to be, as you get squeezed from both ends. But what’s really exciting for me is the way the Prosper 5000XL offers new scope for both throughput experts and service specialists, plus a real opportunity for those who are stuck in the middle to make their strategic shifts towards more clearly defined business models.
It’s very fast. You can’t argue with 650 feet per minute. It produces offset-quality color images (up to 175lpi). Yet it has the built-in advantages of digital, too – the variable data capability, the low running costs and the potential to handle short runs without cost penalties. All that makes it the first real all-round printing press based on digital inkjet technology. It’s the first inkjet that offers a genuine opportunity to migrate offset jobs to digital without compromising speed, quality or economy.
With Kodak’s paper strategy providing great new optimized papers, a clear and practical four-diamond rating scheme to help in choosing the right stock, and the new in-line optimization module to allow printing on almost any paper, today’s printing revolutionaries have all the ammunition they need. What happens next is up to the individual company and the path it chooses to follow. But there won’t be many cases where “business as usual” is the recipe for success.
Posted on Mon, Sep 13, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
by Don Burns
To run a profitable printing business these days, you need the right skills, the right people, the right equipment, and the right business model.
I know printers who have staked their whole future on doing one kind of work and doing it well. Their focus is on throughput and productivity, operational excellence and ruthless efficiency.
They won’t chase marginal business and they won’t be lured into areas where they don’t have clear competitive advantages. So they’ll normally buy just two or three papers. They buy in bulk and get good deals from all their suppliers.
I know others whose approach is just the opposite. They’re not about economies of scale. With them, it’s all customer intimacy and flexible, personal service. Whatever paper the customer wants, they’ll have it or get it within hours, no problem. If that means working with a hundred different papers in the course of a year, that’s how they keep their customers coming back.
But we all know there are plenty of other printers who kind of fall in the middle. Not big and focused enough to rely on economies of scale, but not secure enough in a specialist service niche to meet the customer’s every whim. For them, the Prosper In-Line Optimization Station could be a really important part of Kodak’s new offering. Coupled with the quality and productivity of the Prosper 5000XL inkjet press, this optional, affordable module means they can get great results from different types and grades of paper.
The in-line module is built around a robust roll coating technology that allows the use of a wide range of water-based pre-treatment fluids, with different chemistries, viscosities and coat weights. Pre-treatment can be applied to all kinds of different paper surfaces, coated or uncoated, matte, silk, or glossy. Yet, from what I’ve seen of the results, it looks as if just four fluids will do the job for almost every paper.
I think this is really significant, in business terms, as it will let printers use the widest possible range of standard offset and commercial inkjet papers. It’s not the most glamorous side of the Prosper revolution, but in-line optimization is going to help a lot of Kodak customers compete and win profitable business, without having to invest in a warehouse full of different papers.
With the right fluid formulation, roll coating can be used successfully to treat almost any stock, including the papers you’d use for catalogs and magazines. And if you want my guess for the future, I expect we will even be treating non-porous, non-paper surfaces, as used in packaging and labels. That really would be broadening the business base for a lot of commercial printers.
Posted on Thu, Sep 09, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
by Don Burns
Inkjet printing can be confusing.
For a start, there are so many different options to choose from. With continuous inkjet and thermal or piezo drop-on-demand technologies, dye-based or pigment-based colorants and water-based, solvent-based, solid, or energy-cured fluids, that’s already 24 possible permutations of inkjet printing.
So when a printer asks the sensible, practical question: “Is this paper suitable for inkjet?”, the answer is never going to be straightforward.
It depends on the job, and it depends on the system. To get the best results, a drop-on-demand piezo inkjet using aqueous dyes needs a completely different kind of paper from a continuous inkjet system using aqueous pigment inks. No single paper is going to be universally successful for inkjet printing.
Even Kodak’s new Prosper 5000XL, with its proven ability to produce offset-quality images at very high speeds, can only deliver what the paper will allow.
Our Stream technology can indeed provide acceptable results with many standard offset papers – quite good enough for many customers’ needs in some applications. But the right inkjet-treated paper will always give better quality, so it is up to the customer to take the decision about what cost/quality balance is appropriate for a particular job.
To help customers get this right, Kodak has supported the Prosper launch with a new paper certification program. I’ve been involved in developing this and it’s not like anything else you’ve seen. For instance, it rates papers on a one-to-four-diamond scale, evaluating image quality using consistent metrics for optical density, strikethrough, raggedness, color-to-color bleed and mottle.
Instead of a binary pass/fail certification regime, our certification program will give printers a reliable guide to the tested paper’s performance in specific applications. Based on this, they can make the right choices from all the available stocks. They can simplify their logistics and supply chain management and bank on delivering high-quality service and predictably good results.
So far, we have built a database of over 3,000 paper tests. We assess the papers on a four-diamond scale and even make the raw data available, so printers can see the trade-offs between different attributes that led to the rating for a particular paper.
It’s all part of the big, broad view we’re taking of the digital revolution. With offset, quality control is typically the responsibility of the skilled pressman. With digital inkjet, it’s mainly the OEM and writing systems that take on that responsibility. But paper selection is one of the key variables that affects quality. The more we can simplify the total system, eliminate confusion and produce reliable, predictable results, the more our customers’ expectations will be achieved.
Posted on Wed, Sep 08, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
by Don Burns
When I was a kid, I used to love going to the food building at the fair. My favorite place was the mini donut stand, where they offered five or six types of donuts – cinnamon, sugar, powdered, and others. Walking back along the production window, you could peer at those donuts meandering in the lazy hot oil river. At the start of the process was a hopper of batter and I realized all the flavors started from the same dough. It was at the end that the baker added the toppings. Simple beginnings and a variety of finishes..
So… If you’re a print services provider, how simple was your start and how many finishings do you deal with now?
You see where I’m going here? Printers make money from printing, not from warehousing, material handling, inventory, and supply chain management. But there are plenty of printing firms I know where the warehouse is a lot bigger than the print room, and more people touch the process than print the paper.
We’ve let our industry develop, over the years, in a number of ways that are less than ideal. It’s true that a single print company’s customers will often have a wide range of preferences and requirements. But does anyone really believe we need to offer the range of options we do?
To my knowledge, there are at least 2,100 types of paper currently available. That’s maybe 30,000 SKUs to pick from. I know plenty of sheet-fed commercial printers who have to manage over 100 papers on the premises all the time, or at least delivered the next day..
Pleasing the customer is important. We all know that. I know your customers have their own customers and end-users that they want to please and delight. But can consumers really distinguish the fine differences between all these different papers?
The answer is “No.” They can’t.
And if it is costing us money to stock and use a range of solutions that add no positive value for the final user, it’s time we paused for thought.
We don’t get any bonus payments for over-pleasing our customers. We might get a repeat order, Sometimes a small premium (remember those?) for being special. But usually all we get are cost penalties.
That’s why Kodak has worked so hard to match the development of the brilliant new Prosper 5000XL press with a potentially radical new approach to the issues around paper. Less, not more.
We’re working with the world’s top paper mills – from Verso Paper in Memphis to Nippon Paper in Japan and Ziegler in Switzerland – to create new papers that are perfectly tuned for Prosper’s main markets, in key areas like book manufacturing, direct mail, catalogs, and magazines. We’ve developed a new paper certification program to help printers pick the right stocks for different applications. And we’re helping to encourage the industry to rationalize its product ranges for today’s markets.
I have friends who say the whole market, apart from real specialty products, could be covered with 25 -30 papers. I don’t know if that’s possible. But I know that’s the way we need to be heading, if we’re going to improve our logistics, cut our costs and get back to a simple process. Sweet.