Automation: Cutting the Cost of Failures to Tame the Document Supply Chain
Posted on Mon, Jul 11, 2011 @ 01:19 PM
Automation: Cutting the Cost of Failures
By Bruno Henry, Chief Operating Officer, Sefas Innovation
Nobody likes talking about mistakes, especially when they are seen to cost money. But there is really no getting away from it. Printing is an industry where metal, fluids and paper interact at high speed under less than ideal conditions, where tiny software bugs or sensor defects or minute differences of alignment or registration can throw everything out. The data we work with is not always as clean or complete as it should be. The materials we use cannot always be totally pure and flawless. And sometimes we just mess things up.
Compared with most other industries, the level of built-in checks and routine disciplines in printing is extraordinarily high. We rip and proof and check and proof again. We take a good look at everything before we hit the button, we watch it through the machines and we check once more to make sure the final piece looks right. But errors still occur. Reprints happen. And dealing with them represents an appreciable part of the production center budget.
One of the great, unacknowledged strengths of automation is its ability to attack and bring down the costs of failure, at almost every stage of the print and mailing process.
It all starts with the content – the text, the design, the branding and the variable data. Ultimately, that must be the responsibility of the business users and document stakeholders – people who are probably a very long way from the print shop floor. What they release to the production center should, ideally, be perfect. It won’t be, but it is part of our job to give them every opportunity to catch their own mistakes.
This was something Sefas specifically took into account when developing the Producer module for Open Print. If business users are to carry out proper pre-print quality checking, they must be given helpful and appropriate ways to do it. The documents must be readily available to the right people, but secured so that they are inaccessible to the wrong people. Those with the authority to take a snap decision and pull or alter a document at the last moment must be given the power to do their job, under a clearly defined hierarchy of privileges, and all views and changes must be recorded in a full and permanent audit trail. These days stakeholders are probably as likely to be traveling as they are to be sitting at a desk, so it also makes sense to ensure that document previews are available online.
All this is actually easy enough to automate and manage, as part of a wider, integrated automated system. Yet there are still many production centers that rely entirely on manual procedures for pre-print quality checking. It may be hard to calculate exactly how much the odd mistakes that creep through cost these people over the course of a year. The only certainty is that it will be far more than the small investment that would be needed to put an end to this kind of antiquated procedure. How many people in a bank or an insurance company are stopped in their tracks and diverted from their work whenever there is the slightest brush with the regulatory authorities? How many jobs and projects get held up?
Compliance imposes certain added costs when it works. But they are nothing beside the costs incurred when compliance goes wrong. When something slips through, compliance issues can frequently mean boardroom involvement, witch-hunts and blame games, possible fines and compensation payments, and even the imposition of costly and over-defensive measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Sefas has certainly benefited at times from senior management suddenly dictating that automation must be introduced immediately, at almost any price, after some embarrassing mistake has provoked the wrath of the regulator.
Lapses in pre-print checking are obviously not the only causes of unfortunate and expensive errors. Every time reprints are necessary, new opportunities for error are created. One problem is solved and, all too often, a new one is introduced, especially when manual intervention is required. There are inevitable interruptions and delays as operators switch over to handle the reprints, with knock-on effects throughout the production center. For a long time, it was a particular ambition of mine to find ways to automate reprints, with the objectives of improving productivity and protecting the integrity of documents and data. Now that the Sefas software offers automated reprints as a matter of course, I find it hard to imagine any company choosing to operate without this facility.
This may be just one corner of the automation story, but it is highly significant. The vast majority of batches – over 90 percent – contain some documents that need reprinting, for whatever reason. If almost every job carries the cost burden of reprints and remedial work, these extra costs have to be built into prices. If customers will not put up with that, there is only one other place they can come from, and that is the print provider’s margin.
Open Print’s achievements in this area address these cost penalties by transforming the processing of reprints. Every document that passes through the production process is automatically checked. The closed loop feedback system that tracks their progress catches the ones that are not up to standard and automatically submits them for reprint, flagging up the problems, fixing them and then finally updating job and SLA statistics when the stragglers have been brought into line. Reprints that need particular colors or treatments can be grouped and handled together, while the reprints needed to close out an urgent mailing run can be directed to a local printer so that they can be collected the moment they are ready.
Protecting document integrity, cutting down on errors, and streamlining reprinting is not the most glamorous side of production automation. Unless you take a sample period – a week, or, better still, a month – and carefully track how many mistakes occur and how much time and effort it takes to put them right, you will never have an accurate figure for the actual cost of failure. But senior managers who have completed this exercise are usually left ashen-faced at the amount of money they are routinely pouring down the drain. The ability to slash these losses and provide all the other, highly positive advantages of an automated production workflow makes a very potent argument for a modest investment in print and mailing center automation.
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