Print Buying

Print Buyers Check-list.

Buyers’ Check-list you can answer ‘yes’ to. The more ‘no’s’ you get, the more your print buying policies need an overhaul.

Does your organisation have an written print buying strategy which suits the needs of your business?
Do you obtain ‘open’ quotes (i.e. detailed, broken down quotes) for every job?
Do you make use of the cost analysis of open quotes as a negotiating tool?
Do you monitor global paper market prices?
Do you advise your internal customers and designers on various paper grades from the point of view of value and technical suitability?
Are you aware of the wider print buying market place and confident that you are using the best in class suppliers?
Are you using too many suppliers?
How many suppliers is enough?
Do you have the means to objectively measure supplier performance?
Could the convenience of using local suppliers be clouding your decision-making?
Do you control sub-contracting, or could a rival sales director see your latest new product brochure before your own?
Do you maintain up to date supplier plant lists and know the advantages/disadvantages of their equipment?
Do you involve Printers at the design stage of new jobs?
Do you use the Pantone system to specify colour values?
Can you explain the problems of tonal range compression to your internal customers and instruct suppliers how to control it to your satisfaction?
Is the Origination supplier aware of the characteristics of the Printer’s equipment such as dot gain and optimum ink film thickness? Do you lay down standards for these?
Do you insist on the paper specified for production being used for proofing?
Are you aware of the likely differences between proofs and the final result?
Do you give final approval by passing work on machine?
Do you judge proofs and print using standardised lighting conditions?
Do you have a written down set of procedures to objectively evaluate and settle disputes with suppliers? (These could include the cost and definition of extras, quality, packing, delivery etc.)
Do your suppliers operate a statistical sampling system throughout the print run? (This could be essential in evaluating the scale of a problem if a bad copy turns up on the MD's desk)

Horizon Associates has a wealth of experience of dealing with the Print Industry as the above checklist and the following article hopefully article demonstrate. For your own peace of mind, why not ask us to carry out a health-check on the strengths and weaknesses of your operation. We also provide recruitment through our close links with CIPS Recruitment Services and in-house print procurement training. For contact details click here

Useful background and technical information for Buyers of Print ‘The power of the printed word’ by Derek Roylance

Ever since Johan Gutenberg invented moveable type in Mainz around 1460 and William Caxton set up shop in London in 1478 the printed word has been the principle means of spreading ideas, information and education around the globe. Despite the rise of TV, Radio and the Internet it still remains mankind's most indelible and lasting communication medium. All businesses rely on printed material from the mundane like parts lists, to the vitally important such as advertising, marketing, sales and corporate PR. For some organisations, such as publishers, it is in addition the means of producing the products they sell.

The quality, including the writing, design, production and delivery, of each piece of printed material is an important source of competitive advantage and indirectly the bottom line. To maximise this competitive opportunity all organisations should have an effective and pragmatic print buying strategy.

The Industry:

The printing industry is a mass of contradictions. On one hand organisations which aim to be best in class are highly technologically dependent and capital intensive whilst on the other hand cost of entry can be relatively low with cheap second hand equipment being operated out of garden shed type buildings. All this leads to a highly fragmented, fiercely competitive, over capacity industry. "Printers are like piano players - ten a penny! However some piano players perform in concert halls others in pubs." The trouble is that for the uninitiated it is a little more difficult to judge the quality of Printers.

Printing is seldom produced as one continuous in line process, normally it is a fragmented process produced in steps on many different machines by different people. This all leads to all sorts of quality variables and compromises. Competitive pressures have also led many suppliers to specialise in just one stage of the process: sub-contracting the remainder - fine in theory as long as management, co-ordination and security are handled well.

For hundreds of years training in the industry was organised through an apprenticeship system; this has broken down leading to patchy quality training of both operatives and management. From the buying perspective we are therefore faced with a jungle of loads of suppliers willing to queue on our doorsteps; many just selling on price or through generous expense accounts!

Under these circumstances, for anyone without knowledge or insight of the industry, supplier choice can be a nightmare.

Print Buying:

To avoid the angst many organisations have, or are, out-sourcing their print buying decision making in the expectation that this moves the risk and some of the cost to the chosen supplier or print broker. However we question the validity of this approach if the buying technical expertise and experienced objectivity is not available to ensure that on-going value for money is being achieved.

Our recommendation to protect the organisation in this respect in particular and for good print buying practise in general, is twofold.

Cost Analysis:

This is an essential step in the print buying process for all work. Quotations should always be broken down into some constituent elements. Begin by seeking a simple breakdown of Paper, Origination, Printing, Finishing, Packaging and Delivery. If a supplier will not supply this information - go elsewhere.

Cost breakdown is enormously important from the negotiation point of view - even an inexperienced buyer can rapidly compare one quote with another and begin to ask searching questions of the Printers efficiency in one area by comparison with another. It also leads the buyer naturally into learning more about the processes involved by asking the right questions to increase their knowledge.

The aim should be to obtain ever more detailed in-depth costing information as knowledge and experience builds. For instance - if lamination is an important part of a particular job a separate cost, further split out from Finishing, will be required.

A broad knowledge of the Industry:

Cost analysis will help build knowledge but it is not the entire solution, however it is perfectly possible for a professional buyer to gather the required skill with a combination of training and on the job learning. In particular supplier visits to inspect work can be very informative, as everyone in the printing industry will happily answer any question because they are invariably proud of their skills. Indeed on asking a question the problem is usually not one of receiving a reply but rather of getting away from the mass of detail which is generously offered!

For buyers without broad print knowledge the following can be used as the foundation stone to begin the learning process. Experienced print buyers should just scan the rest of the page.

The Printing Process:

Beginning with some form of artwork and words the printing process mass-produces copies of the original material hundreds, thousands or millions of times as required. The final presentation can be infinitely variable from forms to books. To begin to understand the major steps involved we consider four areas.

Material:

Although anything from concrete to the yolk of a fried egg can be printed on, paper is the usual substrate, Papermaking is a massive industry in its own right with pulp being a major traded commodity on the world's exchanges. Two important considerations -

Generally speaking the better the paper the better the final print quality. However the right choice of paper is obviously critical to the final result and should therefore be made at the design stage taking into account the creative requirements, the cost and any technical limitations. Compromises will sometimes be required. Imagine a booklet consisting of high quality illustrations from transparencies and important text matter. The transparencies will reproduce better on a high gloss paper to obtain maximum contrast but the text may be difficult to read, particularly under artificial light, because of the glare from the gloss. A compromise might be to use a good quality matt blade coated woodfree cartridge paper.

Paper cost is often a very large element of total cost - generally speaking the longer the print run the more significant paper price becomes. As they just pass on this cost some Printers are not clever at buying paper, for one thing there are so many varieties they often have little leverage. Also very few employ professional buyers. It is therefore important to think of standardisation to increase leverage and even consider buying the paper yourself to supply to the Printer.

Visits to see paper mills in action are an amazing sight and a further invaluable part of the learning process. Beware however the "free" visits offered by paper merchants and mills.

Hints - you will need to learn about grain direction, chemical pulp, mechanical pulp, substance (weight), opacity, smoothness, calliper, bulk, moisture content and absorbency.

Origination:

With most printing processes it is impossible to reproduce genuine tonal variations in the same way as photography. Printing can only apply a film of ink to make an image or leave the paper white. To achieve a tonal effect the human eye is fooled by breaking a picture image into varying size dots of ink. This is called the half tone effect and is produced with film contact screens or electronically.

Colour is achieved by use of the subtractive process - the base paper being white because it reflects all the hues of the spectrum. Black and colours are obtained by applying ink to stop all (black) or some (for colours) light being reflected. The colour original is broken down into colour separations by 'photographing' it, conventionally or electronically, through filters of the primary colours - Red, Green and Blue, in order that it can be printed in inks of the complementary colours - Yellow, Magenta and Cyan; plus black to use as a key to add detail and for typematter. This is called the four-colour process.

All this is the opposite of colour TV which uses the additive process; taking a black screen and using a combination of the primary colours Red, Blue and Green to build various colours and white.

To understand the process more an O level in physics would be helpful but better still visit an origination supplier to ask loads of questions and see how things work in practice.

Limitations to be faced -

The contrast range of the average colour transparency is around three times more that can be produced by excellent litho printing on the very best quality paper. The printed result must therefore inevitably always be a compromise as the tonal range is compressed by about two thirds.

It is not possible to mass produce printing inks to exactly the right supplementary colour hues therefore colour correction to counteract the deficiencies must be undertaken. Despite this it impossible to exactly match many colours by the four-colour process - some purples, mauves and pinks are simply impossible to reproduce.

A proof (prototype) is usually required for checking by the client. However no proofing process, be it mechanical, photographic or electronic, will accurately simulate the result which will be produced by a printing press under mass production conditions. The result of this is yet more compromises.

Print Processes:

The information given here refers primarily to the Lithographic printing process because it is the most versatile and widely used. However the astute print buyer should know of the merits of the other main production processes Gravure, Silk screen, Flexographic, Letterpress, Ink jet, Electrostatic and the fast establishing Digital print process.

Lithography is a surface process produced from a flat plate that carries the image. It is based on the principle that grease and water do not mix, therefore a plate can be produced with a greasy image leaving a background, non-image, area that will receive moisture. If a greasy ink roller is applied to the flat service (the plate), ink will stick to the greasy image but will be repelled by the wet non-image background. Paper can then be laid on the plate and if a slight pressure is applied it will transfer the image of the greasy ink onto the paper. This is over simplification because modern lithography is a rotary offset process. Offset because the image is first transferred to a rubber blanket before being applied to the paper.

Machines can be sheet fed - printing onto sheets of paper or web-offset printing onto reels of paper. Web offset can produce a semi finished product by way of in line printed and folded 'signatures'.

Limitations & Problems:

Because it is based on the repellent action of grease and moisture the process is inherently unstable. If therefore a printing press is left to its own devices during mass production it will hunt up and down producing unacceptable colour variances. Despite modern controls the skill of the operator is still required to keep the variables within acceptable limits.

Inevitably compromises will be required between the proof and the production run; do you leave this to the Printer or attend yourself, at the end of the make ready (machine set-up), to approve the production standard?

As mentioned under Origination, some colours are impossible to match with the four colour process. If one or two colours are especially important, say house or brand colours, you should seek out a printer with a five or six colour press in order that your important colours can be printed with a special colour matched ink.

To be able to communicate well Print buyers should understand the following basic technical terms - bleed, imposition, dot gain, set off, slur, densitometer readings, colour bars, the Pantone system, out of register, ink trapping, plate gap, cut off (web offset), linting, long grain and short grain, scum and catch up, rub resistance, hiccies and spots, strike through, show through.

Finishing:

Often sub-contracted the term Finishing covers a range of mechanical process such as guillotine cutting, folding, diecutting (cutting out fancy shapes), embossing, varnishing and laminating, collating, binding, numbering, stitching, etc.

It pays print buyers to make friends of Finishing department staff because they are in an ideal position to spot poor print quality.

We can review your print buying operation and produce a Report highlighting strengths and weaknesses benchmarked against best practise and save you money. For a no strings attached, no obligation, initial chat contact us at info@horizon-associates.com