Print Workflow and Processes

36- preflighting 101

 Want to head off potential problems with customer files before they get to your production floor? Learn what preflighting is and how it benefits to smoother production processes.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Welcome to another edition of The Print University. Today we are going to be talking about preflighting 101. My name is Ryan; let's get started. 
    • What is preflight exactly? I like to use the analogy of a pilot who is reviewing everything as a preflight checklist to make sure that everything is in operation for the plane so that they can take off and get to where they are going.
    • Similar kind of thing, except here we are dealing with files - design files that we may not have a lot of control over how we receive them. They come from many different sources. They might come from a creative design application like Adobe Creative Cloud or QuarkXpress or maybe an online design tool like Canva or maybe even a document composition tool if we are talking about variable data. 
    • You want to preflight those to see if there are any errors and catch those before you submit it further down into the workflow, and it gets to the digital front end that is attached to the digital printer or the RIP that is attached to maybe a computer-to-plate system. It is that step before you go to actually print and output your file because you do not want it to cause issues and corrupt the file. Then, something graphically changes with it, or a font does not get substituted, and you end up with different weird characters instead of the actual text. All of those kinds of things. 
    • Preflighting really is a check of all these different kinds of things that are known as a preflight profile. Those are just rules that you have established in terms of what you want to look for in the files and maybe how you want to correct those issues within the file.
    • Why is it needed? In many cases, unless you are designing the artwork inside of the print shop, you are probably receiving files from customers. They are not professional designers in many cases. The tool sets vary dramatically in terms of how they create the PDFs and maybe what specifications of the PDFs they actually adhere to. You can get a really wide variety of things. You want to optimize and streamline your workflow, so it does not cause you problems downstream. 
    • Now there is a little bit of a difference that we would like to point out between preflighting and optimization. Preflighting, again, uses those preflight profiles, which can check for a ton of things in the files. Many of those can not only alert you but also fix them. One example - we want to print CMYK when we are going out to print, and you may have RGB images or artwork in the file. It can not only alert you to that, but if you do find it, go ahead and convert that to the CMYK color space using some kind of profile to do that conversion. That is just one example. 
    • Another example might be that it finds a super high-resolution image that the designer put in at 600 or 1200 dpi, and we do not really need that for the type of output that we are doing. We might downsample that image so that it is not as complex, which means it is going to save time at the digital front end, the RIP, and the printer in terms of processing. It just makes a cleaner file.
    • Optimization is a little different. There are usually not as many settings that you can manipulate or control. What it tries to do from a software perspective is simplify the structure of the PDF. That might be removing X-objects. It might be if the entire font set was embedded, but only the characters A, B, C, and D were used, it will subset those and to make it a lighter, more simplified font embedding, which saves space in terms of the file size and the processing time you get further downstream. Again, maybe it does something like downsampling images. 
    • The key difference between preflight and optimization is that, typically, optimization is a set-it-and-forget-it kind of task. You create the rules by which you want it to optimize, or maybe some default presets that they have available in the software tool. Then it is going to automatically apply those depending on how the files come into the software.
    • Preflight is usually more engaging. Usually, an operator is sitting there and looking at the report, figuring out if things have been corrected properly automatically by the preflight tool, or if there are still things that manually need to be done. 
    • Here are some very common preflighting and optimization tools that are in our market.
    • The first three - Callas pdftoolbox, Enfocus PitStop, and Markzware FlightCheck are all preflighting tools. There are slight variations in how they work and operate, but they generally check and solve those kinda issues that we find in the files. Markzware does it more upfront in the native application or the creative design applications. Enfocus and Callas do it from the PDF point of view. 
    • There are a couple of optimization tools that are in the market too. There are probably more that will eventually come forward, but there is Solimar ReadyPDF and Crawford PDF Accelerator.
    • Let's take a look at a demonstration of how Preflighting works. I am going to switch over to Acrobat where I have a brochure that is open. I know there are issues with this one, but I am just going to go into Acrobat and run a preflight. I am going to choose one of the default profiles that exists called "digital printing color."
    • You notice I have two options. I can either analyze or analyze and fix. I am just going to choose to analyze, which will just find the errors and present them to me. Then I can figure out how I want to fix them. I can come back and say, analyze and fix, then maybe based on the rules that are set in this profile, it will automatically fix some.
    • When I click analyze, it did find over 70 RGB objects used in this two-page document. Again, I might want to convert those. I might want to go back and say, analyze and fix to have it fix that particular issue for me. It found some very large-resolution images that I might choose to downsample. And several font issues too.
    • You have a couple of options with this particular tool. You can embed this in an audit trail, or you can create a report which might be useful to create for your customers to show them these are the issues that we are consistently seeing from your files that you may want to address. These are the issues that we found, and this is why we are charging you an additional fee to correct and fix these. 
    • Again, there are the kinds of warnings that it found in the preflight based on the profile and just general information about the file.
    • That is preflighting 101.
    • We hope that you join us on a future episode at The Print University. Until next time.

37- imposition 101

Setting page order is a critical function that ensures page 1 is before page 2. But it is also important to ensure that folds do not interfere with the images or text.  The critical positioning, orientation, and pagination of any printed job is accomplished through imposition. This module explains what imposition is, essential terminology, and the different levels of available automation.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Welcome to Imposition 101. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting. And, of course, I have Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup here. Hello, Pat. 
    • [00:00:08] Pat McGrew: Hi there. We are going to do imposition! 
    • [00:00:11] Ryan McAbee: We are going to talk about imposition. It is one of my favorite topics. How would you describe to someone who is outside of this industry or coming into it potentially what is imposition? 
    • [00:00:21] Pat McGrew: We are familiar with books. We are familiar with the idea that there is text on the front of the page and on the back of a page. Sometimes we forget that in most cases, when you are looking at long runs of things like books and catalogs and magazines, and even some complex direct mail pieces, they are not printed as individual pages. They are actually printed on big sheets of paper, and there is magic that goes into figuring out where the page should be on the sheet. When the sheet is folded and cut, you get page 1, 2, 3, 4. There is magic to it, and it is different magic if you are doing four pages up on a sheet or eight pages or 16 pages, and it is always multiples of four.
    • Imposition is the art and science of placing pages on a sheet so that when they are printed and move into finishing, they will be arranged in the order that the content owner expects them to be. 
    • [00:01:20] Ryan McAbee: That is absolutely true. The other way I like to think of it is - using a software tool in two dimensions, how to lay out something that will eventually be in three dimensions. That is something that takes a little getting used to. Luckily, most of the tools today have visualization methods, so you can see what you created and see it in a 3D view which helps.
    • It is not always just pages that we are talking about too. You still have to do impositions for folding cartons, which are packaging and some other types of work. We do associate it a lot of times with page-based work.
    • Why do you have to create an imposition? I think you told us without telling us already, Pat?
    • [00:01:52] Pat McGrew: You are trying to maximize your paper usage. I have to admit, the very first time that I ever had to work on imposition, it was manual.
    • We were creating a book for a nonprofit, and we were trying to do as much of the manual labor in advance of delivering it to the printer as possible. We literally had the pages typeset, cut them apart, and glued them together to build the sheet size that we would then deliver to the printer to make the film to do the printing.
    • Of course, it was a long time ago. No one was happier to see imposition programs come into the market than I was. One of the things that an imposition program will allow you to do is to put in some parameters: finished page size, number of pages, and number of folios. If you are printing books, you do not typically print in one sheet. You are printing multiple sheets. Each one of those sheets has a certain number of pages on its front and back. 
    • A lot goes into imposition, and again, you are trying to do it in such a way that there is no waste on the sheet size on the sheet that you are picking. Part of imposition is also trying to figure out how many sheets or boxes or whatever is going to fit on the size sheet you want to print. It may also help you determine what size sheet you want to select if you have some options. 
    • [00:03:10] Ryan McAbee: It is all about maximizing your material usage. Often paper or the substrate is one of the highest costs that you have in the whole process.
    • [00:03:18] Pat McGrew: If you make a mistake, it is not pretty. 
    • [00:03:20] Ryan McAbee: That is right. You do not want to have that happen because it is usually not caught until you get to the finishing or converting. Then it is really late in the stage to reprint and so forth.
    • So it is not something you want. 
    • [00:03:28] Pat McGrew: Have you ever bought a book at the bookstore and had the books had pages in the wrong order? 
    • [00:03:31] Ryan McAbee: I have not, but I am guessing you have
    • [00:03:33] Pat McGrew: I have. 
    • [00:03:34] Ryan McAbee: Not something you want to figure out when you are trying to read it. 
    • [00:03:37] Pat McGrew: No. Something did not go well. It was a folio towards the back of the book, and I just laughed.
    • [00:03:41] Ryan McAbee: Just for some terminology, if we go in the way back time machine, I believe what you were describing is called the mechanical paste-up. When you were talking about cutting them, then that would be shot with a camera to create film. Giant film that then would be taken to someone called a stripper, who would create the final film to make the plate. You would have rubylith material and all this kind of stuff. Basically, it would go into a vacuum frame machine for the exposure of the film to the plate, and then you develop the plate and all that kind of stuff. 
    • That is just a little bit of where we were at, and thankfully we have gotten much more automated. We took a lot of those processes and steps out of the equation because that was very time-consuming. It was a specialist kind of thing. There was a skill there.
    • [00:04:20] Pat McGrew: I made good money when I was in college doing that work because it was way better than flipping hamburgers.
    • [00:04:25] Ryan McAbee: The other thing that we have to talk about when we talk about imposition is terminology for front and back. In digital printing, you hear the term simplex and duplex. Simplex will be printing only on one side of the material, or sheet; duplex will be printing on both. 
    • For analog printing, they do not tend to use those terms. Printing on one side of the sheet is usually called single-sided. Depending on how you are actually moving that material through the printing equipment determines what is called for the printing of the backside. It may be a work-and-turn. The best way to describe a work-and-turn is if I get to the sheet, it is basically going like this, so you are turning it this way. 
    • A work-and-tumble would be turning it this way in the machines. Then the same thing for perfecting. Sheetwise is going this way. Perfecting is going this way. 
    • The difference between those four terms, the work-and-turn and work-and-tumble, you are actually getting two out of the same exact image or print. Whereas on the sheetwise and perfecting, there are completely different images and artwork and content on the front than it is on the back. That is the terminology that we have. I know it is a bit confusing, but that is how it works. 
    • [00:05:25] Pat McGrew: It helps because, if you are talking to analog printers, the term perfecting press is a term that they use. When you talk to digital printers, that is not typically the term they use.
    • If they are a digital shop born out of digital, they may not know the analog terminology. There is some explanation that has to go on there. 
    • [00:05:41] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. There are a lot of variables that the software these days will help you to factor in when you are creating your impositions.
    • Here we are looking at a page-based imposition again, so not like something for packaging. All the different things that you have can change based on the final product that we are trying to do. From the size of the pages to the number of the pages, to how it is actually going to be, converted or basically finished in the bindery at the end.
    • Another thing that we often do not think about, Pat, is paper. The actual material has this thing called grain and grain direction. What does that mean, and why is it important? 
    • [00:06:12] Pat McGrew: If you look at woven fabric, you can tell the web and the weft of the fabric - the main North/South versus East/West, right? Typically you want the grain direction of the paper and the printing direction of the paper to be coordinated so that it absorbs ink in an even way and it cuts in the correct way. Grain direction definitely changes how well a piece of paper will cut. If you cut with the grain or against the grain, you tend to get different results. 
    • What you want to do is make sure that your paper, when you buy it, will normally tell you what your grain direction is. Sometimes you can specify when you are buying your large pallets of paper and your rolls of paper, and what grain direction you want because sometimes there are options available, and there are reasons you might pick one or the other.
    • [00:06:56] Ryan McAbee: The telltale, you see this sometimes in the finished product grain direction, is when it comes to folding too. If you fold against the grain, especially if it is a thicker material or a thicker paper, it will not have a clean edge. It will look crumply in a way. That tells you that you have folded it against the grain direction of the paper. That could be something that is going to impact the customer in not accepting the work in the end. 
    • [00:07:16] Pat McGrew: If something is not easy to fold or does not increase, it affects its ability to be inserted into an envelope. Usually, you will find that transaction and direct mailers are extremely sensitive to grain direction on paper. You also find publication printers are sensitive because a book or a catalog or a directory is highly folded prior to being finished if it is being done analog. If you make a mistake with the grain direction, it really does impact your ability to get clean finishing on the pages. 
    • [00:07:41] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, those are very good points.
    • Impositions can be very simple, especially if you are talking about a 1-up or basically one page, maybe front or back, that is being printed on a digital piece of equipment, that is printed to size because there really is no imposition there. It is really when you get into the larger sheet sizes that have multiple pages or pieces of content on them that you have to start thinking about other things. One of those things is a bunch of marks that help control production as it is going through the printing process and the finishing processes. 
    • Some of those standard sets of marks you can see here. This is more of an offset-related sheet, but some of these you will also find on digitally printed sheets. It could be things like the color bar that is up on top. That allows the press operator to actually measure the density of the color and see how uniform. it is - a quality control kind of aspect.
    • Then you have the cut marks and maybe folding marks that you see here. The cut marks in the corners are black, and then the folding mark is that red line in the middle that just shows the difference there. Then you have maybe other things that are required based on the processes. Barcodes are very common. Barcodes are very common in packaging because they want to identify things, and they can use them for the nearline and offline finishing.
    • [00:08:45] Pat McGrew: Publication printing as well, because they will use it to track folios within a book and books. While we are showing a barcode here, a traditional barcode here, sometimes you will see the 2D barcodes  -  the things that look like QR codes are also fairly popular.
    • Registration marks are the other thing that you will typically see. All of these are designed to be read by machines, and read by cameras during the process to make sure that all the pieces are coming together as we expect them to, and that everything is aligned correctly and registered correctly during the printing and finishing processes.
    • [00:09:15] Ryan McAbee: Most of the equipment, even analog and certainly digital equipment today, is using these marks for quality control in-line, and it can make adjustments on the fly for things like registration to get the paper squared up. Front to back even. Color is a big one where they can start adjusting things based on what it is reading.
    • [00:09:33] Pat McGrew: It is worth mentioning that a lot of these processes - manual impositions, semiautomatic, impositions, automatic impositions, intelligent impositions - all of these techniques do require a little bit of art and a little bit of science. As you start getting into automatic and intelligent impositions, what we are finding is that technology is continuing to innovate. 
    • Putting it together by hand - there is not a lot of innovation. There are applications like the Adobe suite, Corel suite, or the Figma suite. There are a bunch of creative suites out there that actually have some sort of simple imposition capabilities. They are not automated, but they give you tools. By the time you get into automatic and then intelligent impositions, there are actually a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications that actually can bring you back five or six versions. “Here are some ideas of how you could do your imposition. This one will waste less paper, but this one will print faster." Things like that.
    • There is a lot of value in looking at these automated and intelligent imposition programs because whatever you invest in them, they will probably save you that money manyfold. 
    • [00:10:35] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. It is really a stairstep here. The manual imposition that you can do through the creative layout applications requires the same skill almost as we were talking about in the way back time machine. It is just doing it in a software program these days, but it is still very error-prone unless you have that skill and knowledge base built up. 
    • When you get into the very specific tools that are meant for imposition, they help you out a lot because of a couple of things. They have a standard folding library, especially if it is a paper-based work, where you can choose what are called folding schemes that help you determine how it is going to fold and everything in the end.
    • Then you can create reusable templates. Once you get something locked in for your 36-page booklet or whatever it is, you can save and reuse that and recall it every time you need it from that point on. It has everything you need on there, including the marks and all those registration barcodes, et cetera.
    • Then Pat, really, what has been interesting in more recent years is that intelligence aspect. What that does is look out across the fleet of equipment that you have available and say, “What is the absolute best way we can find to run this specific job?” That is where you get into extreme cost savings, and you get into extreme optimization with your material usage. It is all about efficiency in this game of printing, so it is really cool stuff that is happening. 
    • [00:11:47] Pat McGrew: Designers typically do not think a lot about imposition, but they should because they should at least have a passing understanding of what it is and why it is. Imposition is typically performed in the prepress agency or at the print shop. Typically you do not deliver an imposed file, but you might. If you are a designer and you find yourself with a requirement to deliver imposition, you want to be as educated as you possibly can about what the printing company is expecting. 
    • [00:12:11] Ryan McAbee: In many cases, even people who use imposition software all day, every day, are faced with some unique new folding that they have to think through. Another manual kind of technique and designers can use this too, is to take a piece of paper, fold it as the finished product would be, and then you can mark it up with the page numbers and so forth. That is what is referred to as a folding dummy because it is literally a miniature representation of what is going to be produced in the end.
    • That helps you when you go to sit in front of the program and figure out how to create the imposition. 
    • [00:12:36] Pat McGrew: It can be zen, as you are trying to get it all to work, but it can be really frustrating too.
    • [00:12:40] Ryan McAbee: Yes, it works both ways.
    • We hope you have learned a little bit more about how imposition works and why it is needed in the industry. How it is really evolving into all these neat artificial intelligence and automation techniques. And we hope to see you on a future episode at The Print University.

38- primer: software & functions

Modern day printing is a software-driven, custom manufacturing process. software components help manage the business concerns, while others help with operations and production. For simplicity, we have organized software into four categories: business management, data management, content management, and workflow management. In this module, we review the types of software, its purpose, and examples of solutions in the market.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and I am with my colleague Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting. This time in The Print University, we are going to be talking about software. And you might be asking yourself, why do I care about software? How important can it possibly be? It is pretty important, right?
    • In every print shop, there is software. Sometimes it is in your face; you see it, and you know it is there. You are filling things in on screens. Sometimes it is sitting under the current, right? Running a lot of automation routines that nobody ever sees.
    • What we want to do in this episode is help you understand where software plays in a typical shop. What kinds of software you might run into, and what roles it plays in helping ensure that the job the customer orders is what actually goes out the door.
    • So Ryan, what do we think about software in general? 
    • [00:00:52] Ryan McAbee: First, it is important to think about it as these are the tools to get the work done and have it flow through from the beginning to the end. The other way to look at it in a more tangible way is - you made a whole lot of investment in your physical equipment, the printing equipment, the finishing equipment, and it is going to allow you to optimize and best use that equipment that you have that huge investment in.
    • That is the lens I would look through as we go through this module. We are going to speak at a higher level as we go through. There is a lot of different software with a lot of different acronyms that we will throw at you, but do pause the screen so that you can read the descriptions of what those solutions are. We are going to talk a little bit more holistically about them as we go. 
    • Pat, I will go through the first two categories of software, and then you can go through the next two categories. We had mentioned in another module that there are two primary workflows at a high level in any print shop. You have the business workflow that is taking care of all your customer management. It is taking care of the ticketing and the pricing and the costing and all of that side of things. Then you also have another workflow category that is more focused on the production aspects and the technical parts of getting that work executed. Usually, those two align and overlap, and hopefully, integrate and automate between the two.
    • Business management really is the software solutions that are usually supposed to be the central, single source of truth in your environment. In a more simplified way, it is the brains of your operation. But it is the singular brain. We do not want to have multiple brains running around that think they know what they are doing. You need to have one reliable, accurate source of information to work from. For many people, that is going to be a print management system, which we will get into. It could be the host of these other acronyms that are similar systems that other parts of the printing industry may or may not use.
    • Then you also have the data management tools. These tools are used if you are doing variable data printing, if you are doing transactional printing, if you are doing direct mail, in many cases. It is where you have to take data from the customer that you are printing for and figure out how to use it and format it in a structured way to go onto whatever output that they have requested, whether that is a statement or bill or whether that is a postcard that is going to go in the mail. There are many different kinds of tools and techniques that are used around manipulating that data and also optimizing that data to make sure you save costs in the end. We have two other categories, though, Pat.
    • [00:03:02] Pat McGrew: We do because the two categories are content management and workflow management. Content management software is designed to accept the jobs -  to accept the work and help you keep it organized. There are content management systems that allow you to store individual objects like company logos and image libraries of approved images. Maybe you store them by customer  - their approved logos and images and image objects. 
    • There are also content management systems that are really archives. They are designed to capture everything that gets put into production. They become the record of everything that goes out into the mail stream, for instance, or everything that is delivered in a kit for a given customer.
    • There are also content management systems that are tools that allow you to do things to the content to put it in a different format than it used to be in. Right size it, maybe, because you are changing formats. There are all sorts of things that content management solutions can do.
    • Digital asset management systems are a form of content management system. They are highly structured databases that contain all the elements that can go into different kinds of work that will be output. There are also things called digital rights management systems, which are the way that copyrighted material is managed in an organization.
    • Say you are Coca-Cola. You are very proud of that polar bear that is in all your advertisements. He is actually a copyrighted entity. You want to know whenever it is used, and you want to make sure that when it is used, it is used appropriately. Digital rights management systems help do that. There are also transform solutions that will help you do a lot of things. They will help you turn one file format into another file format. They will also help you ensure that the file format that you have is as optimal for print or eDelivery as it can possibly be. Content management is a lot of things, but it is always a very important piece of the overall workflow.
    • Workflow management is the controller, right? It is how you ensure that every job goes through the appropriate path on its way to output. Preflighting is part of workflow management. Imposition software is certainly part of it. To a large extent, I could make the argument that color management is part of workflow management. I can make the case that all of the things that go into routing and preparing are workflow management. There are an awful lot of things that can go into that big umbrella managing the entire end-to-end process.
    • [00:05:30] Ryan McAbee: The way I think about these is that content management is the stuff that you need to use, and then the workflow management is more like air traffic control to make sure it gets to the right place and the right type of output and destination. 
    • [00:05:41] Pat McGrew: It is a great analogy because it is so easy to route a job through the wrong path if you do not have really great roots established and you do not understand the ultimate purpose of the work you are doing. 
    • [00:05:51] Ryan McAbee: To unpack this a little bit - this is again a point where you can pause your screen because there are a lot of acronyms here.
    • Content management is usually on the leading end, before workflow management, because it is the content or data, the information, that you need to do something with on the backend. You will see terms here Pat already mentioned -Digital Asset Management, or DAM as it is more commonly shortened to. You have other things like content management systems and customer communication management. All of these things; and this is very acronym-heavy.
    • [00:06:18] Pat McGrew: It is. The thing about this section is that this may not exist inside the four walls of the printing plant, right? In many relationships, all of this is actually at the customer site, and they manage all of it or an agency that they appoint does. 
    • A product information management system is often used to build catalogs. That may actually live at the catalog producer or the catalog owner's site and never be exposed specifically to the print company. More and more printing companies have started to take on some of these pieces as a service. They are doing content management as a service and archive as a service, design as a service, and asset management as a service. Your mileage may vary. You may have exposure to it, and you may not. 
    • [00:06:55] Ryan McAbee: That is a very good point. Usually, in the three remaining buckets of software solutions here, business management, data management, and workflow management, those tools are much more likely to be within your four walls.
    • However, inside each one of those categories, it could be just one of those things or a couple of those things, not all of them. You are not going to find all these solutions inside your particular environment. 
    • We are talking about business management solutions. They all help us with our customer interactions, with pricing and costing information. When we are creating quotes to manufacture stuff, it is helping track materials and make sure that we can do our purchase orders and work with suppliers. It is that business management aspect. Probably one of the things to help clarify and position these tools more,  Pat would be - from print MIS all the way down to the PLM - what type of printer is going to use that type of software solution?
    • [00:07:40] Pat McGrew: A print MIS could be in any printer because they come in all sizes and all scales. You can have print management information systems that will work for mega printers and are installed to manage plants worldwide through a single interface. Most of the franchise companies that provide software to their franchisees have mini print MIS systems embedded into them, if not full-blown ones. As we look at this group on the right under the green column, the companies over there are serving everybody from commercial printers, packaging printers, folding carton printers, flexo printers, label printers, and book printers of every size and scale.
    • It is a little bit different when you get into ERP systems because you do not tend to see them in smaller operations. An enterprise resource planning system is designed to be one of those Star Trek universal translators if you will. How things will interact with each other so that it forms an integration point among disparate systems across the business typically found in manufacturing systems. We say in packaging converters, and that is certainly a place you see them. But in any place where there are multiple manufacturing operations that go into producing the output. A lot of book publication printers will use ERP systems to help them manage things like cover and case bound versus soft cover versus different sizes and formats that they might be printing.
    • [00:09:02] Ryan McAbee: I have heard that terminology mostly in the packaging converters, so the ones doing folding cartons, labels, and corrugated, in particular.
    • That terminology could be applied in an in-plant environment. The in-plant may not be using it, but the organization may be using it, and they may have to interface with it. Then the other place I have also seen it was in the signage arena. We are starting to see some of them refer to themselves as ERP solutions. 
    • [00:09:22] Pat McGrew: Because you are managing a lot of small bits and pieces that go into manufacturing. It is actually a term that comes out of pure manufacturing that has been borrowed by the print industry to describe the things that happen when you are dealing with complex print products.
    • Not so much when you are printing flat sheets, but if you are printing something that has to be assembled, that is definitely where the ERP system can help you make sure that you have all the elements you need to produce the final product. 
    • [00:09:47] Ryan McAbee: Then what about this MES or manufacturing execution system? It sounds similar to ERP, but it is not really the same thing. 
    • [00:09:53] Pat McGrew: Again, this is a term that gets borrowed from pure manufacturing. These are the systems that are helping you manage raw materials and the multiple steps that raw materials may go through before they can be made part of the printed product output. In folding carton, you might be tracking your supply of glue that might be used. You might be tracking the cutting blades that you need for cutting the flaps and things for your folding cartons. It is all of the things that are used to manufacture the final product, but at the materials level, at the Bill of Materials level, that is used to manufacture the final print output.
    • [00:10:34] Ryan McAbee: Print might just be one component in the entire MES, because you are talking about manufacturing. If you are talking about a pharmaceutical line, you have the raw inputs for the actual drug that you are making. You have the other parts to making the drug. Then you have the packaging and the printing and everything else that happens.
    • [00:10:47] Pat McGrew: It comes out of pure manufacturing: car manufacturing, equipment manufacturing. The term began to come into the print industry via those organizations that are producing complex print in complex manufacturing environments.
    • [00:11:01] Ryan McAbee: I have mostly heard this in the corrugated manufacturing space, but I would not be surprised if it starts creeping out a little. 
    • [00:11:06] Pat McGrew: Yeah. If you start looking at the complexities of corrugated manufacturing, and you mentioned pharmaceutical - think about pharmaceutical packaging, which is by and large folding carton type packaging - it is an umbrella kind of workflow management solution that works with a print MIS, works with an ERP, works with content management, works and with scheduling systems and estimating systems.
    • [00:11:29] Ryan McAbee: Then we have this last term here which is product life cycle management. I have to be honest; I have probably only seen this in textile printing, but what is your take? 
    • [00:11:38] Pat McGrew: It is funny, we do these processes; we do not always call them the same things, right? If you think about product lifecycle management at the highest level, agnostic to printing or anything else, what you are trying to do is identify every stage of a product. The steps that go into each stage of the process. And you are following it on its path from the original design through the point where the product is completed. That is what Product Lifecycle management is. We build it, we test it, we launch it, we live on the proceeds of it, and slowly it gets displaced by other products in the market. Eventually, we have to make a decision about when to no longer make it.
    • A PLM system gives you the forecasting information for when you should take a product out of primary availability versus secondary availability. Take books on your backlist if you are a publisher. Product life cycle management is heavily used in book publication, sometimes under other names, but the process is the same. It also gives you information about when you should take things off the backlist and bring them back into primary production because a title gets popular all of a sudden. Think of this as an infrastructure management solution that allows you to ensure that every process can lead naturally into the next process without delay. You are right, we see it in textile production all the time, but again, you will see them in other systems as well. 
    • [00:12:57] Ryan McAbee: Interesting. Let's move on to data management solutions. Many different types of data can arrive on the printer's doorstep, and it is up to the printer to organize that information and do some kind of ETL to get it into some other software tool to further optimize it and use it. 
    • [00:13:12] Pat McGrew: You use the term ETL. That is extract, transform, and load, and that is how we often interact with big pools of data. It is that big data everybody talks about. Extract the data we need for a process that needs that data, analyze it, and transform it into a format that I can actually use in my production process.
    • I want to start with analytic dashboards, and I want to start there for an important reason. Analytic dashboards come in all sizes, shapes, flavors, and descriptions. They may come from your hardware vendors. They may come from your software vendors. You may have multiple analytic dashboards that do not talk to each other. In fact, that is probably the most common situation. 
    • More and more, we are seeing organizations standardize business intelligence dashboards. And then through the use of APIs, pulling production-specific information into those business management dashboards that are sold by people like Google Analytics and Microsoft Dynamics. Amazon has its analytic service, and HP has its analytic service. Everybody has an analytic service, right? In the end, you want to understand if your organization has analytic dashboards, even if they have multiples, and what information they make available to you. Start to understand how accurate that information is and how you can apply it to the business of getting production work through your shop. 
    • Online client portals are really important because that means jobs are coming in through that portal - and print jobs are data. I want you to wrap your head around that one for a minute. Print jobs are data, even if they do not contain financial information, personal health information, or variable data in the traditional sense of the term. The print stream is a data stream, and it contains information. It has to be managed carefully. It has to be secured from the point where it arrives at your shop to the point where you are using it to the point where you are delivering information out into your output channels. These portals are really important not only to keep up to date, and to apply all the software patches but also to force people to use them. Do not allow work to come in from outside of those channels if you can possibly avoid it, because it provides the most security. 
    • When we are talking about data management, we are talking about it from several layers. There is the regulated data: personal information, health information, and financial information. We need really solid security systems for these. There are things like piece-level tracking solutions that let us track mail through the mail stream. There is optimization software, not just postal optimization software that lets us save on postage, but also, data optimization software. There are a lot of things that are available to us to optimize all the data we are dealing with. 
    • There are variable data printing and manipulation solutions. Think about the kind of work that you do. If you are a sign printer, you may never use a piece-level tracking system. You may never use postal optimization software. Analytic dashboards and online client portals should still be part of your life. If you want to offer something different to your customers, you might use some of the variable data solutions because you might be able to create programs for your customers to create variable signage, personalized signage, personalized packaging, personalized boxes, and personalized labels. 
    • [00:16:37] Ryan McAbee: I am glad you brought that up, Pat. As I look at the list of solutions on the left, the dashboards and the client portals can be universal to any type of printer. It is true about variable data printing in many cases as well. It is probably worth mentioning what customization is versus personalization because both are considered variable data, but personalization is where you are using identifying information unique to an individual to make that print unique to them.
    • Whereas customization is...
    • [00:17:03] Pat McGrew: It is demographic. Instead of using my information, Pat McGrew, or yours, Ryan McAbee, I might buy data about a certain ZIP code. What kind of people live in this ZIP code? And I make my decisions about my communication based on that.
    • [00:17:18] Ryan McAbee: You probably have seen some of the consumer product goods companies that had random names, printed random names, and it relates to you because that just happens to be your name. 
    • [00:17:25] Pat McGrew: Most famous one - Share-a-Coke campaign. 
    • [00:17:27] Ryan McAbee: I am pretty sure Nutella, Heineken, - there have been several brands. 
    • [00:17:30] Pat McGrew: Oh, everybody. Hershey did a big one earlier around the holidays, earlier in the year. There are opportunities. If you are looking to offer some unique products regardless of whether you are a sign printer or you are a document printer, these variable data programs can help you create products that give you some differentiation. You will be managing data, one way or the other; you have to get comfortable with the solutions that are going to help you do it in an optimal way. 
    • [00:17:52] Ryan McAbee: And all of that entails industry regulations, depending on what type of thing you are supporting.
    • Coming into content management, it is really everything that is designed to help us retrieve, manage, organize, and tag, so that we can find it easily down the road to reuse. Assign rights, who can access it, and who cannot access it. That is all the realm of a digital asset management system. The content management systems all do similar things. They just work in slightly different ways and with slightly different use cases. We probably talked about the first two enough. Maybe spend a little bit of time here talking about the uniqueness of a customer communications management solution, and also how that ties into more of the layout design and document re-engineering that may happen.
    • [00:18:31] Pat McGrew: You are most likely to be exposed to a content management system or a CCM system. They are prevalent in print shops around the world. Depending on the nature of the services your organization provides, you may have creative design capabilities in your shop. You might be using the Adobe Creative Cloud. You might be using Canva. You might be using Quark to help you provide creative services. 
    • You might have that thing we call document re-engineering, which is where you are taking an inbound file, and you are turning it into puzzle pieces. right? You are basically looking at all the elements of the file and making decisions to change some of those pieces. It might be a logo swap. It might be that you have gone to a new postal provider and the window on the envelope for the mailing piece is now a quarter of an inch too far to the left or right, and a document re-engineering solution can help you move the piece without having to re-engineer the whole upstream process that created the file. That is often a very economical and optimized solution that can be applied. You can add new content. If you have ever seen a little advertisement on the bottom of your credit card bill, that may not have been in the original file. That may have been applied through a document re-engineering system that calls out to a marketing object library and pulls that information in. In effect, a document re-engineering system works with a content management system to be able to interact with objects in a library to create the content the customer needs in a timely and optimized manner. That digital asset management system we mentioned before is basically a giant database of stuff, of objects and content and text blocks and fully-formed pieces that we can use over and over again. They are typically set up in such a way that they cannot be modified except by an authorized individual. The content management system has a lot of those same elements, but they typically include more tools for modifying the content or creating the content for multiple output channels.
    • If you look at a customer communications management solution, where they add some additional functionality is the ability to go out to multiple output channels, sometimes through the solution itself. They do not require you to build it and then hand it off to another system which a content management system would. It is really just a repository for stuff, whereas the customer communication management solution is actually capable of pushing things out through different channels, including text messaging and WhatsApp and Facebook, and anything else that you want to market through.
    • It is important for you to ask internally at your shop what solutions you have sitting there that you might be asked to interact with and understand what services your organization provides.
    • In terms of content management, some print shops have none. Print shops with zero content management solutions. 
    • [00:21:18] Ryan McAbee: Honestly, of all the solutions on the screen, you might be in a printing environment that has none of these, with the exception of creative design, because almost every printing establishment has some flavor of a tool here.
    • [00:21:29] Pat McGrew: They might have the on-prem version, they might have the cloud version, but they have something.
    • [00:21:32] Ryan McAbee: It is also important to note that the example of software vendor lists is not complete. This is just some random selection of tools that fit into each one of those categories. Going into this, you may not have a lot of these inside of your environment. It just really depends on your unique situation. 
    • [00:21:47] Pat McGrew: Look at the names because if you see the names now, you will know what they are. 
    • [00:21:50] Ryan McAbee: Exactly. You can match them up to what other similar solutions you may have inside of your environment. 
    • Moving on to workflow management solutions. This is really where all the detail happens to prepare the work for the output. It can be prepared in a lot of different ways. You can have the online ordering components to a web-to-print that also gets some preflight to help prepare it. You can convert the file formats or the data streams if they need to be going to most likely a PDF base workflow for many people these days.
    • We have covered a lot of these in our job onboarding module and also the key processes to workflow. I would say additionally reference those for this particular grouping of software because we speak to them much more in detail. 
    • A couple of things that we probably did not focus too much on were the makeready and batching solutions. Let's touch on those real quickly. I will start with makeready, and then I will pass it to you for batching, Pat. 
    • Makeready tools are often used in environments like in-plants, but not exclusively. It is where you may be scanning an original on a piece of glass or a scanner, and then you need to manipulate that. There are many different ways you may have to skew it or rotate it slightly to get it straight again. You might have to do some despeckling, which is trying to take out these random little hickeys or dots that are on the image after you scan it. It is also page ordering. It is being able to convert. Say I scanned this in color, but I want to have it actually print out in black and white. I will do that color conversion real quick. It is all about preparing pages that either you scan or that you have received as some kind of digital file, to begin with. Most of the OEMs of digital print equipment have some tool like this, and there are also some independent software vendors that provide solutions too. It is usually a term that you see in the digital printing space. Now on to batching.
    • [00:23:23] Pat McGrew: Batching is the fun stuff. Batching is where you are taking multiple jobs and combining them together in order to create a bigger job to send to the printer for better optimization of the capacity of the press. One of the things we know about printing in the current era is that we have seen a migration from a fewer number of giant runs to smaller jobs being put in more frequently. Your client used to order a million brochures at the beginning of the year and just warehouse them and go through them all year long. They do not want to pay for the warehousing anymore. By the way, they are changing things. They are changing products, so now they want to buy 2,500 of those brochures from you at a time. They have three-up brochures on a certain kind of paper, but you have eight or nine other customers who are doing the exact same thing. You make them a really good deal on these trifold brochures on this certain stock in a certain format. You have a lot of customers buying that product from you. The most efficient use of your press is to gang those jobs together, to basically batch them together into a single job and send that single job to the press. What that does for you is it saves you a ton of money. How it does that is that now you do not have the waste between jobs, which can be as much as 200 feet of paper waste on a digital role fit press. On analog presses, it is the difference in recalibrating for every job, which can lead to waste sheets. Even digital toner  jobs typically have waste sheets that happen or wait time that happens before the next job can actually start. When you batch it together, you eliminate all that wait time. You eliminate a lot of waste, and you make better use of your press. Presses like to run. They just like to run. Building bigger jobs allows you to get the most out of it. 
    • Now the trick with batching solutions is that they come in a lot of flavors.
    • Your print MIS may have a batching capability that nobody has ever used. It is just sitting there waiting for you to use it. No one has come up with a good reason to. From my perspective, the good reason to do it is to save money on the production process and create a more consistent work output in a more consistent manner.
    • There are standalone batching solutions as well. Some come from hardware vendors. Some of them come from known software vendors. I would start by asking your production team if you have a batching program in place. If you do, how is it used, and which vendor does it come from? What decisions are made on when to use it and when not to use it? Just by asking those questions, you might discover that there is a world of opportunity to optimize your workflow by making better use of batching solutions you have already paid for. If you have no batching solution, this is a really good time to go look for one. 
    • [00:26:02] Ryan McAbee: I think you said some key words there, Pat. Across the entire list of solutions we were talking about, each one is meant to optimize different parts of a print workflow. To really save money and automate and enhance whatever you are doing already in a manual type of approach. Or not doing it all.
    • [00:26:19] Pat McGrew: This is something even a newbie can ask, right? Even if you are new to a specific print shop or new to printing in general, asking questions that lead to optimization in the shop is always a good thing to do.
    • [00:26:31] Ryan McAbee: There are many software solutions that can be used in all of these fun printing environments that we've gone through at The Print University. 
    • We hope you have learned a lot and go back and reference this as a tool going forward and hope to see you on a future episode here.

39- primer: key workflow processes

Printing operations are complex chains of custom processes that may vary from job-to-job. The key to print workflows is integration and automation of people, processes, and equipment, through software. We discuss the four primary areas of production: job onboarding, preparation, production, and delivery.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and I am here with my colleague Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting. This time we are bringing you the key workflow processes. Ryan, we know that people who are listening may not really know the concept of workflow. They may have heard the term and not really understand that it is a set of processes. In our organizations, in our print shops, there are key identifiable workflow processes, and that is what we are going to talk you through in this episode. So Ryan, where do you think we need to start? 
    • [00:00:32] Ryan McAbee: We probably need to start by defining what we mean at a high level by workflow for print production. That really is from the point that the customer raises their hands and says, "I want to have X, Y, Z printed or output and all the discrete processes that take you from point A all the way to the delivery point. That delivery could be print; obviously, that is what we are largely focused on, but it could be other multi-channel output like we were talking about in another module, whether it is email, SMS, and any kind of app. 
    • [00:01:00] Pat McGrew: Workflows happen everywhere in the business, right? There is a workflow in the accounting department - how they invoice and what the tasks are. There is a workflow out on the loading dock in terms of the order of things that they do to make sure that everything that is going to be shipped or added into a mail cart for lodging with the postal service is done correctly. But for our purposes, we are going to look at the pieces that start when the job comes in the door. Think about every person who touches the job and, in the best of all circumstances, all the processes that touch the job.
    • [00:01:31] Ryan McAbee: That is right. For most printing environments, it is probably best to think of it in two different, bigger workflows.
    • There are a lot of micro-processes that you could say are a workflow - when you add multiple processes together to accomplish a certain task, get the product out the door, or packaging the product to be shipped and that sort of thing. But at a high level, you have the business workflow - that is all the things in terms of customer management, creating quotes and estimates, and then the ticketing process and the tracking process that flow through to make sure that you are actually producing what they wanted. That you are producing it in the timeframe that they expect it will be delivered in. That is the business workflow. 
    • Then you have the more production-oriented workflow. That is taking the content and the data, in many cases, and formatting that in a way that is intended for whatever output you are talking about. If it is a page-based kind of print, we would make sure that the pages look right, that the color looks right, the logos are in the right place, all that sort of stuff, and it is in how the customer intended it to look when it is output. That is more what we are focused on in terms of this module, where we are talking about print production.
    • [00:02:30] Pat McGrew: We start with the idea of job onboarding, which is bringing the job in. Then we want to prepare the work to make sure that it is going to be printable and deliverable. We produce it, and then we deliver it. Those are the four big stages we are going to focus on in this episode. 
    • [00:02:44] Ryan McAbee: A phrase that I hear you use often is leaving money on the floor. Of these four steps, the one that we identify as an area where money is left on the floor across all types of print shops is job onboarding. It is really a critical point in the job's life cycle, where it starts. If you do not get it right at the starting line, it is hard to error-correct when you get further downstream without having to start completely over.
    • It is almost as if you are running a relay race at the Olympics. If you get off the block at a slow pace, it is hard to recover. But then the fatal thing is if you do not have that handshake with the baton just perfectly, or you drop it - it is over.
    • [00:03:18] Pat McGrew: It is done for you. That is exactly what job onboarding is. It is getting that relay race lined up, but it is also making sure that the fine detail is correct. We have heard horror stories of people who have onboarded jobs - the salesperson took the job order and wrote it down in a notebook; it was not entered into any kind of validating system. They brought it in, and they handed it off to a CSR. A decimal was out of place or inches instead of feet. Just all sorts of things can go wrong in measurements, right? Just the paper, the substrate, and the difference between one uncoated and another uncoated substrate might make a difference to the customer. If you deliver it on the wrong one, they may reject the job outright. Everything about capturing the information becomes vital. We know that so many companies still do these things manually. When you are manually writing it down, and then somebody sits down with an estimating and quoting program, then they are estimating it from the wrong information and delivering a quote from the wrong information - that is what I mean by leaving money on the floor. Whatever you do next, it is going to cost you money to get back to what the customer really wanted.
    • [00:04:21] Ryan McAbee: One thing that is complicated here - and we are not saying this is an overnight thing, you just snap your finger, and it is fixed - for many shops, there are multiple paths that this onboarding process can take because the customer interaction point comes through in different ways. You can come through that physical salesperson that is going and sitting in front of the customer saying, "Hey, what can we help you with this month, this year, whatever." That is the manual side of it. That is really what we are trying, not necessarily to avoid, but we are trying to put structure in place around that so that you are capturing the right information. Ideally, you are capturing it into a system like a print MIS solution or a web portal that is attached to that to make it easier for a salesperson to use. You are getting all the information firsthand. it is not having to be transcribed and transposed and done incorrectly because we are guessing at some things. That is, on the manual side, what we are trying to correct. 
    • If you have other ways of onboarding work from customers, whether it is online order forms in a more simplified version of web-to-print, they are putting the information in themselves. That is a little bit of a different process that is going to remove errors, at least from the print provider's side of the equation. It is all about getting that upfront information right. And then the other critical thing, Pat, is when it comes to this estimating and quoting. That can be a land mine, too, in terms of profitability because you have to look at your system every once in a while. 
    • [00:05:34] Pat McGrew: You absolutely do. I think one of the challenges in a lot of the early generations of web-to-print systems and digital storefronts and order entry capture systems in our industry was that they did not validate the entries. I could say that I wanted something that was a thousand inches long when I did not really mean that. I might have meant 10 inches long and forgot the decimal point. There are all sorts of stories of people entering the wrong information. The system never told them there was anything wrong with what they did, so bad things happened. 
    • The other thing is that a sophisticated system will actually allow you, as the print shop, to define the specifications that you can handle in your print shop. If you are printing everything in specific sizes and somebody wants to order something that is larger than what you can print, it should throw some sort of message alert to talk to your CSR or other message and not actually let you place the order online until you have talked to a person.
    • There are those issues, but then there are also the issues of integration of all these pieces. If you have the customer sending you things via FTP, which is the file transfer, or they are sending files attached to email clients or an email that tells you where to log into their system to go grab a file or things like WeTransfer and Box and all the different sort of online file transfer things - every one of those need a process around them if they are going to survive. The more you can get rid of things like email clients with files attached and links - because I do not know about you, but I do not like clicking on links in this era of malware and cyber hacking - and use secure file transfer protocols, secured boxes that you can drop files into making job onboarding more reliable and safer for everybody.
    • Those are considerations and, of course, making sure that your scheduling software is actually aware of all things around it. A lot of companies put in point tools over the years. "Oh, look, here is a really easy-to-use scheduling piece of software. I have to manually enter everything into it to get a schedule, but it is a really nice-looking scheduling system. It is a really nice-looking preflight system, but I have to execute it manually every time I execute it." 
    • The key precept of workflow is that we want a job to be as automated as possible as work comes into the shop. It should be validated, preflight issues resolved, and then move on to the next step in the process in an automated manner. That is hard to do with a lot of individual tools that do not talk to each other. 
    • [00:08:02] Ryan McAbee: For the job onboarding to really have success here, the best practices that we would recommend are to really limit, as much as possible, the different paths that your customers can use to actually submit requests for jobs. The fewer paths or roads that you have coming into the shop the fewer you have to figure out how to manage and then hopefully automate. That is number one. Number two - that is why I like web-to-print. You mentioned that there are parameters that you have to set. It makes you think about your business in terms of products with parameters. A term that is useful to think about. 
    • It is going to say, "Yes, we can make a poster, or we can make a business card.” But you can only do it in these sizes. You can only do it with this kind of content and so on. From that point, it is really about linking your different software solutions together so that they can communicate back and forth. A prime example of that is not a common practice in the industry yet, but should be worked toward - is the fact that if you are offering products online, you should really have that link to the estimating engine of your print management solution. That is the brain and the calculator for all of your pricing because it is the only one that knows your up-to-date costs. If you are using a flat cost list on your web-to-print solution, you could have a little bit of improvement there. 
    • [00:09:05] Pat McGrew: Little bit of caveat there - that assumes you are keeping your print management environment up to date. So every time the inventory comes in, you have to make sure that the costs are updated in your MIS in order for the estimates to be accurate.
    • And sadly, we often find that is not the case. 
    • [00:09:20] Ryan McAbee: In times of volatility, particularly with your inputs, you need to be more on top of that and proactive than if it is pretty stable. We have been through a period where our ink costs and our paper costs have been fluctuating greatly, and in some cases, we have seen substitute products that may have a different cost basis as well. You are absolutely right, Pat; all that information has to be up-to-date. 
    • Now that we have the job in hand, the customer says we want to have it made. We have all their artwork content that we have retrieved from somewhere. What do we do?
    • [00:09:47] Pat McGrew: This is where the grunt work happens, isn't it? It is where you make sure that the file that has come in is actually printable. We call it preflighting. We run it through some tool or set of tools that identify the elements within the print file and give us some information about whether all the fonts that should be embedded in the file are actually there. It tells us whether we have different color spaces involved in the same file; RGB and CMYK. We have information given to us about mismatched resolutions. In the era of multi-channel delivery, many designers have not been taught that 72-dot-per-inch images that might work fine on your phone are not ideal for print. We actually need higher-resolution print-ready objects, graphics, and photographs. 
    • This is where sometimes we have files coming in that are not in a format that my print device actually knows, right? Maybe it is an older format. Maybe it is just a different format, so we need file conversions. We have called them transforms in other episodes. These take in maybe a PostScript file and put out a PDF or a PCL file.
    • [00:10:55] Ryan McAbee: It is becoming more apparent that all of the print segments are trying to converge and standardize on PDF as the file format for the workflow on the production side. It may come in as something else in the beginning, but it is giving you more flexibility.  
    • There are a lot of preparation steps for the page itself - to get the right color, the right font sets, and the right images. Then it has to be imposed or positioned to go onto often a larger sheet that is going to be run at the printer, and we can save some money there, too, right?
    • [00:11:26] Pat McGrew: We absolutely can because there is really great software in the marketplace you can acquire. Sometimes it is an add-on to the software you already own that use - we will call it artificial intelligence; it is really machine learning - to provide, based on the specifications you provide, the size of what you are printing. Are you printing a bunch of 8 ½ by 11 or A4 sheets, or are you printing larger size formats? Are you printing a lot of smaller formats? It helps you identify the most efficient ways to lay the images onto the sheet, whether it is a roll-fed or a sheet-fed device that you are working with. It helps you position the kind of virtual images that you are going to be printing onto the sheet in the most efficient way. The smartest of the programs can actually give you options, right? We think this is the most efficient for cost, but this one actually might be more efficient for lack of waste. This one might give you better options depending on the substrate that you are using.
    • Some of the solutions today are so smart that to not use them is almost silly. This is as opposed to the old days when we used to literally sit and do it by hand to determine what needs to be on the backside of the duplex page in order for the book to fold correctly.
    • Imposition - we think of it always in terms of books, but it is not always books. It is something we think of in terms of brochures. Anything that is printed on both sides is something where you think about imposition, but also in terms of just positioning on the sheet. 
    • [00:12:48] Ryan McAbee: It really should not even be thought of as pages at this point anymore. When we cross all the different lines of printing that are possible, it is really about the optimization of the material or substrate. It is just the placement of those to do that optimization. 
    • One thing is to think about if you had the big funnel or the larger funnel where you were taking in your work on the job onboarding part. At this point, it is really application-specific or product specific. Different products require different preparation steps and require different impositioning will require different, this, that, and the other. Ultimately not all of your work is going to be output on the same equipment, both printing and finishing. You are going to have a variety of different kinds of work that you do. It is best to think about how to align processes that are needed by the product types that I actually print. 
    • [00:13:31] Pat McGrew: And the services that you offer. Because one of the other things is that the prepare step is really a series of services that get applied to a job.
    • Your relationship with your customer might be such that you offer them the service of doing document re-engineering for them. There is an old format that is embedded in the print file, and they want you to change the logo because we just changed our logo, and we do not have time to change all our files. So you offer them the service of running through a toolset that allows you to make a swap of one logo for another or change a color scheme because you changed your brand colors. There are services that you can offer there. You can offer postal optimization services, which means you are using a different set of tools.
    • The prepare step is where you are doing - I called it before the grunt work - of making sure that when the file heads out into its delivery channel, you have applied every service to it that you want to charge for, and you have applied all the things to that job that will help you make it process efficiently through the rest of the steps it has to go through.
    • [00:14:34] Ryan McAbee: Those couple of examples were perfect because, in that re-engineering scenario that you laid out, that would be a transaction-type document that we are probably applying that to or direct mail, but not necessarily if I am doing signage work, as an example.
    • [00:14:45] Pat McGrew: Yeah, you would not normally see that in signage. It could work. You could, in fact, if you sell document re-engineering software as a vendor; that could be an opportunity for you. To be honest, it is typically in transaction work and direct mail work. Any place where variable data is involved, where you are actually changing objects, changing images, changing content based on programmatic rules, document re-engineering can tend to play in those spaces. For most commercial static work, it would not. 
    • [00:15:10] Ryan McAbee: The other example you gave is talking about post-optimization. Again, this is where it becomes product and application-specific because if it is not going into the mail stream, you are not going to do that step. It is very specific in terms of what you are producing.
    • The other thing we have not talked about yet in the prepare stage, which happens across the board, is the concept of proofing. This is showing the customer what the output should look like. There are two major forms of proofing. There is what we call soft or electronic proofing, and then there is what we usually refer to as hard copy proofing. Even in hard copy, it could be content versus color-accurate proofing. Do you still see that a lot in the industry, Pat?
    • [00:15:42] Pat McGrew: When you think about how all of us over the last several years of lockdowns got sent home, an amazing number of design agencies and big brands all of a sudden got comfortable with soft proofing. When we talk about soft proofing, we are talking about sending, usually, a PDF file to the customer who created the job. We are saying to them, here is the final PDF file that we are going to print from. Are you okay with it? 
    • The largest agencies, the largest brands, typically, those approval professionals are working with monitors that are color calibrated - that have the capability of applying the same color profile that the press will use. They are aware of what substrates they will be printed on. It is very accurate for them to be able to look at it, and yes, that is what I am looking for. 
    • If you are not in an organization that has that capability and you are exceptionally color sensitive to your brand logo color to how things are going to appear, that is when hard copy proofs are still typically printed and cut out and sent off to the customer to be reviewed and approved.
    • Most transaction work is approval for position. They call it FPO - for position only - of the elements of a job that will be printed. Direct mail in the letter format version will be the same way. The higher the degree of luxury in the brand, the higher degree of color sensitivity in the brand, the higher degree of messaging in the brand, the more likely they might ask for a printed copy to take a look. A lot of the static color jobs.
    • Book jobs, interestingly, are mostly soft copy proof and approval these days. They have already seen the print quality that is going to come off the press in black and white for the book block. It is not going to change. They get a copy of the cover. They get a proof, a single copy, and everything is fine. I think that we will see all these styles of proof and approval for some time to come. But approval management is becoming more automated. 
    • [00:17:28] Ryan McAbee: I think you made a couple of good points. You are probably going to have to go to a more elaborate proofing handshake and approval process if one or two things happen. It is a more graphically rich and designed piece. Also, depending on the client, if they have more stringent requirements because they are representing a brand or they are just particular. 
    • [00:17:45] Pat McGrew: Maybe they are asking for an unusual substrate, right?
    • Something that is not a run-of-the-mill substrate. Then they might really want to see how their vision and reality link together. 
    • [00:17:55] Ryan McAbee: Other than PDF delivery of a softproof, there are also many portal-type solutions that have a lot of different tools available for the end user to where they can view the dots that may be printed - to view the separations of the different colors to make sure it is overlaying and trapping correctly and all this kinda stuff. 
    • [00:18:09] Pat McGrew: Yeah, we have been talking about it in terms of the workflow in a digital print workflow. When you start talking about offset-type processes and flexo-type processes where color separations are important - understanding stochastic screening versus other forms of screening may be very important to you and your processes.
    • That is where having a specialized portal for soft proofing becomes essential if you cannot get access to a hard copy print very easily. 
    • [00:18:34] Ryan McAbee: Probably the universal rule for all printers is that you want this process to go as quickly as possible. If you do not get the sign-off, you cannot print whatever the actual job is
    • [00:18:44] Pat McGrew: This is where approval management solutions can be really helpful because you can set up rules that automatically nudge the client to get them to confirm when they received the proof, confirm when they have reviewed it, and confirm their approval if a hard copy proof has been sent. It can monitor when they view a soft copy. And if they view it, but they do not approve it, you can nudge them and say, "Hi, was there a problem? What do we need to do?" And keep on doing that until you get the approval because time is important. 
    • [00:19:11] Ryan McAbee: You want that nudging to be in an automated system and not the CSR having to email or pick up the phone.
    • [00:19:16] Pat McGrew: Because that is the most expensive way to do it.
    • [00:19:18] Ryan McAbee: That is right. Now we are moving on to the produced part of the equation.
    • We are basically preparing the equipment to receive the files or the job to print or the job to output if it does not print. We are talking about device setup. Device calibrations to make sure it is at an optimal print condition, optimal color output, that sort of thing.
    • There are some other kinds of interesting things that are happening in terms of automation and also the quality control aspect that we have seen emerge over the equipment in recent years. Walk us through a few of those and why they are useful 
    • [00:19:47] Pat McGrew: When you are looking at print, the print industry people come in different flavors. They come in extremely knowledgeable flavors where their eye is so good they can catch a color miss, just in their brain. Then you have people all the way down the scale to people who really are not very knowledgeable, but they have been charged with making sure that everything is going to print correctly. That is a pretty wide range of people that we are trying to help out. You want to use as many of your tools as possible to help guide you along the path. 
    • If you are in an analog print shop, the process of getting ready to print a job is significantly different than if you are in a digital print shop. The whole process of getting a file, getting a plate made. There are a lot of different paths depending on the nature of the equipment that you are using. Getting it mounted. Getting the printer ready. Getting ink levels set, doing your test runs, and trying to minimize those, so you minimize waste. All your calibration. These are time-consuming processes. For every tool that you can possibly use if it is available to you, you should use it. Sadly, we do walk into shops that have very automated presses that are being run as manual. 
    • [00:20:50] Ryan McAbee: Some of those automation techniques on the analog side - so that is offset printing, flexo, et cetera - are that they can now have more automated plate mounting and hanging, so an operator does not have to do that. They also can receive data from the prepress area to set up the ink densities that it expects are needed, so that saves time and minimizes the waste that you mentioned there, Pat. 
    • [00:21:10] Pat McGrew: Which makes modern presses really lovely. 
    • [00:21:12] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, and the ink loading can be automatic and everything. The operator can focus more on making sure the papers feed and seeing the output come off the output section. And then, many times, taking that output and using a tool to measure the output, to say that it is in color range. 
    • [00:21:26] Pat McGrew: Get it on the table, get it scanned, and have it read back to you. Now the truth is, in our industry, analog presses are amazingly robust devices. They are manufactured for longevity. So there are still large sections of the market using presses that do not have those automated capabilities. Those folks have a bit harder job making sure everything is going to be registered correctly, getting their color managed, and getting their ink settings set up. If you are in one of those press shops that has gone to automated equipment, your life is significantly better, and you are able to produce things more quickly with less downtime between jobs than a shop that is running a pure manual press. 
    • [00:22:08] Ryan McAbee: On the digital side, first of all, There are fewer steps. There are no plates required and so forth, but the other thing is that they have been building sensors and different systems inside the actual printer to help the operator do many of these things automatically. You hit the button, and it goes ahead and calibrates the device. You hit a button, and it may be even G7 compliant at that point for the color side.
    • [00:22:26] Pat McGrew: A lot of them have automated many of the processes that allow you to claim G7 certification. They have also made it easier to create custom profiles to style the ink and the color management in a certain way to meet a certain customer demand or an unusual substrate. A lot of digital presses have become very smart about that.
    • Not all digital presses are created equally. Not all inkjet presses are created equally. Not all toner presses are created equally. There is some learning curve to understanding how your equipment behaves. Some inkjet presses have image optimization modules that optimize the ink usage, how droplets are dropped, and the size of the drops. Others do not. 
    • Some toner systems have image compensation modules, and others do not. It is important to understand the equipment that is running on your floor. To understand how much to trust whatever the software is telling you as well, right? You want to trust, but verify until you really understand how the presses in your operation are working.
    • [00:23:22] Ryan McAbee: There is a general line of order here in the produce stage. It is usually that you are going to print something, and then it is going to move along to some sort of finishing step or steps, usually multiple finishing techniques that are involved.
    • That can either be inline, meaning it is done as part of the print process, after the print process with equipment connected. It can be nearline, where you are scanning a barcode, and it helps set up the equipment. It could be completely offline, where the operators do more manual tweaks and controls. 
    • [00:23:48] Pat McGrew: Even offline equipment can read a barcode. A lot of the newer offline equipment can. Finishing is everything from just a chop of a perf on a page that is coming through to complex motion cutters, plow folders, and things that are actually folding the sheets on their way into a process.
    • [00:24:03] Ryan McAbee: Again, I know we have said it multiple times already, but it is all driven by the final output. What is that product supposed to look like at the end of the day? 
    • [00:24:10] Pat McGrew: And please look at our finishing module because we go into a lot more detail. 
    • [00:24:13] Ryan McAbee: I think the other universal thing that we can say on the produce stage is that there is information or data that can be brought over from the prepare stage and used to set up and automate more processes with the equipment, assuming that equipment can accept that information.
    • [00:24:29] Pat McGrew: There is a phrase that you will hear in workflow - in print shops - it is the term JDF, job definition format, or JMF, the job messaging format. It is a protocol. It is a way that machines can communicate with each other, and data can be captured and shared with other machines or with people, or with reports. Many modern machines use that format to communicate with each other. I think it is still not as widely implemented as its founders hoped it would be by now.
    • If you hear that phrase, that means that you are likely in a shop that has some automation and the ability to capture data from the machines. The good thing to do is then to look at that data and use it. Analyze it to help you understand if you are getting the most out of the equipment that you have.
    • [00:25:14] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, definitely maximize the use of it. So that is not only pre-setting equipment but also using the messaging component to get that other data back and figure out what to do with it. 
    • Finishing us out here, we have to deliver this work somehow. Again, it is going to be based on what product we are actually doing. Maybe walk us through a couple of scenarios here, whether we are doing something that is transactional direct mail that goes into the mail stream versus maybe we are warehousing something for kits and all the different kinds of fun stuff that we can get into in this final stage here.
    • [00:25:39] Pat McGrew: Print and mailers, which are transaction people and direct mailers who are printing for the purpose of getting something into the mail stream, sometimes all they do is print, fold, insert it in the envelope, and it goes. Sometimes it is a much more complex operation because there are die cuts and things that are going to be cut out of the direct mail or a foldover postcard with a cutout. It can be pretty complex, but at the end of the day, it has to be capable of being mailed. If it is in an envelope, the envelope has to be sealed. There has to be postage, and it has to be presorted before it gets to the USPS. If it is a postcard, there are some different processes. If you are in a print and mail shop, you know that there is equipment out there that is helping you get the mail prepared for lodging with the post office, and off it goes. 
    • If you are a book printer, for instance, you might be creating books of one because you are responding to an online order environment. As a book is prepared and is finished, it is inbound, and the cover is on it; it is ready to go. The process that you go through there is probably that there is a barcode that is traveling along with that book that tells the shipping department what to do with it. Does it get sent Priority? Does it get shipped, FedEx? Does it get shipped at book rate, and we hope it gets there?
    • If you are a publication printer that is printing maybe 25 or 50, or hundreds of thousands of books, you are probably putting all of those books into crates. They may go to a warehouse before they actually get shipped anywhere. They may go directly onto a truck to get delivered to a distribution facility. In those cases, the process is interesting because you have to know the weight of the book, height of the book, the length of the book, and width of the book, to know how to pack it most efficiently and effectively into the packaging material. Then get the appropriate weight to get it lodged into the shipping organization or even to store it in the warehouse. There are a lot of details that happen when you are handling book-type things. 
    • The same process if you are creating marketing collateral for the fulfillment, right? You talk about kitting. If you have ever opened a new bank account. If you have ever received a new credit card. Sometimes when you join a new member organization, they might send you a folder full of stuff. Something has to actually get that stuff in the folder. There is a whole kitting operation that is typically manual today. The building of kits is still typically a people-oriented operation where you grab a folder and stuff in that you're supposed to fold it in half and pass it to the next person. 
    • Or it might be that it goes into a box. We have all gotten the pretty boxes in the mail that have the little holders, and maybe it is a cup and a pen, and a key chain and a flashlight. Those operations are all manual. And then there is some printed content that goes with it. Those processes, very people-oriented, typically have multiple staging warehouses involved. One for all the raw materials. The printed materials and anything else that has to be included in the kit, regardless of the format of the kit. Then people assemble the kit, and now the kit has to be handed off to be delivered. Might be that it is all stacked in pallets and shipped to someone else who is going to do the delivery. It might be that your organization is going to put it into the delivery stream, either through a common carrier or through the postal system. 
    • If you are doing any kind of sign and display work, you might be doing a single copy, or you might be doing hundreds of signs. They all require a certain kind of packaging in order to be stored correctly and shipped correctly and safely. They might go into roll tubes. They might be shipped on pallets. They might be assembled into kits for delivery to retail stores. There are probably as many processes as there are angels dancing on the head of a pin for this part of our process. It depends on what your organization does for a living and what part of the supply chain you fit into, and the nature of the products that you prepare.
    • We know of some large printing organizations that are also really efficient, optimized kitting and fulfillment organizations. We know others that are only printers, and if it needs to be kitted, they send it out. All of these things are possibilities. 
    • [00:29:29] Ryan McAbee: To close it out here, we have been focused on print applications or products, but it could be digital delivery through apps, SMS, and so forth.
    • Then on the fulfillment side, it could be fulfilling print with a physical object, like a coffee mug and an embroidered t-shirt. It does not necessarily have to be a printed product there, either. We find printers are getting into all these other value-added services, and it changes the mix of things a little bit here in the delivery stage.
    • [00:29:50] Pat McGrew: It does, and it all has to be tracked. 
    • [00:29:52] Ryan McAbee: Exactly. 
    • That gives us a good overview from the job onboarding all the way through the delivery of the work. Those are the key processes for print production. 
    • We hope to see you on a future episode here at The Print University!

40- primer: design considerations

Designing for print is not the same as designing for the Web or digital delivery. There are creative and business considerations to understand. This module explores the most important areas impacted by design choices.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another episode here at The Print University. I am joined by Pat McGrew of the McGrewGroup. This is Ryan with Pixel Dot Consulting. Today, we are talking about design considerations. I think we are coming at it from an angle of “I'm the designer and I need to know what to do to make the design function for print, or at least some things I need to think about.”
    • [00:00:20] Pat McGrew: Absolutely. Designers know how to design. We love the fact that designers know how to design. They understand color and how colors fit together and angles. They have that architectural knowledge, but when you are designing for print, it is not the same as designing for a screen.
    • One of the things we know about designers coming out of schools these days is that is really the primary focus. It is not 20 years ago when people came out with a really good grounding in designing for print and understanding all the technical elements of designing for print.
    • Today we want to go through some of the things that you really need to understand if that is what you are going to be doing. Today, a lot of really good designers are doing whole campaigns. They might be designing for the web, for your smartphone, but also designing for print. They may understand the mobile and online elements much better than they understand the print elements. 
    • We want to talk a little bit first about creative considerations. Ryan, print technology today is so vast. You might be designing for an offset press where there are multiple plates, and there is one plate per color. It might be a four-color press, a six-color press, or a 10-color press. You might be designing for a digital device where the image is sent to a Raster Image Processor and imaged for inkjet or for toner in one single pass over the substrate. In each of those cases, you have got some special considerations.
    • [00:01:39] Ryan McAbee: When it comes to the offset world, which really applies to all the analog printing technologies, it is a mechanical process. There are certain things that you have to be aware of in your design in terms of how colors join each other, how they overlap, and how they lay over top of each other because it prints unit to unit. There is no such thing as perfect registration. We cheat that with something called trapping, which is basically spreading or choking, overlaying or undercutting the colors when they lay together. There are specific things related to what kind of print technology you are using.
    • The thing that I was going to jump in and say before was, "You mean I cannot use the image that I pulled off the web and have it actually print correctly?" 
    • [00:02:15] Pat McGrew: Honestly, no, please do not do that. It is one of the things I think a lot of designers miss, and it is not deliberate by any stretch of the imagination.
    • It is just the experience. When you are designing for the web, when you are designing for a screen, whether it is a smartphone or a laptop, or a tablet, you are dealing in a world of red, green, and blue. Your primary colors. When we are dealing with print technology, we are often in that other kind of color. We are actually dealing with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black and how your design is different. Also, the resolution is important. And when we are designing for print, we are designing for a higher resolution. It means we have finer controls. We want to make sure that we are designing for the resolution that the piece is going to actually appear at. 
    • Let's talk about the business considerations for a second because we are going to dive into some of the specifics in a minute. Every one of these decisions has a cost associated with it. Sometimes designers do not always realize that. 
    • [00:03:06] Ryan McAbee: The more complex your design is, the more cost you are adding to it. As an example, if you are using really fine lines or really small reverse text, that is more difficult to actually print regardless of the printing technology you use. It is going to require more effort from the printer, who is going to obviously pass those costs along to you. 
    • [00:03:23] Pat McGrew: That is okay. If you are doing a high-end campaign for a luxury brand or for an organization that wants that kind of look and feel. They want the die cuts. They want the foiling. They want the spot varnishes. They want glitter. They want holograms. That is all great. You can design for that, but it is important to remember that everything you do that takes beyond the basic color on the basic substrate range is going to have a cost associated. It is something that you not only have to, as a designer, discuss with your buyer, but you may end up having conversations with the printing company as well. They may come back and say, “We see these design specs that you have sent to us. For us to do what you are asking for is going to cost A. If you will work with us to make a few changes, it will cost B, which will be much less.” Those are conversations that designers have to be prepared to have and not be insulted. Nobody is impugning your design creativity.
    • There are actual costs associated with all of these things, and most design agencies understand the trade-offs. It is always a good idea to be ready to have that conversation with a printing organization. 
    • [00:04:33] Ryan McAbee: You really have to understand the creative brief from the client, but more importantly, how that is going to align with the print that has to happen, and also the costs that are associated with it. It is always a good idea to get the parties communicating together. 
    • [00:04:45] Pat McGrew: Have that budget conversation, because one of the things we know from some other work that we have done on brand conversations is that sometimes these become loops that go around at the very front end of the process multiple times to dial in that knife's edge between design intent and actual execution cost.
    • It is one of those things that designers, in general, should be prepared for. There is a business behind how all these designs will be executed. 
    • [00:05:10] Ryan McAbee: Let's talk a little bit more about the specifics of the design and design elements. We are going to start by distinguishing what is a typeface versus a font and what maybe even what a font foundry is and all of those things related to text.
    • [00:05:22] Pat McGrew: Font is my favorite four-letter word. I will admit it. I love fonts. One of my favorite apps on my phone is called What The Font. What the Font is from Monotype, which is a font foundry - an organization that designs fonts for a living. You can hold the phone over a menu in a restaurant to figure out what fonts they are using. I use it all over the place just to see what people are using. 
    • Typed faces come in flavors. They come in Serif, which means it has glyphs. It comes in Sans Serif, which means it is a very clean font. There is something called pseudo-Sans Serif, where there is just the hint of a little serif.
    • The reason it is important to know these things is that, traditionally, Serif fonts were considered easier to read. You see it a lot in books. Fonts are considered easier to read because the Serif, that thing that hangs off, takes your eye into the next letter and helps you form the words.
    • We actually read shapes more than we read letters, and it helps carry them together. Whereas, San Serif is much more commonly found as a display type because each letter is very distinguishable - it is great for logotype. These Serif and Sans Serif and pseudo-Sans Serif typefaces are typically licensed. If you are an Adobe customer, you have a whole bucket of fonts that you get as an Adobe customer in the Adobe Type Library. You can also license from companies like Monotype and independent font designers. Very often, large enterprises will have their company font that they've paid for.
    • It is important to know that typefaces are copyrighted items. If you go out and buy that CD with the 5,000 free fonts that you can use, it is only free to use for non-commercial purposes. If you are designing for a client who is going to use it in advertising, for instance, those 5,000 free fonts you should not be using.
    • When we use the word font, we are actually talking about everything that hangs under the typeface. It is the plain version, the regular version, the bold version, the italic version, the bold italic version, small caps, special characters, and sometimes ligatures. In German, you get that ff ligature. A lot of languages use ligatures for specialized characters. 
    • A font is a whole family that is put together, and a type designer designs the font family based on intended uses. Some fonts will be designed for display type. They will design big open areas in the counters, and they will design serifs to be really big and bold, not petite and small.
    • Other times they are designing perhaps a book font family to give you the ability to do the normal, the bold italic, and the italic with some maybe special entities involved. You want to be looking for fonts that are designed for the intended purpose. Anytime that you're working in a professional setting, designing for clients, it is really best if you are using licensed fonts so that you can prove that you have the right to use them and your client does not wind up in trouble down the road.
    • [00:08:23] Ryan McAbee: It is absolutely important to read the fine print in terms of the licensing of the font. There are some newer initiatives that evolved over the years, with Google Fonts as an example which is more of an open source.
    • Then from a technical perspective, once you find the font, you have to put it into your computer using font managers to turn them on and off as you need to. There are even different types of fonts in terms of format. There are Type 1, TrueType, and OpenType. 
    • [00:08:46] Pat McGrew: Type 3, which, if you are using it, you should stop because Adobe is discontinuing support for it. It is important to understand the environment that you are developing in. And today, most designers' work will end up as either PostScript files or PDF files.
    • Today, any kind of modern font, if you buy from Monotype or you buy from Adobe or other professional font houses, will take care of you. They are not going to deliver a format that you're not going to be able to use widely. 
    • If you are working in a legacy environment, you are working for one of the big enterprises that may have fonts in use right now that were designed for devices that no longer even exist, and they have been migrating them along very carefully. It is always worth asking really deep questions. If somebody hands you a file that has a font in it, you may have a problem. It is a very old style of font and some of the open source fonts; even today, not all open source fonts are created equal. You want to make sure you understand the source for your font and also its availability for use in the output formats that you are going to be working with.
    • And that is true not only for the print, but also on the screen. 
    • [00:09:52] Ryan McAbee: When you go from your design application out to a format like a PDF, you want to make sure that you include every font - what is called embedding, so that it rides along with the file. It can be interpreted downstream by the applications that pick it up and use it.
    • The other best practice here is to not try and fit as many fonts, and different types of fonts, into a design as humanly possible. We have all run across files in the print world where it literally had hundreds, if not thousands of different fonts in one file. First of all, it takes longer to process, and it is more error-prone. From a design aspect, it is just overwhelming too. 
    • [00:10:21] Pat McGrew: Sometimes, a design file can carry fonts it never uses. It is always worth doing a little bit of cleanup. Be hygienic about the files that you are transmitting to your customers. If somebody hands you a design template or a previous design and they are asking you to update it, for instance. Change the colors, maybe change the logo. When you are done with your work, it is worth interrogating the file. Put it through a preflight tool so that you can make sure what you are transmitting to your customer is as slim as possible and it does not have fonts that are never even used. 
    • [00:10:52] Ryan McAbee: Then we have another kind of detail work that can be in the file that can also cause issues when we go to print.
    • It is really the fine detail, as we say, not only in the vector lines but also if you get down to really small type or even what is known as reverse type. What do we need to be aware of here? 
    • [00:11:08] Pat McGrew: Let's talk about lines first. If you are doing a project that is going to be both print and online delivered, it is important to remember that screens are not the same resolution as what we print. You could have a line that is so fine that it never appears on a screen or on a phone. It is something you would want to test if you are going for very fine lines. It is the same problem if you are going to print both offset and digital; you want to make sure that there is enough information in the file about that line that it can actually be printed. A one-point line is very difficult to print. It takes more information to actually do a good job on a one-point line. 
    • You also want to be careful about colors when it comes to very fine lines that are a single color. It is very hard to keep the registration. Remember that print is a composite process, and it is laying colors on top of one another in order to accomplish that line.
    • If you want a red line or you want a purple line, it may not be printable across all the different technologies that your piece will use, so it is something you want to test. We always suggest checking with your printer to find out their recommendations. Many printing companies will actually have design guidelines that they can share with you about how thin a line they can print, how small a typeface they can print, and what colors they can accomplish at different point sizes. These are all really important design elements, and on the reverse type side, it is what is in this picture - white on black. It might not be white on black. It might be white on dark blue. It is basically the process of printing black, and then it is going to be on whatever color paper is underneath it. This is the other way around where we are surrounding the characters with the ink, and we are knocking out and leaving the substrate to show. 
    • If the substrate is not bright, maybe it is an off-gray, and black might not give you something that is readable text. All of these design elements are really fun to use and can give you some really award-winning designs, but only if you can actually print them.
    • [00:12:57] Ryan McAbee: This kind of reverse type is what we refer to as a knockout versus an overprint. A knockout means that it is going to show the substrate that is beneath.
    • [00:13:04] Pat McGrew: You can accomplish the same thing with an overprint. If you are working with a device that has a device link. We have seen examples where they do a dark laydown, and print white on top of it. With toner, that is something that you cannot do because the toners do not mix. 
    • These are things you would want to test. Be aware for design purposes of what each output technology is really going to do. 
    • [00:13:26] Ryan McAbee: We talked a little bit about color already. The fact is that when you are designing for a screen, it is in the additive color model using red, green, and blue. When there is overlap, you get your white. 
    • Where printing is using CMYK: your cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The K is black, and it is what is referred to as subtractive color. What is fun is that you may choose a color in the RGB color space, and it might not be represented by CMYK printing inks because it is outside of what is known as the color gamut, which you see in the triangle on the right here. We have all kinds of fun things to think about when it comes to color, not only in the color models but whatever you are printing on is going to impact the color. 
    • [00:14:01] Pat McGrew: That image up in the top right is a really important one. I know in many print shops and many design shops, you will see these images printed out as posters and sitting on the wall just as a reminder that there are color gamuts. It is important to understand the target technology so that you understand what you are trying to accomplish and what can be accomplished.
    • Remember that every different kind of substrate: paper or vinyl, metal, plastic, film, or whatever you are printing has different receiving characteristics. Not every type of paper, for instance, will represent red, blue, or purple in the same way. Some of that has to do with the reflective characteristics of the paper and how it absorbs ink or handles toner. Some of it has to do with the inks that are used, whether they are offset inks, or they are used in digital devices. For this reason, knowing your target output technologies is very helpful. 
    • Sometimes that information is simply not available to you at the time the design is being started. As soon as you can, you want to test to see how your color is going to be represented. This is often why we have talked about press sheets and press checks, where the designer asks for a physical proof. What it is going to look like. That very carefully chosen pink that you have decided to go for in a logo color might not appear the same on every kind of substrate that the piece is targeted for. Those are things you want to test. 
    • This is probably a good place, Ryan, to mention G7. G7 is a standard. It is actually a process, to be fair - a specification. You will find in the world of color that there are people with deep expertise who are very aware of the different color standards that exist.
    • European standards are a bit different than American standards and how they are defined and specified. G7 is one from Idealliance, and it has seen wide adoption even in Europe in many cases with some of the larger print houses. G7 is a process where you literally are calibrating the press to the design to make sure that the color the designer specified is what is being delivered - or as close as possible - to the print output device. Basically, you use a camera device to look at specific colors, and you back your way into what kind of information needs to be fed into the process so that the designer's file will print what the designer intended. So the red that the press can print. 
    • [00:16:33] Ryan McAbee: At a higher level, the reason we have seen G7 widely adopted is the fact that it is one that is fairly easy and well-known to implement, so printers can do it. Because it is using a base-level grayscale calibration, in theory and in practice, it allows you to move the print and still get reliable color output whether you are going to an offset press or you are going to move that work to your digital toner cut sheet device. That is what we see at play here a lot. 
    • These color gamuts and color spaces are defined mathematically, and there is a file associated with them. We call it an ICC profile because it is the International Color Consortium that developed it. It is the mathematical representation of that visual thing that you see up here on the screen on the right. If you are a designer, sometimes your printer may even supply you with an ICC profile that you can put into your design application, like Adobe Photoshop. It will give you a better representation on the screen of what the output may eventually look like at the end. It is not a hundred percent perfect. Your monitor needs to be calibrated, too. 
    • [00:17:27] Pat McGrew: That is really important - about that monitor calibration. You and I know from an adventure we were on with a client that calibrated monitors can make all the difference in the world in having a reasonable conversation with your printing company. 
    • If you, as a designer, are sitting in front of a screen that is calibrated from the factory, all of your design is in the context of what you are seeing on the monitor. When that file gets transmitted to the print house, they are going to look at it on their monitor, which may be calibrated in a totally different way. Weird conversations happen because now you are both looking at your screens, thinking that you are looking at the same thing, but you are not. Again, something like G7, which is mathematically based, has mathematical coordinates for every color in the rainbow effectively. If the mathematics are correct, then you should get what you intend to get. Having a calibrated monitor as a designer would be something we are spending money on. Just to make sure that you can have reasonable conversations with printing companies, which typically do have calibrated monitors in their pre-press departments.
    • [00:18:29] Ryan McAbee: There is a common toolset used that is really a measuring device called a spectrophotometer. That is not only used to calibrate a monitor, but it is also used to read color patches or blocks of color from a printed sheet to see that you are in tolerance. It is printing exactly how you would expect based on the color target you have established that you want to hit.
    • Color is one of those things where I think it is just a communication effort between the parties to understand what each one is doing and how that impacts the results in the end. 
    • There is also this influence of the different print technologies that you can target when you are designing for print output.
    • We have offset and digital; you could also say analog and digital. There are physical considerations when you are talking about analog printing because it is a mechanical process and not a digital process. But even with digital technology, There are things that you should be aware of when you are designing. 
    • [00:19:12] Pat McGrew: It is a good idea to know what the target output devices that you are designing for are. Sometimes you cannot, but in the broadest possible terms, these are different technologies. These printing devices do not always absorb and interpret print files in the same way. So you definitely want to be thinking about your design in the context of where it might be used. If you design for offset, you have a world of options. Because you can do just about anything in an offset context. If you are designing for digital, you are working in a narrower context. A digital file can be uplifted and moved over to an offset device without too much difficulty because the digital world is a little bit narrower. Gamuts are a little bit narrower. Substrate ranges are a little bit narrower.
    • [00:19:55] Ryan McAbee: There are physical limitations in terms of the size of paper or material that you can print on and also the thickness of those materials too. 
    • [00:20:02] Pat McGrew: Moving from offset to digital gets a little bit more entertaining, and some of the most heartbreaking conversations I have had with clients have been, "Oh my God, we got this file in, and we tried to print it, and the customer won't accept it."
    • And it is their file, so why will they not accept it? Very often, when we go back and we look at that file, we discover that file was originally designed for offset. That means that the designer was meticulous in specifying things like ink limits within graphic objects, which is something that designers like to do to oversaturate some of the images that are being used. The problem is that if you do that within the graphic images, it is not uncommon for an offset file to be over-inked - to have ink limits for the black set at 300, which causes the black to really saturate. If you bring that file over to a digital environment, it is not uncommon for the digital front end of the digital device to flatten all that out. It only knows 100% of anything. It has no idea what to do with 300%, so it flattens it all out. Now the image that is being produced looks different because the saturation is gone. The nuances that might have been available in the offset environment are no longer there. There are ways to fix it. It is not an unfixable situation, but when it happens, it can be a real shock.
    • As a designer, if you know that you are designing for offset and your customer tells you that they were trying to use it in a digital environment,  sometimes it is worth going back to the original source files and resaving a version for printing in a digital form that takes the ink limits out so that nothing goes above 100%.
    • For any given project, there may not be a right technology. There may be a what is available technology, but if you have to cross the stream from offset to digital, you probably have more work to do than if you are crossing a stream from digital to offset.
    • [00:22:04] Ryan McAbee: As a designer, you may not realize that these elements are in your file and they are not necessarily optimized for the outputs. On the printer end, they have tools, whether it is preflighting tools or other routines that they can run at the digital front end that will automatically fix some of this. But that is not really the best path that we could have. It is always better to design it upfront than to take the risk of being corrected on the back end. 
    • In terms of substrates, we know There is a broader range of paper and plastics and other kinds of materials that you can run on analog offset-type technology. Digital is catching up to some extent. It seems every year we are getting a wider range and capabilities. 
    • [00:22:40] Pat McGrew: You know, we hear the paper manufacturers say that for a large part of the papers that they carry, their goal is to have both analog and digital versions of those papers. They know their clients are making decisions about when to run long-run, and when to run short-run, especially as they are supporting book manufacturing. It is a big area where a lot of times they may do a short-run for author’s copies and review copies. Once they are happy with everything, they put it onto the big presses and run offset while something is a best seller. Then it may move to a back catalog where there are not as many sales, so they move it back to digital. But they want it to look and feel the same, right? They want the paper to be the same. They want the cover stocks to be the same. That is where the paper manufacturers are really working very hard to do that. Not just for having it the same for offset and digital, but also trying to keep the prices closer together. For many years digital papers that are designed to be used with digital devices have typically carried a premium. They cost a bit more, and they did that because the paper manufacturers were producing much less of that kind of paper. It was expensive for them to do the chemical formulations to make them appropriate for the different digital devices. They passed that cost along. Most of the R&D is done now, so they are able to produce the papers more seamlessly in the quantities that their customers are demanding.
    • It is one of those things that you really want to check. More of the hardware vendors are coming to market making statements that they can print on any offset stock so that you do not have to buy inkjet-prepared or inkjet-treated paper or toner-treated paper. It is always worth checking to see if the substrates that you want to use behave in the way you expect them to behave.
    • But we are seeing more democratization of the way paper is produced. One of the challenges with offset is that it is capable of printing on a lot of stuff - textured papers, coded papers, calendared papers, and all sorts of really interesting variations. To date, that range on digital is still not quite there, but for basic book stocks and a lot of the direct mail stocks, you can find analogous papers on both sides of the fence. 
    • [00:24:47] Ryan McAbee: When it comes to thinking about what you are printing on, you are talking about the size. You are talking about what color the substrate is going to be, whether it is clear plastic or if it is white paper, or some colored paper. You are talking about the finish of the actual material. So is it smooth? Is it textured? Is it very porous where the ink will absorb? Maybe you are using a print technology where it is going to sit on top like toner, so it does not sink into the paper. All these are considerations when you think about what you are printing.
    • [00:25:09] Pat McGrew: As you are designing, you want to be thinking about the cost. To some extent, the more control you have over the substrate that will be used, the more you can design to the substrate. It is worth having conversations with your customer and with the printing company who might be supporting you to make sure that your designs will be best represented on the substrates that they have available and are willing to pay for.
    • [00:25:28] Ryan McAbee: Definitely get sample books. There are sample color libraries that you can get in a printed way. There are all these different samples of substrates and papers and materials that you can also get from vendors to see what your options are. Also, just by feeling some of these materials, you can get a sense of, whether will it work for what you are trying to design for? 
    • So there are many different kinds of tools that you can design with. What is the takeaway here? 
    • [00:25:48] Pat McGrew: I think you are going to find a huge community of Adobe product users. Adobe has been very effective at keeping its products up to date and bringing new features. They have added capabilities that make it easy to add QR codes, easy to add barcodes, and easy to add interactive experience pieces. They have also gone out and bought a lot of different companies that used to be out there as independent. Their most recent acquisition is a company called Figma, which is another one of the online design tools. In general, the Adobe reputation is a little bit more expensive, but you get a lot. They have gone to a subscription model, so you typically pay by the month, or maybe, you might pay once a year for it.
    • There are still a lot of companies using the older on-premise versions that don't have all the features. I like Adobe products. I use Adobe products. I am a fan of a lot of the features and functions, and you will find most design agencies have at least an installation or a subscription for Adobe.
    • There is a company called Quark. Quark grew up in the world supporting newspaper design and magazine design, and has had high and low penetration into the market. They are still out there. You will find people who are Quark fans. Sometimes they are just anti-Adobe fans.
    • Corel has been around as long as Quark and Adobe as well - they are a nice Canadian company. Great tool set. I have an installation of that as well. Like a lot of the functions and features. Let you do all the things you want to do. Save PDF in the right format for your target environment. All good stuff. 
    • There is this new universe of online design tools, and one is Canva. Canva now has more users worldwide than Adobe. They are an Australian company that began as a yearbook formatting company to make it easy for high schools and universities to create yearbooks online and, over time, has just grown and grown. In fact, the slides that you are looking at here, we have created in Canva. We find it to be a pretty easy-to-use tool, but then there are all sorts of other bits and pieces that you might want access to. 
    • There is a product you will see  - the last one on the list  - is Pantone Connect. Pantone Connect is a product that basically gives you access to the Pantone color books as part of your design tool. Up until very recently, if you were an Adobe subscriber, you had automatic access to the Pantone Connect library. That is no longer the case. You now have to have a separate subscription. If you are going to use Pantone Connect. There are a host of other color connection solutions that are coming into the marketplace by a lot of the color management companies. The people who make color management software to make it easier for you to handle color. So it is important to understand the tools that you have, and the tools that are available, and sometimes it varies by the kinds of customers you are serving.
    • Which one of these tools might be best? The odd one out on the list is Autodesk AutoCAD. You might be going, gee, I have never heard of them, or I use it all the time. This is a set of tools that were really designed for the engineering and architectural space and is generally used in very structured design. You do see it for engineering drawings. You see it for architectural renderings, but you also see it for floor plan layouts. You'll see it for trade show design. I know a lot of companies in the trade show and exhibit space use it to design how your stand will look at a trade show that you're contracting them for.
    • It produces some different kinds of file formats. You actually have to do a little bit of work to produce PostScript or PDF files out of it. If what you do is mostly in the architectural space or highly structured space, this is a tool that might be part of your toolkit. 
    • [00:29:07] Ryan McAbee: The toolset for structural design is almost always used in the packaging realm to create the dielines.
    • [00:29:12] Pat McGrew: That is also true. That is a very good point. For a lot of the 3D-type things to identify dielines and cutlines, Autodesk, AutoCAD type tools are very commonly used. Then there are tools that come from companies that we know. Esko is a company that is very well known. They have sets of tools that help you render things out and take your design packaging templates and push them out. There are a lot of different tools, and depending on your specific area, you may find that the teams that you are working with have some that they really like a lot and help them do their job more effectively. Others might not be as well known in the areas you are serving.
    • [00:29:44] Ryan McAbee: Some of these have a stronger foothold in certain segments of our industry. Adobe is pretty universal. You will find most printers have that software. But Corel is very relevant in the direct-to-garment space. 
    • [00:29:53] Pat McGrew: And across Canada. If you are in a direct mail house in Canada, the odds are good that you will be using CorelDraw and the Corel Suite as using Adobe. 
    • [00:30:02] Ryan McAbee: Then Quark has a publishing legacy and stronghold in that.
    • From a design perspective, whatever tool you settle on using, ask the question of your print provider if they accept that kind of file format. Is there any difficulty that they have had working with the different output from these programs? Because it is not all created equally, right? PDF is not a PDF is not a PDF. 
    • [00:30:21] Pat McGrew: That is absolutely true. 
    • [00:30:23] Ryan McAbee: We hope you have enjoyed this session and course on the design considerations. As you can see, there are many factors in your design based on the type of output and results that you expect.
    •  We hope to see you in a future episode here at The Print University.

41- job onboarding

A significant part of a print production workflow is the job onboarding process. Job onboarding begins when the customer makes a request until the point it is lodged into the business and production workflows of the print shop. This is an area often overlooked; processes and automation can result in significant improvement.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hi, It is Ryan McAbee at Pixel Dot Consulting and Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup here to walk us through job onboarding, which, Pat, is one of the biggest and probably most overlooked parts of the printing process. You can leave a lot of money on the floor, or lose a lot of money on the floor.
    • [00:00:16] Pat McGrew: It is scary when we talk to printers around the world about the processes they use from the point the salesperson sells the job to the point that it can actually go into preparation for print. There is a lot of chaos involved in the job onboarding processes with most of the people we talk to. I do not think there is an understanding of how much money it actually costs when job onboarding is not done in an optimal way. 
    • [00:00:40] Ryan McAbee: And do you see that as a problem just with one particular type of printer, or is it across the board? 
    • [00:00:46] Pat McGrew: I think it is universal because we have been in printers of all sizes, from small one-man operations all the way up to mega printers that have a global presence. In most cases, their focus for optimization is in prepress, print, and delivery with the assumption that if they have captured the order, it must be correct and everything is just fine. 
    • Very little attention seems to be paid to making sure that they have estimated the job correctly. If we used an estimating engine, it must be correct. The quote must be correct because the engine told us it was correct without actually thinking about whether the estimating engine was given the correct information.
    • Did the salesperson actually capture specifications correctly? Did they sell something you do not do? That is my favorite, which makes the whole job onboarding process a constant call back to the customer to verify activity. If you have customer service people sitting on the phone trying to verify all the information that a salesperson took or what came in an email or maybe got faxed to you, that is costing you a lot of money.
    • We have talked to CSRs who say they can spend 12, 14 hours a day trying to verify one order with a customer. So job onboarding - the more we can automate it, the more we can optimize it, the more we can make sure it is validated, the better off we are, and the more money we keep in our pocket. 
    • [00:02:03] Ryan McAbee: We like to focus on job onboarding because it is one of the areas that can contribute the most to waste and inefficiencies in the entire print workflow.
    • It really happens in those two ways, Pat. One way is that you are just not capturing the information correctly to begin with when you transfer that into your production and business workflow systems inside the print shop. If it is not captured correctly at that point, it is going to ultimately result in additional touchpoints by people to fix it.
    • You are also relying more on your people to catch errors potentially downstream. Then once those errors are actually found, you have to figure out how to fix them at that point. Sometimes they are not fixable without actually having to do a complete reprint, which is going to completely destroy any profitability that you had in the job, to begin with.
    • The touchpoints also are just numerous here because you are usually working with multiple sets of people in very manual processes. Like that interaction that you were going through between the salesperson and the customer support representative or the estimator, whoever gets that detail from the customer into the actual workflow there.
    • You ran us through what we mean by onboarding, from the point that the customer says they want to purchase something through the point that it becomes embedded into the workflow at the print shop. What are some of the steps needed to do the onboarding?
    • [00:03:14] Pat McGrew: I want to place an order. I am a customer, and I want to place an order with a company I have never done any business with before. The only way I can place that order is to either call them, or I can go on their website, and I can try and find my way through to placing the order. Inevitably I am going to have to make a phone call to somebody to figure out if I am placing it right. That kind of customer interaction between the buyer of the print and the company trying to fulfill the print is extremely costly because an uncertain customer trying to do new business with an organization they do not know, that has not made it easy to do business, means that everybody in that transaction is at risk. 
    • There is money being lost just because the interaction is not optimized. We have not made it easy. Think about the same situation where I am buying from somebody I do know, a company I have done business with before, but they are still making me call somebody or reach out to a salesperson to take my order. They are not making it easy. I buy the same thing every month like clockwork, and they are making me call a salesperson every single month to get that order placed. This is the place in the job onboarding spectrum where a lot of money is lost because we have not made it easy for the buyer of the print to self-service. I think some people do not like the idea of self-service. But if I have a highly reliable relationship based on my ability to buy what I want and place the order when I want and get some feedback from that order entry environment that my order has been accepted and is going to be delivered in the timeframe I want  -  everybody is saving money in that process, right? The print company is saving money because somebody is not on the phone; maybe 15 phone calls to get the order placed. Just getting the order information captured. 
    • Once the order information is captured, we know what the customer wants to print, and we have to figure out what to charge them. In an awful lot of companies, they have estimating programs, and this software is intended to be loaded with your most current costs, right? Here is what this particular substrate just cost me, so that is my cost model for any job I cost out that is using that substrate. This is what I just paid for ink or for toner. This is my current labor rate. Some of them are sophisticated enough to have budget hour kind of information. Those systems are highly sophisticated, but they are only as good as their currency, and I do not mean dollars and cents. What I mean is how current the information in those programs is. 
    • An estimating program that has not been updated for a whole year - nobody is going in and uploading the new substrate, costs, and the new income - it is not current. You are not probably going to get an accurate quote. The odds are that you are leaving money on the table because things are costing you more than you are using for your calculation of what to charge.
    • If that program is automated in a way that it is linked into the customer interaction piece so that they are getting an automatic cost, you know what it is going to cost them to buy this print from you, and all of your information is incorrect. They are getting a heck of the deal, and you are losing. There are all these hidden, unintended consequences of having an out-of-date estimating and quoting system. 
    • It is worse when you are doing manual estimating and quoting because in organizations that still do it manually, and they are out there, a lot of sign shops, a lot of smaller print shops, even in a lot of franchise organizations, people will manually estimate and quote things based on what they think things cost. I guarantee you, losing money on every job they try to estimate. All the fine points that you need to do accurate estimating and quoting just are not there.
    • Now the customer accepts the quote, but they actually did not give you the right information. They thought they did. It was all with the best of intentions when the file actually gets submitted to you. They said they wanted it 24 inches wide by 36 inches wide for the sign. The file that they sent you is 29 inches wide by 38 inches.
    • They sent you letters that they want to be printed, and they told you that they were 8 ½ by 11, but they got them from a European colleague. They are actually A4. Totally different cost model involved there, right? The customer submits the file, so now it is wrong. Now I have to go back and talk to the customer and say, "Hi, it was wrong. I know we quoted you this, but it is actually going to cost that." Some print shops will not ever re-approach the customer. "Oh no, they are too good a customer. We cannot charge them more because it is wrong." Sometimes salespeople make that decision, not the business management. All these things contribute to losing money during onboarding.
    • [00:07:36] Ryan McAbee: In either case, I think the speed at which you can identify that particular type of issue is going to help. If It is identified at the point that the CSR or the estimator is putting that into your production workflow system instead of 10 steps down the road where it is in prepress already, that is going to speed up the process to make sure that what they supplied actually matches the intent and the quote that they actually signed off on. Assuming that we do all these steps correctly, it then gets submitted into the workflow by the customer support representative and or the estimator. It depends on who is in the shop. 
    • We know we have walked through a lot of steps there, but there are some best practices that we have identified to do this. Number one, and it is three individual steps, know how many different routes into the shop or input sources you can use to receive jobs from customers or requests for jobs from customers.
    • Do they come through email 80% of the time? Do they go through web-to-print another 5% of the time? Do you have some kind of direct connection with that company because they are your primary customer, and you are just getting orders automatically in your management system? There are many different ways.
    • The best practice here is to minimize the number that you need to use and then also automate as much as possible getting that request for quote into your system. Also, standardize, especially if it is a manual process like an email submission or it is coming from your sales team, standardize the information that you must have to get it into your system based on what kind of product it is.
    • As an example, if it is a business card, is it a vertical or horizontal orientation? Is it a three-and-a-half by two, or is it the European size? Is it printed on the front, or is it also printed on the back? Is it just one color on the front and four color on the back? All these kinds of details are your standard things that you need to know to be able to return a quote back to that customer and then get it produced down the road. 
    • Once we minimize the input sources, once we standardize the amount of information that we need by product type, then automate it as much as possible down the road - how do we normalize this onboarding through some tools and solutions here? Probably with our print MIS and also some preflight capabilities. 
    • [00:09:32] Pat McGrew: One of the things, when you talk about all these input sources, is an email stream. Some companies have multiple web-to-print systems that they are using. One customer liked one, and a different customer liked another. It could be even worse than it sounds. To try and normalize all, it takes a lot of soul searching. In order to standardize inputs, you have to draw a line in the sand with your clients about how you are willing to accept them. 
    • In the best possible circumstance, email gets off the table entirely. In the best possible circumstance, it is an API/- EDI type relationship, or it is a digital storefront or web portal kind of relationship. Even for the sales team. 
    • [00:10:10] Ryan McAbee: They can use it as an internal tool if the customer does not want to place the order on the storefront. The sales team could use it internally and do it for them.
    • [00:10:15] Pat McGrew: Exactly! If they feel that for a customer relationship reason, they do not want to force an organization to use this tool, then the salesperson should be using it because that is where the job gets validated. That is where you are able to identify whether specs are at a boundary, or things are not correct. It is where you catch most of your errors.
    • When we say create a central record, a single source of truth about the customer and the jobs that they are bringing in, this is where companies have to do a little bit of soul searching. You may have one set of back office systems that contain customer information. You might have a set of production systems that contain customer information. They may not be linked. They may not share information. In fact, they may not have the same information about a company. It is not unusual as you look around to discover that the primary contact for emergencies for a client is one name in one system, and a different name in another system. One of those people, maybe both of those people, do not work there anymore. 
    • You need to be able to create a single customer record that can integrate with all of your production systems. And there are a million ways to do it, depending on how your back office business system is set up; how your production system is set up. That is something you should strive for.
    • You should strive for a single way to retrieve files. Over the years, we got used to email attachments and FTP and secure FTP. More and more, we see organizations accepting things into cloud-based file retrieval systems that are secured and encrypted. To whatever extent possible, you should be migrating to a normalized environment where you do not accept email attachments. They are dangerous for everybody. You do not accept somebody FTPing into your environment, even secure FTP, because still there is a fair amount of risk there. It is better for the printing organization's IT department to own where those files land, and then to make sure they get into the right queues for further processing. 
    • We want to make sure that every single file that comes in is preflighted on its way in. A lot of organizations know the term preflight. They preflight if something looks funny. They do not preflight every file. Unfortunately, an awful lot of files that arrive look just fine. When they arrive in either the prepress department or even at the CTP device or at the digital front end for a digital device, they will not print, or they print really slowly.
    • If you preflight every file as it comes into the organization, you are going to catch most of the problems that might exist and save yourself hours and hours of time downstream. Remember that the further downstream you get in print production, the more expensive the people are. The hourly rate goes up as you go down the trail. You do not want those people fiddling because something is running really slow or fiddling because a job just will not start on the DFE or just will not image. You want to take care of that way upfront. Let's get the preflight upfront, but then let's do it again later in the process.
    • Let's make sure that there is a workflow plan for every job. I am a believer in doing it for every job. It should be part of the agreed process that once a salesperson has made a job sale or a customer has come to you with a new job, and you should be able to map it to a known workflow plan that you use for that kind of product.
    • We are doing a bunch of signs on a roll-fed printer, and we should know what the workflow path for that is. What are all the expected tasks? I am doing a book of one - we should know what that path is and how it is different from when we are doing five or 500 or 5,000 or 500,000 - for every kind of job we do.
    • [00:13:47] Ryan McAbee: To your point, many of the management solutions often, as you build your estimate, they know the plan that particular product will take. You have to include all the costs for it, but they can also submit the ticketing, and in many cases, the actual content that the customer may provide, into these specific workflows for that type of product. That is a really valuable part of automation that can happen. 
    • Pat, I think it was a great point to just reiterate. An initial preflight can happen in a very generic way because you are just checking to see if the size format matches what the customer wanted. You are checking to see if there is any color weirdness to it in terms of color spaces that need to be converted. The font and then the resolution kind of check. Once you get into these output-to-workflow paths on the right, that is when you can be much more granular in things that you are checking for that are specifically needed for that type of work. Make sure that those are included in the file. Preflight is not just one process in the workflow, It is probably going to come up in multiple places.
    • [00:14:40] Pat McGrew: Especially when you are thinking about things like labels and signs that might have specific kinds of coating layers and spot varnish layers and all sorts of things. You want to preflight multiple times because you could go in and make a correction in one process and destroy the spot coating layer. There are all sorts of things that can happen during the processing event that, by the time it gets to the next task, something is missing that should be there.
    • [00:15:03] Ryan McAbee: The last important thing to leave you with is the reasons job onboarding is so important. We are trying to minimize that waste and inefficiency. And eliminate it, if at all possible, from the point where the customer raises their hand until you get it into your workflow. You need to be accurate in how you are capturing the details. The processes need to be repeatable. The ultimate use case is to also have those processes as automated as possible so you can minimize your labor inputs and your touchpoints to get that work actually done. Any other parting thoughts on those kinds of pillars of job onboarding, Pat? 
    • [00:15:34] Pat McGrew: I would ask everyone to think of every one of those icons as having a Dollar sign or a Euro or a Yen overlaid on them. If you are not accurate, you are going to be remaking things. It is costing you money. If you do not have repeatable processes, you are effectively reinventing the wheel for every job that comes in the door. It is costing you money if you do not automate as many of the processes in your shop, especially at the job onboarding stage. Those people cost money. The time on the phone costs money. The time answering email costs money. That is why job onboarding is where I would invest my time if I could only fix one thing in my shop; that is the one I want to fix. 
    • [00:16:15] Ryan McAbee: Very good. We hope you have learned a lot about the jump onboarding process and why it is important to the overall workflow. We hope to see you at a future episode here at The Print University.

42- estimating, quoting & ticketing

The exchange of goods or services in any industry requires an understanding of costs and pricing. Since printing is a custom manufacturing process, the pricing can vary considerably from one product type to another. In this module we discuss the steps of estimating, quoting, and job ticketing along with the staff involved in these processes. A base-level understanding of cost-plus and value-based pricing is also presented.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and I am with my colleague Ryan McAbee, Pixel Dot Consulting. Together we are The Print University. Today our topic is one of my favorites. It is estimating to ticketing, and one of the reasons it is one of my favorites is because this is how you figure out if your shop is going to make money or not.
    • In the end, it is all about the business, right? If you get the estimating wrong, almost nothing else you do is going to make a difference. You are not going to make enough money to survive for very long. Ryan, what goes into estimating? Why do we really care? I know why I care. Why should the market care?
    • [00:00:32] Ryan McAbee: The market should care because it is across the board every time we have done assessments, we know that onboarding is the terminology we use. It is merging the customer's intent, and what they want to have made. Then merging that with the content when it becomes a live workable job at the ticketing step.
    • That is where a lot of money can be left on the floor, as we like to say. You want to make sure that you have good standardized processes that are highly repeatable and highly automated if and where possible. What estimating really is, when it comes down to it, is determining the cost basis that you have for producing whatever work that we are talking about. Then determining a price that will obviously cover your cost and then some because that is your profitability. It is basically how you continue to operate your business.
    • Estimates usually are created with a tool, and these tools can vary widely. We will get into the tool sets that possibly could be used, but you are typically using some kind of tool to create the estimates. Oftentimes the requesting customer is going to look for estimates with slight variations, right? They may want to look at one estimate that has a quantity of 500 versus a quantity of 750. They may want to look at one estimate that has black and white only versus color. You might have to create multiple estimates here because the customer is going to try and evaluate - Where do I want to put my marketing dollars? Where do I want to put my money in terms of this particular job? 
    • [00:01:46] Pat McGrew: Under the hood of an estimating program, Ryan, it is as good as the data it gets fed, right? This is not a one-and-done process. You do not sit down on January 1st and look at what you are currently paying for paper and ink and toner and maintenance and labor rates and budgeted hourly rates and go, okay, "I am good for the rest of the year." All those things are going to be subject to change. What do we have to do to keep the estimating current? 
    • [00:02:08] Ryan McAbee: Things like the hourly rate that you assign, or Budgeted Hourly Rate that you assign to a cost center like a department, or a piece of equipment that is used, like a press that you have on the shop floor.
    • You probably do not have to evaluate those every month or every six months, but there should be a cadence to reevaluate. Those are more direct costs that are involved with that particular cost center running that particular press. 
    • Then you have the costs on top of that, which are more variable, especially lately, which are your consumable costs - so your ink and paper. We have seen wild fluctuations with that. You know that it is changing a lot, and that is the role of the estimator; and that is why they are hard to find. They are one of those unicorn positions in the industry, as I like to say. They are hard to find. They will know, just based on what work they have been involved with, if they need to update for that particular estimate they are doing at that particular time, if they need to go check that material cost because they know it has been fluctuating a lot to make sure it gets captured accurately, so the price is reflected for the customer. 
    • [00:03:01] Pat McGrew: I guess if you are bringing new equipment in during the year or you are deprecating older equipment, that is another reason to go back and re-look at it, right? 
    • [00:03:08] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. Anytime you have a major change in your operation, whether that is a piece of equipment, or, let's say that in the past year, you had to increase your labor cost or what you pay your employees by 20% - you need to reflect that in your management system or your estimating so that it is captured. As the owner of the business and also the estimator, there are multiple levels that know when things have changed enough to where you should revisit it.
    • It is often that we get too busy in operational mode. I suggest that just like you have to block time, in many cases, for equipment maintenance, you should block time periodically for your management maintenance or your MIS-type maintenance. 
    • [00:03:40] Pat McGrew: That makes a lot of sense. So how does that turn into quoting and ticketing?
    • [00:03:43] Ryan McAbee: Once the estimator has all of those details locked in and the variations that the customer may want to see, it is usually just a matter of a few clicks in the system to turn that over into a more formatted document. Usually, that is a quote form that gets either emailed or put into a portal. The delivery to the customer can vary a little bit, but basically, it says this is what you requested, with the details confirming that this is generally what you asked for. These are the different quantity breakdowns, and these are the different pricing breakdowns for what you requested. The customer will review that, make sure it is actually what they had asked for, number one, but also that they agree with the pricing. Then if they want to move forward, that is when it is a few clicks in the system typically to create a ticket. And the ticket can come in many different flavors, but this is literally once it becomes a live, active job. That production ticket can be a physical ticket, which we still see in a lot of cases.
    • [00:04:30] Pat McGrew: On boards everywhere. Yes. 
    • [00:04:32] Ryan McAbee: A lot of times, there is a physical ticket. The argument is that we will have to put the physical proof in there and then have other pieces riding with the job ticket. I hear these kinds of comments a lot. It could be an electronic ticket. Electronic ticketing has benefits in the fact that it will be updated to have the latest and greatest change, or change orders, as it is often called in this world. Let's say the customer calls in and says, "Oh, wait, I need to change out that logo.” Or, “Oh wait. We decided that we need to add another page to the document." Those kinds of changes can be updated automatically, and on an electronic ticket, everybody sees the latest information, whereas, on a paper ticket, you are relying on a person to update that.
    • [00:05:04] Pat McGrew: And we see shops that use both, right? In parallel. Then we have the conversation about which one is right. It should be the source of truth. It may not be.
    • [00:05:14] Ryan McAbee: That is the difficulty when you are using multiple formats like that. You need to, as an organization, determine which one is going to be your source of truth or your single source of record. The reason it is so critical is that there is this handshake that happens, Pat. It is between, usually, the person requesting the print who is either going to do it through a physical interaction with a salesperson, or they might phone in, or they might email a customer support representative. They might actually have a system like a web-to-print system where they fill out the details and do it that way. Or there might be more variations where they have created a direct link between their business systems, right? As an enterprise user, I might order through SAP, and you just get the order in your management system. 
    • Because there are a lot of variations on how we get the request, we need to standardize that as much as possible across all those methods. We will have some customers doing it one way, and some customers doing it another way. At the end of the day, there is the minimum information that we need between the customer information, the product information, and the delivery information to even create the estimate as the estimator to make sure we have it right.
    • [00:06:11] Pat McGrew: Makes a lot of sense. We are talking about this in terms of the processes, and all of this can happen within the confines of a web-to-print system, a digital storefront, or person-to-person selling, right? None of it eliminates the ability to sell through any different type of channel.
    • [00:06:27] Ryan McAbee: We talked in our data episodes about structured versus unstructured data, and I like to use that kind of terminology here. When a human element is involved, either it is the salesperson communicating with the customer support rep or the estimator; it is like the telephone game, if you have ever played, where you say one thing to one person, and then 10 people down the road it becomes something completely different. A lot of that can happen when you have just the human element involved because it is unstructured information that is getting translated. 
    • Whereas if it is more of a direct connection, like the SAP ordering that I talked about before, or a web-to-print solution, it forces you to have structured data because the system has to allow the customer to actually input it. It becomes a little bit more usable and manageable just as a byproduct.
    • It is probably worth talking about the cost models in printing. Probably 90-plus percent of the time, I see the one on the left, which is referred to as cost-plus, but it is worth having a conversation. 
    • [00:07:13] Pat McGrew: But everybody talks about the one on the right. 
    • [00:07:16] Ryan McAbee: It does seem that way.
    • Cost-plus,  as we already referred to it; we did not give it a name earlier. That is basically your costs of manufacturing, your cost of goods sold, and then your administrative overhead costs as well. Then you are going to apply your margin, or the plus part of that equation, your markup as it may be called, and that gets you your final price.
    • It is more of an inward-looking thing. It creates a natural floor and ceiling on the pricing because you cannot move too much up or down because you are using that percentage as your markup. It is more often that discounting becomes a conversation.
    • On the value-based pricing, the reason I put an airplane as the icon here is that I think that is the easiest way to understand it. You are basically trying to say that there is some other intrinsic value in what I am delivering to you that you are needing to pay differently for. We all know this from an airline perspective because if you have ever looked at the pricing between a seat in economy and a seat at the beginning of the plane in first class, those prices are usually nowhere near each other. It is because there is perceived value in the first-class seat versus what you get in the economy seat. And the same thing is true with printing. 
    • [00:08:16] Pat McGrew: I tend to think of it in terms of a conversation that I hear people who sell print hardware have. If you have the ability to do certain things in your print shop and create embellishment, do certain kinds of finishing, certain kinds of binding that are considered a little bit more high-end, that you can charge more because you have some unique capabilities or the ability to produce something faster than anybody. That can be a point of value-based pricing. The ability to produce in a different format than anybody else can in your local area. There are a lot of different ways that you can approach value-based pricing, but there is still data behind it, and you still have to know all that stuff on the left before you approach the value-based pricing kind of conversation with a customer.
    • The thing on the left side is that you are constantly fighting the battle between what your real costs are, which are going to be changing, long-term relationships with customers, who are used to paying a certain amount for a certain kind of product, and also the tendency of salespeople to want to discount independently to maintain the relationship.
    • Wherever you have conversations about cost models and printing and pricing models and printing - all of these come into play. 
    • [00:09:26] Ryan McAbee: To give you a couple of examples more on the value-based side; one is that you may have value-based pricing because you offer a timing component that is difficult for anybody else to meet.
    • If I am requesting a wide-format sign, as an example, and I can get that in two hours, I am going to pay more for that because it is a higher value to me than if  I am willing to wait seven days for it. 
    • There are different people and processes involved in this. I know we had an interesting background conversation here because a couple of these roles may flip-flop depending on the organization  - between what the customer support representative may do versus what the estimator may do. At a high level, Pat, it probably starts with some kind of sales process in the beginning, as you mentioned. That sales process can be with a person, or it can be with a form or process. 
    • [00:10:07] Pat McGrew: Many organizations do both, right? They have online real-time connectivity to their customers through digital portals, but there are still salespeople who make regular calls, touch base, as well as looking for other work.
    • You are dealing in a hybrid environment, I think, more times than not. 
    • [00:10:24] Ryan McAbee: That is absolutely true. Where we got into this offline discussion was  - I put that oftentimes that handshake between the salesperson if they are capturing the conversation with the customer - the request and the specifications for the job - they will go to the customer support rep who will basically act as the traffic cop to make sure it is everything we need.  
    • [00:10:42] Pat McGrew: They are the knowledgeable expert about what can be done. 
    • [00:10:45] Ryan McAbee: But it can work in reverse. You can have that interaction go from sales and leapfrog the customer support rep to the estimator. I would just challenge everybody to think about that. In terms of the labor cost associated with the process, where is your larger cost center from your labor cost perspective? I think that is going to be obvious here.
    • [00:11:01] Pat McGrew: Who are you using? How are you using them? To be honest, these days, in mid to larger companies, an awful lot of this is handled through automation, and the people are exception handlers.
    • [00:11:13] Ryan McAbee: I would absolutely champion that approach too. That is the reason for having systems and processes that work hand in hand together and that everybody throughout the organization understands what those are and follows the process. And that is often the challenge, right?
    • There are many tools that we have mentioned before on the left here, from manual going up to fully automated. You occasionally run into places that have that institutional knowledge locked into one or two people. They will often just do it on pen and paper - “This is what I know because I have been doing it for so long, and I understand my market so well.”
    • That is not a best practice by any means from where we sit because it is a single point of failure, as you often hear in software terms. If something happens to that institutional knowledge and it goes away for whatever reason - a vacation, leaving the company… 
    • [00:11:54] Pat McGrew: …or if they miss a change. Institutional knowledge is only as good as the people who keep it up. Especially right now, the markets are so volatile in terms of the cost of paper, availability, the quantities that might be made available, as well as the cost of other consumables that are part of the process. Relying on what you think is a dangerous way to be running a business. It is not something I would ever recommend, no matter how good that person is. 
    • [00:12:16] Ryan McAbee: A step up from that is you get to more of a spreadsheet, and some of these can be quite sophisticated, to be honest with you. Again, that sophistication is usually locked in institutional knowledge with one or a couple of people. It is not a tool by default that can easily be shared across the organization or with your customers, depending on how you use it. Most importantly, for these days, none of those first two methods offer any level of automation beyond that point which is a big thing. 
    • [00:12:39] Pat McGrew: Or data tracking. If you do pen and paper or you do a desktop spreadsheet, that data does not become part of the institutional knowledge. It is not part of that data feed that we have talked about in other episodes, where we want that data in order to be able to do business intelligence analysis. Everything that gets done outside of an automated process, a data-capturing process, means that information is not available to those processes.
    • [00:13:03] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely true. The next best scenario is software that is really specific to just the estimating component. It understands your cost structure. It probably goes by the cost-plus methodology, and you can generate a quote with it, but that is where it stops. It is a point tool. It tends to be used in smaller print environments. But they are out there. It is still better than the previous two methods.
    • When you step up to a print management system, it often has a lot of supporting modules and things that it can do beyond just estimating, ticketing, and quoting. 
    • [00:13:29] Pat McGrew: Yeah. Many of these systems today are versatile enough that there are application programming interfaces, APIs, that allow them to talk in real-time to the inventory management system. In some cases, they can even talk directly to the paper vendors, the ink vendors, and all the consumable vendors who are involved in the process. 
    • [00:13:46] Ryan McAbee: And real-time information from the shop floor, too, right?
    • [00:13:48] Pat McGrew: Exactly, and when all the information is real-time, then scheduling is more accurate. Estimating can be more versatile as well because you know where your open capacity is. You might be willing to charge a little less for access to the open capacity and a little bit more if people are trying to get things all at the same time. You can do your own version of surge pricing. There are all sorts of options that you have when the data is real-time 
    • [00:14:12] Ryan McAbee: I could not agree more. I want to point out here that it could be the print MIS, and we talked about this in another software session. But depending on what type of printer you are, that could be an ERP, and it could be an MES, it could be a PLM. There are other management tool labels and acronyms that could fit in the same space. 
    • [00:14:27] Pat McGrew: And you have to go to the other episodes to figure out what all those letters are.
    • [00:14:30] Ryan McAbee: Yes. Then there is also a connection, whether it is a direct connection or just a loose connection, for an online ordering type of system - web-to-print is usually the name that we call it in this industry. It is basically that online way a customer can find you and can request a print job to be ordered.
    • [00:14:46] Pat McGrew: Think about it in an enterprise environment; you might know it as a job order and entry system. That is another term we see. 
    • [00:14:51] Ryan McAbee: The best practice here, and it does not always happen, is if you can link your management solution with your web-to-print so that the management solution is actually generating the cost and the price information dynamically. That is the best-case scenario.
    • Many times you will find that they use a price list approach on the web-to-print that has been modeled after what they have done with the management system.
    • [00:15:10] Pat McGrew: But the minute you disconnect it, you are adding risk to the process of getting the best price. 
    • [00:15:16] Ryan McAbee: It is the same kind of risk that we talked about with the institutional knowledge and the pen and paper spreadsheets. It is the same risk, just in a different way. 
    • The estimating, quoting, and ticketing processes are part of the larger job onboarding, just to recap here. It is one of the most critical and pivotal points in production where you can either get it right and preserve your profitability or get it wrong and not have things go the way you want. 
    • [00:15:38] Pat McGrew: Exactly. I think that is the perfect way.
    • Ryan, to wrap it all up now, you have at least the tools to understand estimating, quoting, and ticketing.
    • That wraps us up for this edition of The Print University. I am Pat McGrew. This is my colleague Ryan McAbee. Please come back and join us for another episode.

43-PREPARING DATA PART 1

In the first part of Preparing Data, key concepts about data are reviewed. The difference between public and private data is explored in addition to considerations and best practices for working with data.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition at The Print University. Here I have Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup, and this is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting. Pat, today we are talking about preparing data, but we had two parts to this because there is a lot to it. But we wanted to give a little intro before we dive deep into it.
    • Right, Pat? 
    • [00:00:16] Pat McGrew: We do. Data is something I have been working with all my professional life. What you start to realize is that data means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. What we want to do in this episode is really lay the groundwork around what data is, and where it comes from, and then we can talk a little bit more about how to work with it in the next episode.
    • We are going to start with that basic question, right? What the heck is data? Data is a lot of different stuff. If you are a computer person or an IT person, you think of it maybe in terms of ones and zeros at its most basic level. How it travels through the data systems. In reality, it is formatted data. Formatted information like my name and my address have data elements to it. My first name is a data element. My last name is a data element. The house number, the street designation, the city, the state, and the ZIP code. These are all data elements.
    • If you see this chart, you get the idea that we can talk about data in a lot of different ways. We can talk about demographic data. What you see here on the chart is nominal data. But we can also talk about data that is used in GPSs and in mapping and in grading. What we call ordinal data for second, third, a plus, a minus, economics.
    • Then there is quantitative data, and that is the numbers. Discrete data, the number of something. How many employees are in your company? What your revenue was for the year? Real discrete numbers, and then there is continuous data. There is data that is constantly evolving because of how we describe it; we can constantly get access to that data point and watch it evolve.
    • Lots of different kinds of data, and in the print industry, we use combinations of all of them. We use data to run our business. It is the estimating data that we use to decide how much to charge someone. We have the pricing data that we use to actually tell people what we are going to charge them. We have the data around the things we order and the things that we maintain. The number of employees, all of our employee benefits, and our payroll; those are all data elements.
    • Then there is all the data that is part and parcel of the jobs that we do, right? There are the print files that come in and all the information about those files. The specifications or data points. Then we might do something called variable data printing, where we are actually taking data that may or may not be formatted, and we are putting it into the print file, or we are using it to inform how the print file gets constructed. Even though there are a lot of different kinds in our industry, we can get it down to a few basics.
    • [00:02:40] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, they are big buckets that you could put this data into. I think of it in terms of - you have your customer data; those are the people that you work with. You have your operational data; that is the data numbers that you use to execute the work. Then you have your financial data, throughout the business, but also that includes billing and account receivable and stuff for your customers. Then you have data that you use for marketing purposes if you are doing that variable data, transactional printing, and so forth. Those are the four big buckets that I think of. 
    • Ultimately collecting data is step number one. Step number two is figuring out what data you have, what it means, and how to use it. Then the third step is figuring out how to execute on it. Collecting it and then executing on it are the two biggest hurdles, I would say.
    • [00:03:20] Pat McGrew: There are a lot of hurdles in the world of data. Let's start with the fact that there is public data and there is private data. Let's talk about public data first. This is demographics. It is the stuff that you can get from the Census Bureau or national statistical databases. It is public records: state, and local public records data. This is data that you want to do a marketing campaign, but you are a little worried about using private data. You have heard that is a bad thing. You can create some pretty cool marketing campaigns using nothing but public data. 
    • You just have to know where to find it. You have to understand how it is formatted. You have to take some responsibility for analyzing it to figure out what elements of the data are most effective for your campaign. Then you have to have a way to actually turn that into your marketing campaign.
    • Let's just say - look, I live in a semi-rural area. My neighbors have horses and goats and cows, and there is a bull a couple of doors down. If you want to market to us using public data and you look at the census and demographic data for our area, what you are going to see is larger properties, a little bit more rural. The buying patterns for this neighborhood - people spend a lot of time at the tractor supply. We look a little different than the people who might live five miles over who live surrounding a golf course, right?
    • Because you can zero in on where those addresses lay with respect to the physical attributes of the land, golf course, lake, river, whatever, or an urban tower full of apartments or condominiums, you can make some interesting marketing decisions. Public data is always safe to use. We will say little or no risk, but generally safe to use.
    • [00:04:56] Ryan McAbee: The domain with public data, Pat, is that normally we hear the term in the industry kind of list provider?
    • [00:05:02] Pat McGrew: Sometimes list providers do. That is an interesting term. A list provider is an organization that is constantly buying or scraping data out of public records and then formatting it in a way, and then selling it to organizations that might be interested in it.
    • You want to know the addresses of all the people who live in an apartment condominium tower complex because you want to market to them. List providers can often help you with that and make it easier to use publicly available data. They also may have relationships with organizations that allow them to buy data that is somewhere in the middle between public and private. It is data that is not easily accessible or accessible at all in a public forum but is not really private personalized information either, that they often have access to sell, so they skirt the boundaries.
    • Private data is something that you want to make sure you have all the necessary permissions to use. Personal health data, personal financial data, any relationship that you have with your bank, your credit card providers, your retirement fund providers, your brokerage - any of the people that fundamentally on a personal basis you do business with. Also that businesses do business on a business-to-business basis. All of that is private data. Payroll records are private data. Personal performance records inside the four walls of the company are private data that is not publicly exposed. 
    • You are in a situation where you are working with a customer who is doing credit card statements, for instance. That means that your business has access to personal financial data, which means you have to make sure that every step along the way, that data is secured and does not leak out of your building in any way, shape, or form. It is as protected as it can possibly be from being hacked because that kicks off all sorts of other challenging problems. 
    • Public data safety use. Pretty much anything that is not a public record is something that you want to have permission for, and make sure that you are using it in a secure and approved way.
    • [00:06:57] Ryan McAbee: The way to sum it up is that private data is a little harder to get, but it is much harder to use depending on the use case and regulations. 
    • [00:07:03] Pat McGrew: It can be. Sometimes a customer will say, "I want you to do a variable data job that uses this data that is in our data pool that we have permission to use. We are going to grant you permission to use it.” But they may not format it well. They may not make it easy for you to use, which means your team has to get on board and understand the data structure and figure out how to turn it into something that is actually usable for the purposes of the campaign or the printing that is going to be done.
    • We will talk a little bit more about that in the next episode. The important thing to take away from this episode is that there are kinds of data, and data has considerations. If you are the designer, you are worried about what it looks like and how you are going to use it; you are working with data to help provide a context to the communication that you are creating. You may actually be using data that becomes available to you as a trigger to cause different things to print in a print job. 
    • An example of that is that I live in the Mountain West. You do not. You live closer to the East Coast, in the Mountain east. How people market to us is different because of our location, because of the states that we are in, and because of different contextual things about our lives. Company ABC wants to market to both of us, and they have access to my buying history. I have done business with them. They have access to yours. They know that I buy certain things. You buy certain different things. They can use data to cause different images to go into a catalog or to go into a postcard or go into a direct mail piece, or even to put different kinds of marketing messages onto transaction communication. My bills, my statements, and other kinds of notifications.
    • The way they do that is with programs that can look at the data, and, based on some set of records that they identify, make a decision to send me different kinds of things than they send you. For a designer, it is important for them to make sure that they understand what kind of things those triggers might cause. If the images are going to change because I am in the Mountain West, they are going to send me pictures of pretty snow-capped mountains. Because you are in the Mountain East, it is going to be pretty gently rolling green hills with lots of tall trees. The colors might be different, and the color palette might be different. The ad copy will certainly be different. From a design perspective, if you are creating pieces that are going to be triggered by data, you have a harder job than if you get to control a hundred percent of what the image looks like and everybody gets the same thing.
    • If you are going to be merging data fields into the creative content, you have to think about the worst-case scenarios. There are people who have two-letter first and last names. There are people who have what I think of as the very long German names that have many Vons and Ders in them. It is important to think about what the longest possible requirement might be if you are going to be putting data into a field. 
    • Same problem with addresses. In our mailing design episode, we talked a little bit about the challenge of address windows. We often think that it is just name, address, city, state, and ZIP code, and we are done. It is three lines or maybe four lines. Addresses can be five, six, or seven lines. There can be all sorts of different considerations. If you are creating a job that is going to be merging variable data of an address nature into it, you have to make sure there is enough room for you to merge it into. Creative considerations around data get interesting. 
    • Then, of course, the data itself is a consideration. Data has to be formatted in a way that it can be understood by the programs that are going to use it. That does not happen automatically. Data often exists in relational databases, unstructured databases, and oddly structured databases. They may be set up for a totally different purpose. Now we are going to try and use it to inform a print job, and that puts the burden on a person that often has the name programmer. Many organizations have a person they call a print programmer who is actually responsible for using the programs to reach into a database, formatting that data the way they need it, and making it available to the creative content so that they can be merged together on the way to the print file.
    • [00:10:56] Ryan McAbee: Inside a print service provider structure, those two functions between the data and the design are not the same people. One typically works with a data aspect to prep it, and get it ready, and then the design aspect takes over from there to figure out how to use it.
    • I am glad you mentioned the mail design considerations because that plays into it. So much of this, especially data-driven communications, is going to probably end up in the mail stream. 
    • The other thing I would encourage you to think about is the proofing and approval process with this data. It is often required or something that you want to do as a best practice so that they can look to see that, yes, the data is in the right place once we have the design and that it is appearing correctly. It is the actual data-driven elements, whether it is to that more complex situation where you are replacing images and so forth, actually is doing exactly what we expected it to do. 
    • [00:11:39] Pat McGrew: One of the things we very often ask our clients when we are working with data is for a test database to practice when we are doing the programming on their behalf. We ask them to create or extract and anonymize the best and the worst possible situations. The shortest names, the shortest addresses, the least amount of information that might come to us for a print record, and then the most. 
    • Special characters can be fun. When you are looking at accent marks and diacritical marks in names, for instance. You want to practice with those to make sure that all of your processes are going to be able to accept unusual code pages and different styles of data that might come at you. 
    • Data can be in plain English. Easy to read. Dear John, Dear Mary. Dear Valued client. It can be all that stuff. But in those data records, there can be characters because people come from different places. The style of the alphabets may be different, and data gets translated into what you can read using something called a code page. It is basically the thing that maps all those cute little diacritical marks and accent marks. 
    • If the customer has that all figured out on their side and everything is fine, but it comes to you, and you are not using the same information to read the data in, all of a sudden, my name might look totally different than it is supposed to. My address might look totally different than it is supposed to. It takes a lot of coordination between a client and the print company to make sure that when data is moving, everybody is playing by the same rules. 
    • Then, of course, we have rules-based automation. That is this thing I was just talking about where we trigger, right? Data is coming in, and we write some rules. Our programmer writes some rules about how to interpret the data that is coming in. Is it a name? I do not know whether it is male or female, but there is a little tag there that says F or M or non-gender. Based on that, I might be making some decisions about the images that I select or the text blocks that I select. How I write my text can change based on gender. 
    • It can change based on geography and location. Dear Colorado Resident can be one field, and then what comes to you says, Dear North Carolina Resident, right? All of these things can be triggered with rules-based automation. 
    • It can also control the actual physical print jobs. Rules-based automation can also control not only how inbound data is interpreted, but it can also be used to read data in the print file about changing paper along the way. You are printing for an insurance company, and the ID cards are done on Teslin® to give them a little bit more durability. Data can be in the print file that tells you to switch the print drawer and then switch it back for the rest of the pages.
    • Data comes in for a lot of different purposes. It is important for every print job that is using data in any way, and that is going to be any job that is not a flat, static print job, that you understand what elements the print company is responsible for and what elements the customer is responsible for. And it is always good to run a test. 
    • [00:14:29] Ryan McAbee: It is basically plan, build, test, and then obviously do your proof and approval.
    • That rules-based automation is basically data that is used to trigger something across the board. This is not the only place you will hear that terminology in terms of data. It is also used a lot in the world of workflow management solutions. They use a similar concept to route the jobs based on the data.
    • That is the Intro to Data, and we are going to have a Part Two, so be sure to check that out. And thanks for joining us, and we hope to see you on the next episode here at The Print University.

44- FILE PREPARATION

There are six processes that may be required to prepare files that are received from your customers. We discuss how those processes work along with best practices and tools sets to accomplish those tasks.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrew Group, and as always, I am here with Ryan McAbee, Pixel Dot Consulting. Together we are The Print University. This time we are talking about one of my favorite topics, which is file preparation. Ryan, it is one of my favorite topics because it is relevant, no matter what kind of printing you are doing. There are steps that you will need to be aware of, and that you want to prepare for.
    • Let's look at some of what we have to do, right? It is an interesting process. There are a lot of steps along the way. 
    • [00:00:30] Ryan McAbee: There are. We are talking about it from the point after the design has been created and delivered to the print provider in this case. The customers requested some work to be done and you have got to first go retrieve or get that file from somewhere.
    • The design. That can happen in many different ways, as we know. Email is a very popular but unforgiving kind of way to do it. There are also file transfer protocols or FTP, there are online transfer programs, and there are a whole bunch of ways to receive and pull it down.
    • Then you might have to do other things to actually get it ready for whatever the intended print output is supposed to be. Whether it is going to be printed digitally, whether it is going to be an eDelivery, whether it is going to be printed with some kind of analog print technology. You might have to do some kind of conversion process on the file. You might have to check it out. It is always recommended to pre-flight. To look for those common mistakes that may happen to the files. You may have to go in and tweak and fine-tune things with page level or color-based editing before you finally get it to the point of what we call impose, which is basically optimizing the material usage in whatever way you are actually going to print. 
    • We talked about retrieval, Pat. I know you have some strong opinions. We both have some strong opinions on this part, but it can really come from a lot of different ways.
    • [00:01:31] Pat McGrew: If I think back to when I first started working in digital print - and it was in the very early days of digital print - it was not unusual for us to get a reel tape - one of those giant reel tapes that sat on an IBM mainframe or a DEC VAX mainframe that contained all the file information. You might have had a 10-inch floppy disc. Later on, we got a little bit better. It was the six-inch or the five-and-a-half, five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disc, and then the three-and-a-half-inch kind of hard floppy discs and ZIP disks. That was very commonly how digital files got moved because of file transfer protocols moving from location to location over a network that took a while to develop.
    • [00:02:07] Ryan McAbee: It was physical media that you are talking about. Literally, it was physical media you could touch and had to put in a computer. My favorite one, too, is a little later on versus the one you are talking about with all the ZIP drive iterations that we had. 
    • [00:02:16] Pat McGrew: Yep. Bigger floppy disks is what it came down to. Then as we got into the ability to communicate network to network, originally mainframe to mainframe and network to network, we established file transfer protocols. Those are methodologies where files are literally wrapped in some communication information and transmitted over networks to land in a new location.
    • File transfer is an interesting idea, but these days we want it to be secure. Where you see that "s" in front of FTP, that is Secure File Transfer Protocol. Typically that means we are encrypting files at both ends, encrypting and decrypting, so that any of the information in the file while it is being transmitted is not exposed to the real world.
    • As you mentioned, we see a lot of files moving around via email. We are not a huge fan of that for a lot of reasons. One, it clogs your network bandwidth, sending big files. Now a lot of companies gate it. You cannot send over two gigabytes through email. Fundamentally, no production files should be sent through email. That is just a terrible use of your network bandwidth. Frankly, it makes it very hard to track the files and understand where they have been and who has touched them. It is just not the most secure way. 
    • Even online transfers - things like Box or WeTransfer or moving things with Dropbox or OneDrive or Google Drive can be very useful ways to move things. If you are dealing with data and you are dealing with secure data, you would want to make sure that any of your online transfer environments are as firewalled as a secure FTP would be. That is where your IT people have to get involved and make sure that any information, any files that are landing in an online transfer directory are scanned, and virus proofed to ensure that they are protected. Also, that the data in them is not exposed outward.
    • EDI encompasses all of these things, right? EDI is Electronic Document Interchange, and that is what happens where it can be sFTP, it can be online transfer, but it is where files are literally planted in a new environment. If I am sitting in Tulsa and my files are going to be printed in Oklahoma City, it is mainframe to mainframe or network to mainframe network to network type communication. This is the same technical manner that electronic payment interchange happens where information is transferred directly into a new environment. You see web-to-print, API Application Programming Interface, and JDF (Job Definition Format). All of these methodologies involve wrapping information around the file that is intended to be printed and causing things to happen. Causing the file to be moved into a location. Capturing some data about the fact that the file moved into a new location and then keeping track of it all the way through its journey through your workflow. 
    • You see us putting it in at the top of the funnel; we are capturing a whole lot of stuff. We are big fans of automating the acquisition of files, wrapping them with the right kind of information so that they can be tracked and managed correctly and tracked correctly, then pushing them down through the rest of the workflow. Most of the companies we go into, that is not how it is working.
    • [00:05:19] Ryan McAbee: Other than automation, it is critical to think about the many different ways of retrieving or onboarding the work (and we have a whole other course on onboarding) and how you can limit these to the ones that work the best. Also, for other security and features that you need that can be automated for your downstream processes to go into the workflow. I would not suggest offering 20 different ways to retrieve and onboard work. We want to focus on just a few that work well across your entire client base.
    • Once we get that file, Pat, it may be delivered, so we need to have it in some other kind of file format, often PDF these days, to take it into our production print workflow. That file may originally have been an Adobe file.
    • [00:06:00] Pat McGrew: It can be Postscript. It can be from Quark. It could be a source file. It could be a TIFF file. It can be a raster image file, maybe from a scan. 
    • We see a lot of workflows where inbound communication is scanned and put into print files for onward communication back to clients. Their office documents come in all sorts of flavors. They might be Word documents, and they might be notebook documents, or they might be raw text. 
    • We have XML. It is the markup language that is used to tag files. This is a paragraph, and this is a heading, this is an address, this is an amount. An XML file is not magic. Basically, there is a file that has tags in it, and then there is a file that explains what to do when you see those tags. 
    • [00:06:39] Ryan McAbee: It is in plain sight for all of us, right? If you operate Microsoft Word these days, it is technically.
    • [00:06:44] Pat McGrew: It is tagged. It is an XML file. XML was never meant to be a print file, but it does have something called XSL FO, which is the style sheet that can be applied to an XML file to cause it to be printable, usually in a PDF context.
    • In fact, if you look inside a PDF file, you will see all sorts of things that look like tags that help guide different programs through a PDF. Not all PDF is meant for print. Some of it is meant for e-delivery. There are all sorts of things that you can use it for.
    • Let's talk about native files to data streams, all the things on the left, and converting them into the things on the right. What we are trying to do is come up with as many automated threads as we can to ensure that every inbound file can be turned into something that we can work with. We do that with programs from specific software vendors. Sometimes it is part of the overall workflow environment. Sometimes you need a special tool because there is something specific that is coming to your environment that requires special handling. The goal is to get it out into the print stream that you can work with for print. If you are going to be doing online delivery, you may be delivering PDF, but you might be delivering things that are more appropriate for mobile phones and tablets. You might be delivering it in a form of HTML, which is the language the web speaks. 
    • There are a lot of interesting things that can happen in that conversion process. The goal is always light table fidelity. If it is a print file, how it was originally designed is how it should print after the conversion. We use the term light table fidelity. It is an old term, but what it means is if I print the original file and I print the converted file, I should be able to lay them on top of each other on a light table, and I should not see any differences. 
    • [00:08:27] Ryan McAbee: Very good points. It is worth mentioning here that if you are a transactional printer, this is just something that happens every day for you, and you are converting data streams using transform processes.
    • Everybody else out there may be doing this in a very manual way. Opening it up with a native application and exporting it out to a different kind of format. It is still a conversion that you're doing. You are just doing it manually. 
    • Our point here in best practice that we suggest is to figure out a way to automate that, because do you really want your operators, your prepress operators, or your customer support reps, in some cases doing this conversion?
    • Or would you rather have software just handle it through?
    • [00:08:58] Pat McGrew: It is so easy to make a mistake. 
    • [00:08:59] Ryan McAbee: That is true too. 
    • [00:09:00] Pat McGrew: The more you automate it, the fewer mistakes you are going to be trying to resolve deeper in the prepress process. 
    • [00:09:05] Ryan McAbee: After conversion, we probably want to check to make sure everything looks okay for the way that we intend to output the file.
    • This is where we get into preflight software and solutions. Again, in a certain sense, you may be preflighting manually. You may have a kind of standard checklist, and you are going through that native file. Trying to find all these different pieces. Again, that is probably not the best use of your time or cost structure to be doing it that way. There are specialized tools that are made just for preflight, and it is going to go through a whole set of lists and rules. Literally, I think there are over thousands of checks at this point. It will check for all these kinds of things that you see on the list on the right, but we are really looking for anything that would stop production: low-resolution images, missing fonts, and those kinds of things. 
    • [00:09:43] Pat McGrew: We would make the case pretty strongly that this should be absolutely done when the file arrives to make sure that what was delivered has all the elements that it needs. But it should also be done as a last step before it moves into final print production as well because things happen during prepress. You want to make sure you have not broken anything. We would call it a must-do. Automated just makes so much more sense than trying to do it manually. People will never be as efficient as an automated process when it comes to looking at files and finding the errors or finding the anomalies that might stop production.
    • Definitely recommend that it be automated. We use the term preflight. We should probably also make a point about optimization because preflight is designed to find the errors. Many of the tools can also fix a lot of the errors, but maybe not fix all of them. There is the new generation of programs called optimization programs that will go through and basically repair most of what is there, give you a very detailed report about what it repaired and any suggestions it has about things that you might be able to do better. It is worth taking a look at those as well. 
    • [00:10:47] Ryan McAbee: We go into that comparison in the preflight course. So definitely check that out.
    • I could not agree more with the statement that preflight is not one instance in your workflow. It can be used in many different ways. We often see that in production print environments - that they have put it in several different places. 
    • [00:11:03] Pat McGrew: Especially in an automated environment. You might do it three or four times during the journey of the file. 
    • [00:11:07] Ryan McAbee: Now, page editing is one of those things that can be done in several different places. You could do it in the original design application, so your Quarks, your Adobes, those kinds of things. You could also do it using the preflight tools that we just mentioned because it could automatically rotate pages or do other kinds of things like that.
    • [00:11:21] Pat McGrew: Think about that. This is classic. An image got put into a page sideways because we copied it in, but we just did not pay attention to the orientation. Now it has gone through, and a lot of the preflight tools are very sophisticated and can actually flag something to say the orientation does not seem to look right here. Do you want to double-check that? That is the kind of page editing tool that allows you to re-rotate something or correct a typo. It happens. 
    • I have written eight books in my life, and I do not think a single one came to me after it was already in publication and out the door that I did not find a typo.
    • [00:11:54] Ryan McAbee: I am not surprised at all. There are also other kinds of tools that are in the mix here. You have the PDF editing tool, which a lot of times replicates a lot of the same functionality you have in your design application, where you can select objects, you can remove them, you can change them, and rotate them.
    • We did not put it on the slide here, but document re-engineering tools are actually doing page-level edits, usually like an overlay or putting an image in a particular spot, removing some element. 
    • The one I really want to focus on because it is unique to the digital printing world is this type of solution that is called a make-ready tool. This is helpful if you are in an environment where you are literally scanning a document or original on a piece of glass, and then you need to clean it up. There are different things you can do for skewing and fixing it if it was not perfectly lined up on the scanner. Sharpening images and OCR (optical character recognition) are sometimes built into these kinds of tools. You can also do all the other kinds of things; whether it is rotating pages, it is changing the color from color to black and white. You can do that kind of thing with a couple of clicks. The other thing that is very common, and probably the biggest use case I see out there for the make-ready tool solutions, is creating tabs. We are literally talking about putting these printed things.
    • [00:12:55] Pat McGrew: The things that stick out. 
    • [00:12:56] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, the things that stick out and then the customizing of it, so it has specific text. 
    • [00:13:00] Pat McGrew: Think about it. You might have gotten something from your insurance company that explains all the ways to work with them. It might be a spiral-bound book that has these little things on the outside that make it easier for you to thumb through. That is exactly where a make-ready tool can be really useful.
    • [00:13:13] Ryan McAbee: They are often highly automated, and it is an easier process than trying to do that in your design application. A lot of different ways to do page editing. 
    • The same is really true for color editing. You have all those same kinds of tools where you can do color conversions and so forth. 
    • It is worth mentioning that it is not always a color conversion where you are going from an RGB color to a CMYK color or some other kind of color space. Sometimes it is just the fact that the designer when they were using and assigning colors, their intent may have been to use the same color in two different places in the document, but they chose a different Pantone color extension like a C versus a U. That is really not the same color when you go to CMYK, and it can look different if you do not catch that. That is something called color mapping or color renaming, where you have tools that you can help out with. We talked in another course about embellishments and like spot varnishes and foils and all this kind of neat stuff you could do, but you have to put that into the file in some way. 
    • [00:14:03] Pat McGrew: You have to manage it. It is typically done by adding layers. Those layers need to be managed correctly as well. You can have spot colors. You can have a varnish color. You might be distinguishing between different colors of foil that are being used on the same sheet, right?
    • There are a lot of different kinds of things that you can specify. And I guess, Ryan, it is really worth pointing out what is along the bottom. 
    • [00:14:26] Ryan McAbee: We had mentioned this briefly in our other course on design considerations, but this is a nice visual to see in practice. 
    • On the left, you have basically what is called knockout without trapping. What that does is when you knock out or set an element to knock out when you are printing analog, usually offset, the registration is always slightly off because it is a mechanical process. You cannot get it perfect a hundred percent of the time. If you do not create what is called a trap where you spread or choke overlaying the colors that are meeting up. In this case, this pink and this blue. You will notice a white line where the paper is showing through. What you would do in that case -  when your analog printing is creating the trap - is compensating for the mechanical deficiency in the process so it looks visually as it should. Where the colors are perfectly meeting and aligning.
    • The last one is over to the right. It is where you do not knock it out; it is actually set to overprint, which means those colors are going to mix together visually. You have that pink and that blue, and that ends up making this purple-looking color because that element that "D" and "I" was set to overprint.
    • [00:15:23] Pat McGrew: It is important to understand color. It has so many different characteristics, and it behaves so differently for each process, each substrate. Whether you are using toner or ink. All of these things impact the color that you are going to get in your final piece.
    • [00:15:35] Ryan McAbee: The good thing is that there are many different tools in the arsenal here to correct it, to compensate for it, to change elements and all that kind of thing. 
    • [00:15:42] Pat McGrew: There is some great education, specifically around color, available in the marketplace. We are looking at things at a very high level, but if you need to do a deep dive into color, go take a look at the courses that are available in the market. Idealliance certainly has some. You may find your local university or your local community college might have options for learning more about color tools. Do not forget to talk to your vendors. If you are using anyone's color management software, they very often have design tutorials that can walk you through color from A to Z. They are really worthwhile.
    • [00:16:12] Ryan McAbee: If you are a print provider who needs help with color, there are not only specialists inside of your vendors that could help, but there is also this whole community of color specialists that are independent that can also come and consult.
    • Last but not least, we are talking about imposing the file. I think the best way to think about it is just optimizing for the material, so you use the least amount of material possible because that carries the cost.
    • There are many different ways imposition looks, and there are many different ways that you can actually apply imposition. 
    • [00:16:37] Pat McGrew: The interesting thing is that today we use artificial intelligence and machine learning in many of the programs that handle imposition because the variations are massive. No one brain could come up with every possibility of how to best optimize placing content on a sheet. Now when you are doing book imposition, it is usually pretty straightforward because pages are all the same size, and they have to land in a certain way so that page two ends up on the back of page one, right? It is not really great if page five ends up on the back of page one. That is one of the applications of imposition, but it is not the only one. 
    • We also use these same techniques to combine things on the wish sheet, as you said, for optimizing the materials. If you think about having to mix a two-inch by two-inch object, a three-inch teardrop object, another one that is a cube kind of object, and another one that is an octagon, and you are trying to get them all on the same page because they use the same color palette - this is where tools that use some form of AI or ML are really useful  - to get as many of those objects onto that sheet as possible and create as little waste as possible. 
    • [00:17:45] Ryan McAbee: From a terminology perspective, the last thing that you are describing there, is usually referred to as nesting, right?
    • You hear that word a lot if you are in the wide-format, signage, or label printing segments. You might hear that kind of terminology, but it still relates to imposition. There are also some other terms like N-up or how many steps and repeats you are going to have, right? If you are doing the same image, but you are doing it 50 across the sheet. 
    • [00:18:03] Pat McGrew: That is another place where these programs can come in handy because they can tell you what the maximum is. Should you do it across, or should you do it down the sheet? There are all sorts of things that you can do in programming. Very often, these programs bring you back options so you can pick the one that will actually work for your process the best.
    • [00:18:21] Ryan McAbee: The option you may be going for is the most cost-effective, but you might want to go with the one that you can get done the fastest because you have a delivery date or an SLA to meet. These kinds of smart imposition tools will give you those different options that you can choose from.
    • The other thing that the smart imposition tools do is look across your entire fleet of printing equipment, and figure out which is the best based on the quantity, the size of these things, the due date, or whatever criteria or business rules that you established. It'll tell you and give you the best options possible.
    • [00:18:46] Pat McGrew: For finishing too, right? Because sometimes, we care about the grain of the paper because that can impact the finishing. The program, if you tell it I'm using this sheet and I'm going to be printing it with grain in this direction - it can help you make better decisions about how you lay things on the sheet as well.
    • [00:19:01] Ryan McAbee: I would encourage you to go look at the course on imposition because we lay out the tiers from manual ways of imposition all the way up to this AI machine learning kind of toolset that we have in the market now. 
    • How would you best summarize the journey here for file preparation, Pat? As we went through about six stages. 
    • [00:19:16] Pat McGrew: What you should take away from this is that preparation is what leads to success. If you will take the time at the front of the journey of the job to plan out where it is going to go, and understand its route through your shop, you will understand what touchpoints there will be and how to prepare for each one of those steps in the most optimized fashion.
    • Paying attention to your file prep is the first step in saving as much money as possible as you are printing the job. Failure to prepare, it is probably going to cost you more money to print the job. 
    • Looking at it holistically, I have all these different tool sets that I am using. How can I get them to talk to each other? How can I automate these processes? How can I then elevate my employees to do the real exception handling or the real value-added work instead of the conversion process, which is just the same thing over and over again? 
    • With that said, we thank you for joining us on this file preparation course and hope to see you here at a future episode at The Print University.

45- PROOFING AND APPROVAL

Customers have an expectation their final printed products will match their original designs. To minimize miscommunications and expectations, printers use electronic or physical proofs to represent the final output. Customers review the proofs and ultimately give their final approval before production starts.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition here at The Print University. We are talking about proofing and approval this time, so of course, I am joined by Pat McGrew, McGrewGroup, and this is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting. With that big mouthful said, what is proofing and approval exactly, Pat? 
    • [00:00:16] Pat McGrew: Yeah, so it is a little bit of art and a little bit of science. If you think about proofing, it is what it sounds like. What you are trying to do is the same thing that a proofreader might do with text, but it is not just text. You are actually looking at a complete creative work and trying to determine if the thing that you have been given to look at, whether it is a soft copy or a hard copy, meets the creative intent of the person who commissioned the work. That is a lot of words to basically say; we are trying to make sure that what we see is what we expected to get. 
    • [00:00:48] Ryan McAbee: Another way to look at it is that whatever you originally thought you were starting out with in the beginning is what you now see after the printer has gotten a hold of it. 
    • [00:00:57] Pat McGrew: And that it is represented in the way you want it. Part of proofing and then deciding whether to approve it or not has to do with how the color that you had in your head actually turned up on the substrate you selected. Maybe not the substrate you selected, but what was available in the timeframe that you need the work done. What you thought you were going to get and what was actually available might not have matched up. You had to make some compromises. Now, is what I am seeing still going to work for the purposes of the piece that I have created? 
    • There are elements of proofing the text that are absolutely part of this. It does no good if it is beautiful but spells the words wrong. But then we are also looking for color accuracy. If it is a piece that has embellishment elements to it, we are actually looking to make sure that those have landed in the right locations and are actually doing what we expected them to do. 
    • [00:01:45] Ryan McAbee: I think you hit the keyword there - variable. Because there are a lot of variables that are introduced. Even once the customer has the design aspect locked in, we are still introducing variables, maybe with variable data. If we are introducing different treatments in terms of embellishments that have different layering effects. We also have the variables of the devices that it is going to be output with, and we have the variability of the materials that we are using to actually do the printing and the finishing. 
    • [00:02:10] Pat McGrew: Think about packaging for a second. We talked in another episode about things you had to be careful of. If you have flaps, or there are glue areas, or some unique cutting in order to create unique packaging sizes and shapes - hexagons, circles, whatever - you have to make sure that your artwork has landed on the dielines in the way you expect them to.
    • [00:02:30] Ryan McAbee: It has to be that spot-on positioning. Otherwise, it is not going to be able to convert correctly in that packaging world.
    • There are many different types of proofing, and we will run through the ones here, but the thing to remember here is that each one carries a cost that is different. Some are not as costly, and some are very costly. Then there is a timing element in terms of whether it can be instant or it takes more time to actually get to that proof.
    • And there are many different options here, right Pat?
    • [00:02:52] Pat McGrew: There really are, and we use the term soft proof. Soft proofs can happen in a couple of different ways. The most common way today is that we save the final printable file as a PDF, and we send the PDF out to the customer and ask them to look at it. It has a few risks.
    • [00:03:08] Ryan McAbee: I am glad you are going there. 
    • [00:03:10] Pat McGrew: If you send it out to a client and they are using the free Adobe Reader - they are not paying the money for something called Acrobat Pro - they will not be able to see any of the overprints, and they will not be able to see how any of the transparencies are handled. In fact, the work may look completely wrong to them, and they may reject it. So there are those issues. 
    • [00:03:31] Ryan McAbee: There is a setting even in Reader that can be toggled, but it often is not toggled correctly, and it is putting too much burden on the printer. 
    • [00:03:38] Pat McGrew: And I have just recently had some conversations with some people who do this for a living with their clients. They say this is the thing that messes up their day the most. When the customer calls them back and says, “I told you I would accept a soft proof, but what you sent is terrible. It is absolutely not what I asked for.” And then they have to have the conversation about what did they open it up with?
    • It is not just whether you used Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Pro. It is - did you use somebody else's PDF reader? Because there are all sorts of PDF readers out there that are embedded.
    • [00:04:07] Ryan McAbee: Preview on the Mac, as an example. 
    • [00:04:09] Pat McGrew: And they may not read things in the same way that the plate maker will read it or the digital front end will read it for a physical print.
    • Soft proofing is cheap, relatively speaking. It is cheap, but it is not cheap if you spend eight hours on the phone talking a customer through how to approve it. 
    • [00:04:25] Ryan McAbee: It can be delivered quickly. I would say the other risk that I see with electronic soft proofing, particularly around the PDF proofing, is that many times the printer is literally returning the same file that the customer submitted without anything done to it.
    • [00:04:38] Pat McGrew: That is not a soft proof, right? It needs context. 
    • [00:04:41] Ryan McAbee: What needs to happen to really do a softer electronic proof is that it needs to follow the same processes to the point as what you would output it on. 
    • [00:04:49] Pat McGrew: That means color management for the substrate, a lot of things. The problem is once you color manage for a specific substrate, when you return that electronic file back, the customer is still looking at pixels on the screen, and very few organizations have the calibration modes on their monitors that are substrate appropriate.
    • [00:05:08] Ryan McAbee: That is absolutely true. Another term that we have here is prepress proof. I have to say that it is not a term that you hear commonly in the industry, but I liked it, so I kept it in here. I think it distinguishes between an electronic soft proof versus kind of that next-tier higher, which is often an online portal that gives the customer a visual electronic rendering of the file that often has collaboration tools in it. They can mark it up and say, "Hey, this logo needs to change by 10%,“ or whatever. They also have more tools. Usually, they can measure objects on the screen.
    • [00:05:40] Pat McGrew: And maybe turn things for 3D. For packaging. 
    • [00:05:43] Ryan McAbee: They can turn things for 3D. They can turn on and off layers, as you mentioned with the embellishment, to see if it is in the right exact position or not. It is a slightly higher-level electronic form of electronic proofing. 
    • [00:05:51] Pat McGrew: You often find these embedded in workflows. You find them very often embedded in content workflows from the larger companies that provide those kinds of tools, and you often find them in the larger print houses. The challenge is that some of those tools are out of the reach of some of the mid-tier print houses or the smaller shops. That is where you have conversations anytime you are going to exchange a softproof.
    • [00:06:13] Ryan McAbee: I would say the good news over the recent years is that even for smaller shops, you can get this kind of functionality in a SaaS subscription, which is something you can afford. It is changing a little bit as we go forward.
    • [00:06:23] Pat McGrew: Software always gets better, right? If I think about the software that I had access to 40 years ago, life is way better now. Yeah, it does keep getting better. 
    • [00:06:31] Ryan McAbee: We talked about soft or electronic proofing, the whole other category is what we refer to generally as hard copy proofing. That means physical. You can touch it, and you can see it, and you can smell it and all that fun stuff. 
    • [00:06:41] Pat McGrew: All of those things. The interesting thing is that there are a lot of traditions around producing hard-copy proofs. It does not necessarily mean that it is being produced on the press that will be used for production, and that is important to know. It is very common to use what we call plotting devices for hard-copy proofs for print. They may have slightly different color characteristics or substrate characteristics, but you will see how things will lay out. They are great for showing you the layout. They may not be as great if what you really need is the perfect view of the color that you are going to get and how it is going to look on the specific substrate that you are going to be printing on in production.
    • [00:07:19] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, that is absolutely true. On the hard copy proof side you often have two buckets. It is the contract proof, which is usually terminology here if it is color accurate. Those are usually managed with color management software. They use ICC profiles, and they are trying to hit some color target, whether that be GRACoL, G7, Fogra, or whatever it is. It is still using that proofer or plotter, as we call it, but these are usually aqueous-based inkjet printers. You will have to go look at the wide format section to understand what that is, but they are very high quality. You can actually control the color output to match the intended equipment you are trying to actually run it on in the end. 
    • [00:07:51] Pat McGrew: It depends. If you are going to offset litho devices or gravure devices, what is available for hard copy proofing is typically this kind of situation because that kind of print tends to want the contract proof unless there is a very special relationship between the buyer and the producer. 
    • When you start getting into digital production, where you are doing high-speed inkjet or high-speed toner type of production work, it is not uncommon to go ahead and put that on the press behind another job or in front of a job. Cut it off and have a separate hard copy from the actual device that will be used in production. This is another case where times they are changing, and it has to do with the capabilities of the devices we might be using in production. 
    • [00:08:32] Ryan McAbee: I think the biggest driver to this is if you have good processes in place for color, for your output processes of managing everything. Your customer gets comfortable over time, and they will demand less and less to see different types of proofing. It all is related to the cost and effort that each one of these proofing types requires. A full-on analog press proof, where you are doing it on the physical press, is less and less common these days. It is just not used that much because it is high cost. The customer is not willing to pay for that high cost. 
    • [00:09:00] Pat McGrew: You will see it for high-end luxury work or for high-end, high-value work. If you are dealing with one of the big high-end brands, they will typically want that contract proof.
    • If you are dealing with somebody who prints reasonably the same thing on a regular basis, even if it is a high-end brand for their direct mail work, they are comfortable working with their printer. Today a soft copy will more likely be sufficient for them. 
    • [00:09:21] Ryan McAbee: A couple of other comments here on the content proof side. That usually is used for verifying the text and the positioning of things. If it is on packaging related to the dieline and so forth. If it is commercial, it is checking the page order and that, that sort of thing. Those usually cannot be color accurate because you are going to be printing on both sides of them in many cases using a material that is not going to lend itself to that.
    • Lastly, I think it is also interesting that in some cases, the proofing becomes hardcopy, almost a mockup. We have been in shops together where they were going to run the job eventually on offset equipment, but they use their digital cut-sheet toner device to literally make a color-accurate full mockup of a booklet. 
    • [00:09:55] Pat McGrew: Sometimes they do that for the benefit of the operators so that the operators and the finishing team know what the final piece is supposed to look like, and they have something to check against. 
    • [00:10:05] Ryan McAbee: The proofing is used in two use cases. First, it is used for the customer to see the representation of the output as it is supposed to be in the end and approve it. Usually, there is some kind of approval step here. It is either an email, or it is a check in a portal to say, "Yes, that looks good." It all depends on what kind of proofing they are using.
    • The other thing not to overlook is exactly what you were just saying. It is often that proof, even if it is a physical proof, follows the workflow internally so that the operators can look and have a reference piece and say, "Yep, that looks right. This is in the right order. This is how it is supposed to be."
    • [00:10:34] Pat McGrew: This is the kind of thing that might travel in one of those job ticketing envelopes we talked about in another episode. 
    • [00:10:39] Ryan McAbee: Yes. And that is often the argument for why we keep physical job tickets in some environments still. You have these ride-alongs, as they call them sometimes.
    • [00:10:45] Pat McGrew: Exactly. 
    • [00:10:46] Ryan McAbee: That is a good summary of proofing and approval for the industry. We are glad that you joined us for this episode and hope to see you again here at The Print University.

46- DIGITAL FRONT ENDS

Digital printing methods are reliant on a Digital Front End (DFE) to interpret any artwork and data files required for printing. The DFE translates the inbound print file format into a language used by the print device’s marking technology.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrew Group, and with me, as always, is Ryan McAbee, Pixel Dot Consulting. Together we are The Print University, and today we have a technical topic. We are going to be talking about print workflow and processes from the perspective of something called a Digital Front End - a DFE, you will hear it called.
    • And, Ryan, these are magic machines in a lot of ways. They are partly a Star Trek Universal Translator. They are capable of doing a lot of things. They are providing a lot of data, capturing a lot of data, but they are also most well known for containing that piece of software that takes the inbound file and turns it into whatever the marking engine needs in order to accomplish getting the image onto paper and or onto a plate.
    • Some of the processes are very similar in a computer-to-plate environment that is used in offset printing, but we are really focused right now on digital printing, and this is something that might be part of the machine. It might sit beside or away from the machine. It may have a screen sitting on top of it, or the screen might be attached to the digital press. The guts of it might be sitting in a server sitting behind the press can be almost anywhere and do a lot.
    • [00:01:20] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, it is one of those things that, if you have a digital printer, you know what this is, even if you did not know the terminology. It is the thing that you interact and interface with to manage the job queue, the jobs coming in, and then release them to actually print.
    • But it does a lot more than that. It not only does language conversion to the incoming file to get it ready to actually print on whatever the output engine or the digital printer is. But there are many other kinds of workflow-specific tasks that can be attached here.
    • So you can do things like color editing and color management. You can do things like imposition, which is a common one. Also, image enhancements can happen here. 
    • And in other modules, we talked about the enhancements. Some have tools to click on a spot on the file and create where the spot gloss or the toner will go, from the fifth station.
    • [00:02:20] Pat McGrew: What we have here is a Fiery workstation. A lot of shops will just refer to it as the Fiery because it is heavily installed; you find them everywhere. They are the front ends to the printing devices of many of the hardware vendors.
    • They will just say, “Well, I do that on the Fiery.” And in fact, some of the Fiery digital front ends are configured to have some light composition and variable data merging on them. They are really amazing devices. 
    • [00:02:51] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. There can be a lot of workflow automation tools that are part of it as well.
    • And, Fiery from EFI is not the only digital front-end option. We will get to many of the other ones because there are often digital front ends that are segment specific. When you get into the wide-format printing space, it has a whole set of different vendors.
    • And some of them overlap. We will talk about that as we go forward. But, in terms of the flavors and how these things come, you might also hear the term  RIP or raster image processor when we are talking about the digital front end too. We see those as two different things, but they can be co-located in one box.
    • [00:03:32] Pat McGrew: I think this is a great image because it explains how they relate one to the other. In most cases, the digital front end is the bigger thing. It has the capability of doing queue management and all the things we were just talking about, but one of its key missions in life is to achieve turning the inbound file into what the marking engine needs.
    • I call it the marking engine because sometimes it is going to be toner. And in that case, we are imaging a platen as we have described in other modules. Sometimes it is inkjet where we are going to be transmitting information to inkjet heads for each color so that the image is what we expect it to be.
    • That makes these devices interesting. The raster image processor piece of the digital front end has a hard job because it has to understand not only the inbound file format, which can be a number of different things, but it also has to be able to render it to the intent of the person who created that file.
    • So it has to be smart enough to render every color, every nuance of color, and to do it at high quality. That means it also has to be able to translate graphic images that are embedded in the file, which might be raster images, or might be vector images. So it has to be able to translate vector commands into what the marking engine needs as well.
    • They are pretty amazing pieces of technology. And as we mentioned, typically, when you buy a production digital press, you might not have a choice about the digital front end and the RIP. You might have one or two choices, but in the wide format space, typically, you pick your RIP and how you want that digital front end configured.
    • In fact, you might buy three or four or five different RIPs for your wide-format devices because they each have different characteristics and are capable of doing a better job on giant graphically rich things or things that are not graphically rich but have color intensity. So this is one of those areas where you want to understand the terminology because you want to be able to have a smart conversation with your vendors so that you buy the right solution.
    • [00:05:50] Ryan McAbee: I think one component here that is important to mention is as the digital printing equipment has gotten faster, and as we may do variable data printing with that, instead of just static printing, there are actual data-crunching requirements to be able to run that printing equipment at its rated speeds - the fastest it theoretically can go.
    • You have to have a lot of processing power to be able to do that. So you will see, if you get into roll-fed digital, these things get quite complex and use more high-speed servers, RAID, or blade configurations. 
    • [00:06:19] Pat McGrew: And, there is a cost here because sometimes when organizations are buying digital presses, one of the questions the vendor will ask is - what volume of work are you doing? How much of it is graphically rich? How much of it is black and white? 
    • They use that information to configure your RIP and your digital front end to be appropriate for you. And there are pricing differences depending on how much horsepower you need for the kind of work that you are doing. 
    • [00:06:45] Ryan McAbee: And, the last thing to mention here is the bullet at the bottom, even though we defined RIP and digital front end differently, as we have gone through here - the wid- format printing space, even if it has DFE functionality, they still they call it a RIP.
    • So if you hear RIP, it could also mean it does other things. Most of them do. We saw that nice Fiery example. We see it here again, freestanding and external from the device.
    • And you can have a nice screen and probably a spectrophotometer sitting there with it, but there is also this embedded, or bustled sometimes it is called, where the equipment for the DFE and the RIP are actually inside of the printing device somewhere. We see that typically on light office-level printing equipment, which we do not focus on here too much. Even in light production, as they are often referred to, cut sheet toner devices.
    • That is a common thing for most other types of printers. It is probably going to be external, right Pat? Because it needs more space. 
    • [00:07:52] Pat McGrew: If you are an environment that is running one of the high-speed inkjet devices - roll-fed or cut sheet - inkjet devices, or if you are in a high-speed toner environment, it is not uncommon to see the digital front end actually separated from the device.
    • Usually close by, but sometimes even segmented, where the screen and the driver console are close to the press, but the horsepower driving it is sitting behind the press or even in a dedicated server room. Some of the bigger presses, because they are highly capable, they take a lot of horsepower.
    • A lot of servers, whether blades or RAIDs or whatever technology is being used for the server, very often want to be in a dedicated server environment that is closed off, secure, cooled, and very clean, right? Because these machines, the servers, typically like to be in clean rooms.
    • [00:08:52] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, the DFE needs that physical connection to the equipment. But, the other thing that is worth mentioning is that the software that runs that part of the package in the digital front end can often be run on other workstations that you may have in the prepress area or somewhere else in the shop.
    • And we are seeing that more because some of this functionality is actually being cloud-delivered at this point. You know, there are vendors out there that do their impositioning through the cloud. It makes it so that you can at least operate some parts of the digital front end without having to physically be standing in front of it.
    • Yeah, absolutely. So typically, the choice varies based on the level of printing equipment. And we kind of touched on this already but trying to put it here in a graphical sense. So typically, if you are talking about label or packaging printers that are digital roll-fed inkjet or cut-sheet inkjet, you will probably only have one digital front-end option.
    • And why is that, Pat? Why do we not have like 10?
    • [00:09:49] Pat McGrew: In the world of presses, these are environments that the vendors like to keep locked down. They typically create a very tight connection between the RIP and the marking engines in order for them to provide maximum fidelity to the file and color quality and print quality and speed; it is in their best interest to keep it as locked down as possible and to provide what they believe is the best solution.
    • [00:10:20] Ryan McAbee: And now, a lot of times, that is to get to the functionality, right? Because they know their marketing engine or device better than anybody else. And so they are going to try and marry that with a digital front end that can take full advantage of all of that functionality and feature.
    • [00:10:34] Pat McGrew: Yeah. I think that if you think about the kinds of printers that are typically sold with one DFE option, the goal is to make it as easy to operate as possible. And to provide it at the best cost possible. By locking out too many choices, the vendor can provide the best solution for the customers they are trying to sell to.
    • [00:11:00] Ryan McAbee: And then we get into some other devices. Cut-sheet toner is a classic example where you do have more than one option. You may have only two, and you may have three. This is that world where we see a lot of efi Fiery, Creo, and also RIPs or DFEs that are made by equipment manufacturers. 
    • [00:11:17] Pat McGrew: Yeah. And one of the things we mentioned - the Fiery we had in the picture earlier - is that just because something has a Fiery label on it does not mean that they are all created equal. Fiery devices are configured in a conversation between the EFI Fiery team and the vendors who are selling them.
    • There are a lot of configuration choices based on the equipment that they are trying to drive. So you can have two Fiery DFEs sitting next to each other that do not do the same things or have the same capabilities. So, that is an important thing to remember. And when you are a buyer and given an option around DFEs, that is a very intense conversation with the vendor because you are trying to make sure that the DFE services and the RIP services are appropriate for the kind of work the customer is doing today - but you do not want to lock them out of opportunities for work that they might want to do later on. As we know, digital presses - toner and inkjet presses - are becoming more and more versatile every time a new generation comes out.
    • A lot of these devices can be upgraded in the field to take on heavier substrates, and lighter substrates, to provide more features. So you do want that ability to be able to bolt on a different DFE if that becomes the thing that you should do. And so we will see a chart later on that shows there are a number of possibilities.
    • There are the ones that the vendors usually offer, and then there are ones that they might offer if you are doing specialty types of work that they believe that the alternative DFE and RIP will work better for you. But it is always a good idea to ask. It is a good conversation to have with the vendor as a new machine is being configured.
    • Look, this is what I do, and I know you are offering me this, but are there alternatives I should be aware of?  
    • [00:13:09] Ryan McAbee: And do you do testing? Most of these vendors have demonstration rooms or facilities that you can say - this is the work that I do; show me how it actually processes through this.
    • I think one of the things that you mentioned is worth repeating - even if you do have a choice within the vendor of the digital front end, even inside of that single vendor, there are usually multiple tiers of the DFE that you can buy. Obviously, the lower-cost versions will have less processing power, and fewer capabilities, generally speaking. And then you go up from there in price and capability.
    • [00:13:40] Pat McGrew: It is always worth having that conversation. One of the sadder things is watching a company spend a lot of money on a very capable press, but then deciding not to spend money to have a richer DFE environment. And as a result, they are not always capable of getting every last ounce of capacity out of the devices that they could have otherwise.
    • [00:14:03] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, I think an analogy here is if you buy a Ferrari and you put 87 octane gas into the car. Probably not… 
    • [00:14:11] Pat McGrew: …the best results. Not the best idea. No. 
    • [00:14:15] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. We talked about the fact that it is usually a one-to-one ratio.
    • So you have one digital front end typically to one printer, but that is not always the case, particularly in the wide format printing area, where it is more unique than the other segments because you could have one RIP in this space, but it could drive - maybe not simultaneously, not at the same time - but it could drive four different wide format devices you have in the shop.
    • [00:14:40] Pat McGrew: Yeah, it is not uncommon in a wide format shop that does a lot of diverse work to see a server stack that has multiple RIPs installed, and each RIP is capable of having different kinds of conversations and is connected through a network to all the different output devices. Sometimes they can do multiple devices simultaneously; sometimes they cannot.
    • Depends on the nature of the RIP that is available. We say that one dedicated DFE for each digital printer is the norm. But it is not necessarily the only way it can be configured. For many years, inkjet devices, especially in the early years, came configured with a couple of different digital front ends that you could flip, and you had to manually flip back and forth between them. But you could flip it back and forth between them to be able to handle different print data streams because, in the good old days, we had one digital front end that handled Postscript and one that handled PDF, and one that handled IPDS or AFP.
    • So we have come a long way. A modern digital front end is capable of handling multiple print file formats. Handling multiple levels of graphic richness can give you options for how to manage the color so that you are providing a level of inking or a level of toner that is appropriate for what you want to charge for the job you are producing for your customer. There is a lot of technical information that goes into living with the digital front end for your devices, and it is worth exploring that with your vendor so you can make really good choices. 
    • [00:16:22] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. I love the point you made in terms of conversations. That is how I think about it in terms of multiple DFEs depending on the format you are trying to support. In one sense, you are speaking Italian; in another sense, you are speaking French, and that is like PDF versus IPDS. You need that different interpreter on the digital front end to be able to actually print on those devices.
    • That leads us into why. 
    • [00:16:47] Pat McGrew: We call it the Star Trek Universal translator. Yeah, that is right. It will take your one language and turn it into another - that is its area of expertise. That is its superpower. 
    • [00:17:00] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. And here is the mix of vendors across the digital front end space.
    • This is not every one of them. This is not comprehensive, but it tries to at least give you some of the mainstream names and where they fit. So you will see that some of these vendors play in multiple spaces. They really can go the gamut from supporting cut sheet devices, the roll-fed devices, to the wide format and specialty devices.
    • EFI is an example of that. We have talked about Fiery already. They can support the cut sheet versions, but they can also go into larger B2 environments. They can also support the wide format devices that they manufacture themselves and more. So we have vendors like that, but then we have OEMs that have their own.
    • We have Kodak, Heidelberg, Ricoh, and Canon. Most of the digital printer manufacturers have some kind of variety there. And then it gets into that interesting space on the wide format side where you definitely see a lot of variation, right?
    • [00:18:00] Pat McGrew: Yeah, absolutely. That is why you see the most names over there because that is where you see a lot of RIP providers have come up over the years, typically to provide different kinds of capabilities, different kinds of rendering options into wide-format and specialty where there are a lot of things to control.
    • Typically, that might be doing cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, but they also might be doing 3, 4, or 6 other colors in addition. And so those RIPs need to be able to separate out the color planes and handle everything appropriately. They are also capable of making good suggestions on resolution decisions because when you are printing wide-format you are in a different universe when it comes to trying to decide what resolution you should be printing for the purpose for where the sign will be, and for where the display piece will be seen. 
    • If you look at this, it is important to remember that this is a Venn diagram. At that very middle piece, that sort of darker beige where you see EFI and global graphics, that piece right there - the thing to understand is that Ricoh and Canon and HP, and the other one we could logically put in there would be maybe Adobe APPE is another one that is worth talking about - But what happens is that the people like Ricoh and Canon and HP and, and Kodak who make all these high-speed digital devices and the mid-speed digital devices, they typically will partner with someone for the core.
    • And then, they will wrap their own software and control modules around that. They might partner with one company for the RIP translator, and they might partner with a different company for impositioning capabilities. And they might have internally written code that they use for controlling other aspects of the press.
    • It is a giant spaghetti bowl worth of code that you are typically working with. You have somebody like HP who has traditionally built their own digital front ends, and done it from scratch but traditionally partnered with Global Graphics for the RIP piece. Very recently, they partnered with TAGg to be able to get access to a good digital front end that will now also allow them to bring AFP IPDSprint streams to devices without requiring them to be transformed.
    • Covered in another module, if you look at Ricoh and Canon, they typically partner for pieces of the RIPs and the impositioning pieces, and the color management pieces. You may have choices about what pieces are embedded in what you buy, but very often, you do not have a choice. It is just packaged together for you. 
    • When we talk about somebody like a Creo or a Heidelberg or out there on the left, Agfa, a lot of times, those are the people who might have begun by providing services in offset print environments where they were driving computer-to-plate devices. They developed expertise in how to take a Postscript file or a PDF file and turn it into the raster images needed for plate-making purposes in an offset environment.
    • But because they have that expertise, they also become very good at driving digital devices. So, it is a technical world. It is worth asking a lot of questions, but keep an eye on this for the names, right? I think that this is the kind of slide that you might want to take a screen capture of and have in your hand when you are talking to your vendors so that you can understand what pieces are part of your digital front end environment, and to have the ability to research what capabilities you might be able to get access to in the… 
    • [00:21:49] Ryan McAbee: …future.
    • Those are all good points. I think the other thing is to realize that no single vendor that is listed here has created everything by themselves. There is always licensing of other pieces, and partners to build the best solution possible for whatever they are trying to address with the equipment.
    • In summary, I think it is important if you are a print service provider to be aware of these names, but also to understand what you are trying to accomplish with the device that you are bringing in because that will largely drive the features and functionality that you need from the digital front end to get to that point.
    • Then, if possible, if it is more complex work, you may want to have it tested in an environment where you could see how it performs and behaves with your specific types of work, So any other kind of final thoughts here, Pat, before… 
    • [00:22:40] Pat McGrew: …we wrap it up?
    • As always, we say to understand your environment. Understand what print streams are coming into your environment, and that will help you understand how your DFE interacts with those print streams. And what services are available on that DFE. Take a bit of time to do some investigation. It will help you immensely in your long journey with your DFE.
    • [00:23:03] Ryan McAbee: Very good points. So we hope you enjoyed this episode on digital front ends and RIPs as a part of that conversation. And we hope to see you here soon at The Print University for another episode.

56- DESIGNING FOR MAILINGS

This is a look at the design considerations required for mailing. We discuss the key areas of the envelope and barcoding to ensure the postal service accepts and tracks your mail.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition here at The Print University. Today we are going to be talking about designing for Mailing 101. This is Ryan, of course, with Pixel Dot Consulting, and we have Pat McGrew. This is your world, Pat. Let's dive into it! 
    • [00:00:15] Pat McGrew: Every time I think about mailing, little shivers go up and down my spine because I have seen really great mail pieces and some not-so-great mail pieces. Typically when they are not so great, it comes down to the design. That is why we are doing this module. 
    • One of the best-kept secrets in mailing is that if you start with really great design, you eliminate a lot of processes down the road, right?
    • [00:00:38] Ryan McAbee: We are not talking about the one-offs; we are talking about mailing that is at volume. 
    • [00:00:43] Pat McGrew: Right. This is not the letter to your grandma that you are stuffing in an envelope and putting a pretty stamp on. This is the kind of mailing that is going to take two forms. It is going to be what we call transactional mail: bills, statements, regulatory notifications, insurance communication, and personal health information. And it is going to be the direct mail marketing. The kinds of stuff that shows up in your mailbox that tries to get you to buy something or contribute to a charity, things like that. 
    • In the case of transactional and direct mail marketing, the secret to good design is making sure that the address will be visible. in the way the USPS or Canada Post or whatever post you are working with wants it to be visible. There are regulations for how that address appears. Fundamentally, everything else about the envelope and the mailing process is useless if the address information is not formatted correctly and in the correct location the way the postal service wants it to be.
    • There are a series of regulations that apply to designing four pieces that will be mailed. You want to know all sorts of things about the piece, but you definitely want to know what the size is that you are trying to mail. I showed on another episode, I have a bunch of envelopes that have come into my house that are all bills and statements. No two are the same size. Decisions were made by those organizations to have one that was a little bit shorter and a little bit taller, or a little bit wider and a little bit narrower. Maybe hoping that it would stick out of the pile of mail that was coming to me. Every one of them is legal because their designers took the time to figure out where their logo and their return address had to be. Where the recipient's address had to be, leaving room for the required barcodes and the postage information. All of that is essential.
    • Direct mail is the same way - you can make the most colorful piece of direct mail that is engaging and has QR codes to engage for social media and all sorts of fun embellishment. If the address information is not readable, you have failed the design challenge because it may not be mailable at the rate that you expected to pay. The post office might charge you extra because they have to handle it differently. 
    • There are all sorts of considerations here, and we want to talk a little bit about the basics of the address. 
    • [00:03:16] Ryan McAbee: At the end of the day, if you do not get all this working in coordination with the other, any one of these criteria, whether it is the addressing or it is the size of it, or there is the weight of it - it is either going to cause cost increases to you, or it is going to be rejected, and you are going to have to figure out how to handle it after the fact.
    • [00:03:34] Pat McGrew: The problem is if it gets rejected and you have already agreed how much you are charging your customer for the postage, you get to eat that, or the company that is doing the mailing gets to. Designers should be taking their jobs very seriously, and everybody in the supply chain up to the point where it gets inserted into the mail stream should be verifying that the design is legal for the purposes for which it is intended.
    • [00:03:59] Ryan McAbee: We are talking about something called closed-face mailing. Maybe describe that term first before we get into the actual elements of it. 
    • [00:04:06] Pat McGrew: Closed-face mailing, so there is no window. Now this one happens to be a self-mailer, but envelopes can be closed face mailing as well. A lot of companies do this. Envelopes come in two flavors. The ones that have those sort of cellophane or polystyrene windows that you can see through. The ones that do not and the ones that do not typically are a little bit cheaper. They allow you to print the address on the outside, and they can be really efficient in use. They have very specific requirements. 
    • If you look at this diagram, and this is taken directly from the USPS - if you do Canadian mail, if you mail into the UK, into the EU, into Australia, you might want to check their regulations. They are all about the same, but there are slight variations. For mailing in the US, non-window envelopes have a requirement for what they call the OCR read area. That is optical character recognition. The mailing equipment has cameras, and those cameras are reading the face of the envelope. They are looking at the address, and they are verifying the sort order, and it helps them determine how to route the mail so it gets into the right buckets.
    • If I am sitting here in Denver, Colorado, and I am mailing to you in North Carolina, my mail might make a number of stops along the way. It is not likely that there is a truck that goes from Denver, Colorado, to where you live in North Carolina directly. It is likely that my mail will go to a regional sorting facility, which will comingle my mail with a whole bunch of other mail that is heading in your direction. Then it might have another stop somewhere along the way in order to get sorted down to your local. Every step of the way, the barcode at the bottom and the address are being read by cameras. If your design happens to have a flower reaching up into the OCR scan area, or a pretty picture sitting behind the barcode area, you are going to create havoc with the cameras trying to read these things. This is why the regulations exist. They want those to be clear spaces where the cameras will be able to read accurately and efficiently to keep the mail speeding on its way. 
    • A lot of companies do not like closed-face envelopes because it requires two steps. If they can insert something into a window envelope, then the address is actually printed with the bill or with the communication, and it just shows through the envelope. If they use closed-face envelopes, they need a way to match the content that is going into the envelope with the address on the outside. There is a process called Step and Repeat, where the address on the content gets read and then repeated back onto the envelope. There are some specialized equipment and workflows that make that happen. They can be very efficient, but it is one of the reasons that you might not see as many closed-face envelopes as you see window envelopes - it does take that second process. 
    • [00:07:25] Ryan McAbee: I guess it is a bit of a trade-off because, on the closed-face envelopes, you have a second printing process, whether that is either directly on the envelope itself or in a label that is applied on top of that envelope to get it going somewhere.
    • When you do the window envelopes, the other thing that I am sure you are going to probably talk about is the fact that you are using at least the top of the page of that first page just solely for the addressing component. 
    • [00:07:49] Pat McGrew: It is a real estate balancing adventure, right? When you start looking at envelopes, the window envelope, as we mentioned, has a cutout window. Now the interesting thing is that the OCR area is actually the same. The cameras do not know whether it is a window envelope or a closed-face envelope coming at it. It just knows that it has an envelope, and it has to read it. It is looking for it to be within a certain area. 
    • One of the things that you usually see is that the styrene part of the envelope tends to just frame the address. That is a cost consideration more than it is anything else because that plastic stuff costs money. That puts the job of making sure that the address lands in that window envelope on the designer of the piece. That is a very technical piece of programming that ensures that it sits in a very specific area. That the type is of a certain size - that is regulated as well. Think about people who have very deep addresses because of where they live. There might be multiple lines. There is a danger that you could fall out of the window. Some companies solve that problem by buying envelopes that have a bigger window area, which makes it even more challenging for a designer because they have to keep the rest of the personal information out of the way of that window. It becomes a real estate balancing thing.
    • The beauty of a window envelope is that you can buy these things in bulk, pre-printed with your logo and the return address you want to use. You can buy them by the million, or at least you could buy them by the millions. We are currently having some supply chain challenges, and it is not looking like they are going to go away anytime soon. You can buy them, and it means that whatever you stuff in that envelope, the return information is already on there. There is still printing that has to go onto the outside of the envelope. While you might want just your logo up there, maybe you want to put some marketing information on the outside of the envelope. Maybe you want to put a QR code on the outside of the envelope. In fact, the postal service at different times of the year makes that very attractive because they offer discounts for putting marketing information on the outside of the envelope. For using the envelope as a billboard, basically, you still have to play by the rules.
    • The designer's job is to make sure that they not only understand the no man's land that they cannot design into, but they also leave room for that barcode that you see there at the bottom right of the envelope face. And that there is room for the postage because your design cannot infringe into that postage. It cannot travel there - so the petal of the flower cannot be in there. Your QR code for your marketing campaign cannot be too close to anything that the OCR cameras might pick up. Which is why you often see it on the back of the envelope for these different campaigns. Sometimes you see the most color on the backsides of envelopes so that they do not run the risk of running afoul of being picked up by the OCR cameras that are used during mail processing.
    • Sometimes there are two windows on the envelope. That is also a design challenge. Some companies decided that they still want to use window envelopes, but a lot of processors who process for multiple logos under a brand want the specific logo information and return address information for a specific sub-brand. They will do a window where the return address goes in a window, and there is a window where the recipient address goes. It is even more fun in some direct mail marketing where the envelopes actually have contest information. You might see barcodes or your special number or some color coding. If you have ever filled out a Reader's Digest or Publisher's Clearing House contest where the envelope is amazingly complex - if you look, it has lots of windows and lots of holes in it with lots of different things showing through. Designing for those and keeping it legal to go through the mail stream takes a very experienced designer.
    • [00:11:52] Ryan McAbee: To summarize, everything has its place and you need to get it right. You have to work the design in with that, but also keep in mind that these things have to go through sorting processes that require those specific placements to make everything work.
    • [00:12:07] Pat McGrew: My guidance to anybody is to think carefully about what is going to go inside the envelope and why you are making the decisions about the type of envelope that you are using. Whether you are using a double window envelope, a single envelope, a single window envelope, or a closed face envelope. Remember that the envelope can be your billboard and can carry good information, but it needs to be done by the rules. The rules can be complex. 
    • The reason we do this module is not to turn you into an expert on designing envelopes and designing for mailing. It is so that you know that this is something you should be concerned about. If a piece comes to you that does not look like everything else you've ever seen, you know that it is time to check with your team to make sure that all the right regulations have been followed. Where you find that information is right here. The USPS has done an amazing job of providing great educational content on its website for designers. The USPS Postal Explorer has some really great pages that they have built; in fact, our images were lifted from their site to show the different sizes and, where windows can be in OCR ranges. Look at all of these offerings that they give, and you can download the USPS domestic mail manual - and that can be a really good thing. 
    • [00:13:30] Ryan McAbee: It is worth mentioning that for every postal service across the globe, you can find these things. Do a search online, and you can find these helpful guides and the rules of the road, so to speak.
    • Anything else parting thoughts here, Pat, before we close it out? 
    • [00:13:44] Pat McGrew: I think we are good. Please go to the USPS to learn more and tune in for another episode of The Print University. 

57- PREPARING DATA PART 2

In the second part of Preparing Data, key processes for working with data are visualized and explained. Technical topics like Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) are also covered.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello again, and welcome to The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and as always, Pat McGrew from the McGrewGroup. 
    • Data is so important in our world these days that we not only had Preparing Data Part One, but now we are on Preparing Data Part Two. What do we need to know further about preparing and working with data? 
    • [00:00:20] Pat McGrew: In the first episode, we talked about what data is and where it might come from. And some of the high-level different uses and how you might use it. This time we want to talk about it at a slightly deeper level because data within a print production workflow can serve a lot of different purposes.
    • It can originate from a number of different sources. We want to walk through some things to be aware of, especially if you come from an environment where you have not had to work with data before. A lot of people do. A lot of people come into the print industry without ever having given a lot of thought to data. Today it is hard to find a printing company that does not work with data in some way. There is data in the back office. There is data in prepress; there is data everywhere. 
    • Let's talk first about data sources. Data can come from public sources where it is demographic data and census data, and even GPS data. It can come as a direct feed from a customer database. To be honest, most of the data that a print company works with in the print shop is coming from a customer database. It is either a connection to a customer's database that is live, or it is turned on and off as needed, or it is an extract from a customer database that is packaged up and made available to the printing company.
    • There is also data in the back office. There is data; there is accounting data and business data, and purchasing and inventory data. But let's focus on the print workflow for the moment. 
    • When you get data from a customer, it might come as just literally a stream of stuff with no markers. 
    • [00:01:59] Ryan McAbee: Any way you possibly can think of it being delivered, it can be, and that is part of the challenge initially with onboarding the work and the customer. You have to do that diligence to say, "Okay, how are you going to provide it to me? Then what steps do I need to take to make it usable?"
    • [00:02:14] Pat McGrew: That absolutely should be part of the job onboarding conversation. If you are using a web-to-print environment, a digital storefront environment to take work in. If that work includes working with data, you need to build a really tight environment that puts some bumper guards around how you are going to work with that customer's data. 
    • It is one of those types of environments and relationships where using the web-to-print to set up the specs of the job but does not provide a proof until you have had a conversation because data can change everything. The condition of the data, how it is formatted, and the work you are going to have to do to bring it in and actually use it. That is where those prep options in that second lozenge really become part of the conversation. 
    • Here are some terms you may not have heard before. If you are a data nerd or you are used to working in it, ETL is probably a phrase that you are used to. It means extract, transform, and load. It is that process of looking at a data lake, a data pool, strangely structured databases, and relational databases, and based on some rules, grabbing the data that you need, transforming it into a format that you can use to merge with your design templates, and then loading it into a place where it will be accessible by your programs. Then actually produce the print that you are trying to produce. When we say transform, we are not talking about turning water into wine here. What we are really talking about is just reformatting the data or putting bumpers around different data elements so that you can get access to them.
    • The way I always describe it is to think about an Excel spreadsheet. Sometimes you are given the option to save a copy of the spreadsheet, and one of the things you can do is save it as what is called a CSV, or a comma delimited file. Instead of being in those nice neat columns that you get in a normal spreadsheet, what you wind up with is this massive amount of stuff with a bunch of commas between elements. You cannot tell where things begin and end very easily.
    • [00:04:26] Ryan McAbee: It is like the equivalent of a run-on sentence, right? It just keeps going and going.
    • [00:04:29] Pat McGrew: Run-on data. For many of us who have worked in data-driven print for a long time, we are used to customers delivering things that way. For years, that is how we used to get things. We used to get all the data run together with some kind of marker that would tell us where fields began and ended. We did not know how wide the fields could possibly be, and we did not know how small they could possibly be. All we got was all this stuff, and that is where transform programs run by professionals who are used to dealing with data become invaluable. They can set the data up in a formatted way that makes sense to the design processes, the creative workflow, as well as prepress and print workflow. 
    • Even once you have it formatted the way you want, the data might come at you with first name and last name as one field. Because of your creative workflow, you actually want the first name to be separated from the last name. You want that to be two different data points. That is what a transform would do. Conversely, you might get the house address as the house number in one field, the street name in a different field, and then the direction in a different field, and then Street-Avenue-Boulevard in another field. Actually, for your purposes, you may want that to be one field. So that would be another point of transformation. 
    • Once you do all that, you may need to normalize the data so that all of the different elements of the data will work as a unit when coming into the creative workflow so that you do not wind up with trailing spaces. You do not wind up with strange characters in places where you do not want them. A normalization process is normal. 
    • Once you have that data prepped, now you are going to make it available to the creative workflow, and you are going to use it to create your print file. You are going to generate your print.
    • Maybe you have one of those direct mail pieces that seems to know who you are and where you live. It recognizes that you live in a certain place, and so it is making you offers. I live in the mountain west. I might get a brochure offer that talks to me about snow tires because we are coming into winter months here. If my friend who lives in Florida was getting that same brochure, it would not be talking about snow tires. It might be talking about rain tires for the winter months. It might be talking about changing out windshield wipers or different kinds of maintenance. That is how we use the data to drive these marketing types of conversations.
    • If it is transactional conversations: bills, statements, things like that, the data needs to be formatted. When you get your bill, you are used to seeing the data, the transaction, what you bought, and then how much you paid for it. That all has to be made visible in a way that is not unfriendly. In the database, there are all sorts of skew, numbers, and all sorts of other information that the credit card biller has available. You do not need to see that on your credit card. It is not really relevant to you, so all of that might get masked off as part of the creative workflow. You only see what you need to see to make decisions about paying the bill.
    • [00:07:43] Ryan McAbee: Then there is this whole testing dynamic because after you do all these steps leading up to this, you have to make sure that it is right in the end before it goes out. There are serious ramifications when you are working with data, especially if it is any kind of personally identifiable data, that you do not want to make mistakes on.
    • I have seen this done in all kinds of ways for various applications here in terms of variable data printing. I have seen it where they literally print out a hard copy proof, and somebody internally manually checks it record by record. I do not recommend that, but I have seen it.
    • What are other ways that you have seen it work? What is more of an industry standard or best practice for testing? 
    • [00:08:17] Pat McGrew: There are testing protocols and testing programs that typically an organization that does this all the time will have. The ability to go in and test for what we call boundary conditions in the data. Things that are too long. Letters appearing in runs of numbers for pricing. There are all sorts of conditions that you can set up to test, and you can launch a program at a print file and have it go look for what appear to be anomalies to surface. 
    • Testing comes in a couple of stages typically. You will test your creative workflow without the data just to make sure that everything is printing correctly. That you can actually accomplish print or eDelivery. Then in the best practice, you will take a test database. You will do the merge of the data and the triggering to the creative workflow with the test database. Remember what we said about the test database is that this should have the best and the worst of the sizes and shapes and descriptions of data that you could be working from. Then we see if we get a clean run with that. If not, we go back, and we touch things up the way we need to. 
    • Then finally, at least in the initial stages of bringing a new job on board, we will want to do a full data run and see if we get any errors. We are going to run it, which is going to produce a new print file that is going to now have all the variable data and the triggers all executed. We are going to run that against a testing program that is going to look for strange things happening. It is not uncommon to still be just a little nervous and do some pulls to see if everything is working. In general, the testing programs today are so good that they can typically find whatever you need. Shops that do this all the time get a sense of what is going to work and what is not going to work.
    • [00:10:12] Ryan McAbee: It is almost like a sixth sense there. In some cases, they engage the customer through online portals. Now that we have done our internal testing, we are going to run the record, where you can look at some sample sets of records to verify online.
    • [00:10:24] Pat McGrew: Yeah. Typically a customer is intimately involved with the testing, right? 
    • [00:10:28] Ryan McAbee: We are going to break out a few of these steps here. We have gathering data. There is what is known as structured and unstructured data. Obviously, the unstructured means you have to put a little bit more elbow grease or effort into getting it into a usable kind of structured format. What do we do from that point on? And all these data formats come in every flavor you can imagine. 
    • [00:10:48] Pat McGrew: They do. There is no way we can go through all of them, but there are two big things that I ask everyone to take a look at. 
    • Where did the data come from? 
    • There are still a lot of mainframes in business. If you think about large banks, large brokerages, and large insurance companies, they are very often running these giant computing systems. They are called mainframes. They actually speak a slightly different language than the data languages that are spoken in networks. And on Macs, in Unix networks, and in PC and Windows-based networks. The data is encoded differently in most mainframes than it is on most networks. That transform step we talked about a few minutes ago. One of the things that it often has to accomplish is turning mainframe formatted data into network formatted data so that it can go through the rest of the process.
    • The difference is that mainframe data is... I am going to do some technical talk here... it is encoded using eight-bit character encoding, whereas PC data is seven-bit character encoding. What that means is how characters are represented. Not just a through z, upper and lower case, but one through zero, all the special characters and all the other things we need as well as characters from other languages. Not everybody speaks English. There are all sorts of other languages out there that have special characters. When you get into some of the Asian languages with double-byte characters - trying to make sure that you can represent everything is part of that transform step as well.
    • There are these sets of processes that will make sure you normalize into a single character set that can be represented for the print. You need to make sure that the data is formatted the way you want it to be formatted. That it is in the structure you want. That the data merging processes that you are using have the ability to accept the data in the format that is being made available to it.
    • After you get through all that, which is typically done by your IT professionals and your programmers, there are all sorts of surrounding issues that are almost administrative issues of working with data. Data security is partly an administrative issue. Do you have firewalls? Is everybody being trained on how to be cyber secure? Are you encrypting data on the inbound and on the outbound? Are you doing all the things that you should do to maintain data security? 
    • Do you have all the appropriate permissions to use the data, which should be provided by your customer? But you need to renew those, right? It is not once they say "Yes," you use it for the next 10 years. You need to be having ongoing permission conversations with your customers about the data that you are using. They may have changes in their policies that change the way the data comes to you, and they may not tell you. All of a sudden, data may be coming at you formatted differently than it has come for the last 10 years. That can cause some challenges, which is why you want to constantly be having conversations at the administrative level around the data that you are working with. Then just understanding how they are structuring things.
    • Remember that companies sometimes buy and sell each other, and sometimes they merge. When companies merge, somebody has to decide who is on top and how data will be formatted and structured, and that could change the nature of the data that is coming into your print shop for jobs that you have been doing for years.
    • [00:14:13] Ryan McAbee: A good rule of thumb is that the longer the data has been in use - and it is probably going to be more in legacy systems - the higher the likelihood that you have an expert that knows it intimately is going down. That becomes why these transform processes are so critical. You are basically saying, "I'm going to take what is there, and I am going to make it into a usable, more modern thing that I can work with." 
    • The other thing that you said here, in terms of challenges around data security. The thing that we often do not think about, but data security often includes, is physical security parameters, with access to rooms, server rooms, et cetera.
    • [00:14:53] Pat McGrew: Very often, the people who do this work with data are working in secure, badge-in, badge-out areas. That is an actual requirement of doing the job because the data they are working with is sensitive. Think about your personal health data, your personal insurance data, and your personal financial data; you do not want that being spread across the break room.
    • [00:15:12] Ryan McAbee: We have already talked a little bit about what the ETL entails. There are a whole lot of solution sets out there. 
    • [00:15:20] Pat McGrew: This is not even close to all of them. These are products you might see in your shop. If you see these names, it gives you a hint that these are the kinds of products that get used in an ETL kind of process and in data management and general data formatting, data transformation. 
    • [00:15:39] Ryan McAbee: It is the same that we see in other segments, like maybe web-to-print where you may have multiple of these solutions.
    • [00:15:45] Pat McGrew: Some of these products that you see here might be considered document composition engines and formatting engines. You could very easily put Adobe on here. You could put Quark on here. You could put Chili Publish on here. Because they do some form of working with data - reformat data and produce printable files.
    • Things like SAP and SAS and Oracle - these are very often where you will see the steps of extract, transform, and load perform. Then there is this whole host of other software solutions that perform other kinds of optimization and normalization that are typically inserted into a workflow in order to make it work more efficiently.
    • [00:16:27] Ryan McAbee: Very good points. What happens next? You have to make this available. Once you have the data, you have done your ETL process, you have it in a structured format that you can actually use, and then you are going to put it somewhere, right? You have to execute with it somehow.
    • [00:16:40] Pat McGrew: You are going to execute a lot of different ways with it. The data may be used to generate personalized communication and VDP-type applications. Then there are all these other things that happen with data. It gets fed into marketing analytics and business intelligence programs, tracking programs, and quality control programs. All these things are listed under processes; there are even more than that where data is used to help make business decisions, help make workflow decisions, and job scheduling. Decisions about pricing and estimating. All the data that can possibly be loaded can inform all of the processes that ensure that the company is actually making money.
    • If you look at that software list at the bottom of the screen, it is all of these kinds of programs. You will notice that they have four basic groups listed here. It is all your marketing and SEO. Three letter acronym, search engine optimization. This is the programming that causes your webpage to come up first when somebody puts in a search term. It is where we identify search terms linked to specific products.
    • For your print business, that can be a really important way for customers to find insight. Especially if you are doing customer-facing web-to-print; you want to make sure that you have your marketing understanding and your SEO programs linked together. To do that, you want to be watching the data about the kinds of work you are doing, and the jobs you are doing. Your pricing. Your estimating and customer satisfaction.
    • The business itself has a lot of data that is constantly being generated. In the best circumstance, it is also being constantly analyzed so that you can be constantly making course corrections over the month or a year. You do not wind up at the end of the year going, "Gee, we did not make any money." Why did that happen that way? Because you missed key elements. The market trends changed. People stopped buying certain products. Maybe your pricing became out of whack with what the market was expecting for those products. That is where your business programs and the data you feed into them become important.
    • Shop floor management. I mentioned scheduling. It is everything from the data that informs an estimating and quoting program all the way through to the data that informs the scheduling program. That data will include all sorts of things, including machine capacity. How fast do machines run? How fast can they perform certain kinds of jobs? What kind of substrates can they work with? At what speed? What are the things we have to do to finish a job? How long does it take for us to bind a book or put grommets into a wide-format sign? All that information in is information are data points that get analyzed.
    • Even the creative and document composition engines are gathering data about each project that they work on. How long does it take to complete a project? How long does it take to program the data integration for a project? All of those things need to be managed, and every one of them is a data point. 
    • [00:19:47] Ryan McAbee: The thing that stands out here for me is that there are a lot of different software solutions that are in play here, depending on what you are trying to do from a process standpoint. I think it was in part one of the conversation where we were talking about the big buckets of data. These software solutions overlay with those buckets very nicely. 
    • You had your customer data. That is your marketing bucket. You have your operational and financial data, which are two separate buckets. What is funny here is that Power BI and the other intelligence programs, and then the shop floor data collection and print MIS or your business management solutions - those often overlap and interplay between your financial and your operational data for many shops.
    • [00:20:24] Pat McGrew: All of this is true no matter the size of the company too. You might say, "Oh, I do not do variable data programming." No, you do not. But if you are running a business, there is business data that is part of your life, and keeping your arms around it is the best way to ensure that you will be here next year. 
    • [00:20:44] Ryan McAbee: That is a big push in our community in recent years; we know we have all this data floating around. Let's try and leverage it so that we can better operationally execute and provide more value to the customer and all of those benefits. 
    • The last thing... Now that you have the data that you have prepared, you have basically put it into a format where it can be used and executed. You do not want to just throw it out there and say, yeah, we think it works. 
    • [00:21:06] Pat McGrew: We said in the first episode that testing should be an essential piece of working with data. This actually draws some lines around it. Testing is not just running the job to see if it runs. We are tempted to do that because it seems like the easiest way to get it done. If you cannot do anything else, please do it. The best practice is to establish a test environment, typically on a dedicated server with a dedicated database provided - a test database provided by your client. Maybe one that you build for use in-house that allows you to test the kind of work that you do in controlled circumstances before you allow it to go out into the wild and actually hit the prepress team for production. 
    • It is a little bit more expensive to set up your business with a test environment because there are costs in having the additional server. Many of your software providers will actually include a test environment as part of their licensing agreement with you if you ask. They might not offer it. If you say, "Hey, I am going to be doing testing. Can I have a non-production version of the license?" Many of them will say yes or do it for a nominal charge. If you can be using it in a test mode, you are going to resolve a lot of problems before it gets into production and those anomalies show up, and you might be calling them. There is some self-preservation involved in that.
    • Every one of these steps that you see here, every one of them has about 50 steps underneath it. This is where your test database should be small enough that you can actually review the results that are produced. You can actually look at every output page so that you can give it some clear understanding of everything landing correctly. Do you have odd characters showing up where they should not be showing up? Do you have missing characters? That might sound like a weird thing, but many times when things come from mainframe environments, or they are transformed from other print environments, the fonts do not line up.
    • I have seen work that was originally printed on one company's device using one print format, come over to another device printing in another file format, and all the E's were missing. 
    • [00:23:27] Ryan McAbee: The testing environment and the testing protocols are going to look different depending on what bucket of data you were working with.
    • [00:23:35] Pat McGrew: What the output format is, too. 
    • [00:23:36] Ryan McAbee: We have talked a lot about it in the context of data used for variable data printing and marketing purposes. We were talking on the previous slide about SEO and so forth. If you are doing a kind of testing around marketing IT, the protocol might be more like A/B testing where you send out part A under these conditions and data sets. Then part B goes out in a different way, and you are looking for the responses and seeing which one is more effective.
    • Then you get down into the more operational kind of data bucket, and your use cases are going to be slightly different. You are testing the hypothesis and saying, "If the data looks this way, that means our production might have been falling off for these reasons." 
    • It all is going to depend upon what kind of data you are using and what your purposes or use cases are.
    • [00:24:18] Pat McGrew: Absolutely true. 
    • [00:24:19] Ryan McAbee: I know we were talking about data at a high level, but then we are trying to give some examples and use cases for each one of those.
    • [00:24:25] Pat McGrew: You will hear us talk about data in other episodes in other very specific formats. This is a good high-level overview of how data plays in a print shop. 
    • [00:24:35] Ryan McAbee: Well said. Thanks for joining us on part two of the data journey, and we hope to see you on a future episode here at The Print University.

58- DATSTREAMS

This is a look at the design considerations required for mailing. We discuss the key areas of the envelope and barcoding to ensure the postal service accepts and tracks your mail.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition here at The Print University. My name is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and of course, we have Pat from the McGrewGroup. And today, we are talking about one of the processes in workflow, and it is all about datastreams. So what in the world is a datastream, Pat?
    • [00:00:15] Pat McGrew: This is your print file. We used the fancy name datastream, and that is a legacy term. In the early days of digital printing, most of what we were printing originated as data. It was a lot of accounting reports and things that would be printed on devices that were like dot matrix printers.
    • It was a lot of data. So they were datastreams. We started talking about print streams because there are print file formats, and every piece of software that generates a print file generates that file in a language. And the language might be PostScript, the language might be PDF, the language might be PCL, and about 20 other different things it might also be.
    • Collectively, we refer to them as datastreams. It is these files, these print files, that we send to a digital front end to turn them into the print that actually comes out on the printer. The datastreams or the print streams are also used in analog devices. Typically, if we are going to create plates and we are using a computer-to-plate process - the same datastream we might send to a digital front end, we can send to a computer-to-plate process.
    • It is important to understand what datastream you have, to understand how it behaves, and to make sure that the print file you have is matched to the digital front end that you have so that it can be rendered appropriately. So we are not going to get too deeply into the weeds, but we are going to try and explain the stuff you need to know to have an intelligent conversation with your customer who is generating the files and the vendor who is providing the ability to render that file as print on your device. 
    • [00:01:58] Ryan McAbee: Would you say a way to think about it would be:  from whatever we design from the layout aspect of the positioning of everything, and also the actual elements inside of the design, whether it is graphic or vector or bitmap, or images versus linework, and all the text and everything else.
    • Basically, the datastream and print stream end up becoming the instruction set or wrapper that takes that design and pushes it to a digital front end so that it has the instructions on what it is and what it is supposed to render. This is how it is supposed to be pieced together.
    • [00:02:26] Pat McGrew: It is a perfect way of describing it because the datastream, the print stream, is the instruction set for the digital device to know how to render every page or to render a poster or a giant display piece. We are talking about the same basic technology. It is a little bit challenging in shops that have been around for a very long time.
    • They may be dealing with customers who are used to providing older styles of streams, but they may also have customers that are sending very modern print streams. And that is where understanding what each one is and how it behaves can help you make the right choices. Remember we said in another module when we were talking about digital front ends that there are different RIPs - Raster Image Processors. 
    • And especially in wide-format, you might have five or six of them that are designed to handle certain situations. Some of those situations are which kind of print stream the customer sent you and how old it is in terms of how it is styled, but it also has to do with the different kinds of things that you can do with a datastream to help optimize it and turn it into something that will print effectively.
    • So we are talking about the instruction set. Absolutely true. 
    • [00:03:33] Ryan McAbee: That legacy versus more modern formats for these data and print streams is how you get into the situation where you take the legacy, but you basically transform it or make it into a different, more modern format that you can then do other things with more easily, like the actual workflow processing of it or something else, right?
    • [00:03:51] Pat McGrew: Exactly. One of the things that, as an industry, we became very good at is taking any file a customer throws at us, regardless of how it was created, and turning it into something we can actually print. There are programs called transforms. We often refer to them as datastream transforms, which can take in a file and, through a little bit of magic under the covers, reproduce the image fidelity in an output format that is more appropriate to our workflow.
    • So here is an example. I have PostScript - my customer is a design agency. They still work in PostScript. They want to send me a PostScript file.  I am happy to take the PostScript file, but I actually do not print PostScript anymore. I have not printed PostScript for years. I actually print one of two things. I actually print PDF, or I print something called IPDS. 
    • So let's say, for our purposes, we are going to print PDF. I then do something called distilling the PostScript into PDF. I am transforming it. I am basically putting it through a program that will turn the heaviness of a PostScript file into something that my printer can print more efficiently than if it was dealing with pure PostScript.
    • Most people do not realize PostScript is actually a programming language. You could actually write an accounting system in PostScript. It is an interesting language. It has a lot of operators, but if the printer has to deal with all those operators, it slows it down. It is not a very efficient use of my time or my equipment.
    • So if I distill it into PDF and into a PDF format that was designed for printing, my printer works more effectively. It is the same thing if I want to turn it into PCL for a PCL type of printer. So maybe that desktop printer that you have or an end-of-aisle printer in the office, I could turn the PostScript into PCL or into something called Intelligent Printer Data Stream, which was originally brought to us by IBM. It is now owned by something called the AFP Advanced Function Printing Consortium. Typically found in enterprises for bills and statements and proxy notices and regulatory communication.
    • But again, what I was sent by the customer might be PDF. My printers are designed to take in IPDS. So what do I do? I put it through a transform program, and I send it out. So all these things that you see listed here commonly show up at the print shop. You might get a file that is pages and pages of raster images - TIFF images. You might get files that came from a mainframe. They might be from a network that is seven-bit ASCII or from a mainframe that is eight-bit EBCDIC. Do not worry about it. Your programmers and your IT team know what to do with those files. But it is important to know that files that come from big enterprise mainframes at banks and insurance companies sometimes are formatted differently than those that come off of networks.
    • People in the IT group have to know what to do with those. And some companies have been around a long time, especially banks and insurance companies, some of these big enterprise types of organizations. And sometimes, they have programs in their environment that still generate very old forms of print files.
    • So the reason this table is important to you is just for you to listen. If somebody starts talking about a Xerox FORM or a PAGEDEF and a FORMDEF, these are all elements of some of those legacy enterprise data streams. It is very likely that your organization has already built a workflow that handles what to do when the customer brings these files to you, and you need to turn them into something that you can print.
    • But it is good for you to know these terms. You can listen for them, and if a file is not printing correctly and you have an associated PAGEDEF and FORMDEF to that file for some reason, you know that it went through a transform - go back to the IT people to get some help because it will not be something you can fix.
    • [00:07:55] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, I think the key takeaway here is that there is a possibility to run across any and all types of file formats. And the good news is that we have figured out a way as an industry to handle it. 
    • But I guess my question to you would be, in terms of modern production printing, are there any trends in terms of formats that really are de facto go-to formats?
    • Or do we really still have to deal with 15 different things? 
    • [00:08:15] Pat McGrew: So I think it depends on what part of the print market you are serving, right? If you are serving the wide-format markets, it is very likely that you are already getting PDF files, and you are fine. It is the most common language of exchange now for design houses and printing companies that serve them.
    • If you are in the direct mail space, it is most likely that you are going to get a PDF file from your customer or maybe an AFP file, an Advanced Function Printing file, from your customer. In rare cases, you might still get a PostScript file. You might get a PCL file. You might get something called a VIPP file, which is a Xerox format.
    • But again, if you are in that space, you probably already have the mechanics built to deal with them. You probably would not see much other stuff. Now, the fun thing is if you are in the enterprise print space - if you are a print service provider serving banks and big financial institutions, government entities, all bets are off because, very often, they are the people who are still generating things in 20 and 25-year-old formats. They are afraid to touch the programs that generate them. So they ask their print providers to handle that transformation into something that they can handle and print. 
    • So something like an IJPDS - Inkjet Printer Data Stream - typically is used to drive individual print heads that might be hanging off of an offset printer or even as a mail table where envelopes are being printed. But it is a very specific language, and if you are in that environment, there is probably someone there who understands that stream and knows how to work with it. Get to know that person so you can understand who to go to if something goes wrong. 
    • But for the most part, your workflows for these things are already built, and already tested, but it is one of the reasons that whenever a new job comes in, especially from an enterprise customer, you always test it to see what that file really is versus what they told you, and how it will move through your workflow. Because it could have very old things in it that might need some tuning in order to move through your workflow.
    • [00:10:27] Ryan McAbee: And I guess another point to make is that if you do go into a new market, which means you are doing new applications, and you run across some kind of new format, engage the vendor community. They know all the options that are available in terms of how to make things work for whatever particular output device that you are trying to target. 
    • In terms of formatting in composition, there are different ways to take in the data and then do something with it. So what are we trying to highlight here? 
    • [00:10:50] Pat McGrew: There are lots, and again, the odds that you, the person listening to this, will have to do this are not very high, but it is good to know so that you can have intelligent conversations with your team. 
    • Typically, what happens in the development of print files is that applications generate data, and they may also generate the print file as one continuous piece. So it not only has the data about your credit card statement, and what your spend was last month, but in line, it is generating the lines, the boxes, the shading, and the color. It is generating the variable data and the sort of template information all at the same time in one continuous print stream.
    • Many programs do that. Alternatively, there may be programs in place that take the data, format it, and merge it with a template that was built separately by an application program. A composition engine merges it together and then creates the print stream. 
    • In all cases, what is happening is that at the machine level is it is all ones and zeros, and those ones and zeros are being interpreted into things you and I will recognize - numbers, letters, lines, shading, boxes, color, all those things. That is what produces the print stream. If I have to make a change, then I have to turn it into something different than what the customer delivered to me.
    • Then it goes through a transform program to reinterpret all that information into a final format that I can print. The programs themselves operate in a programming layer and an application layer. In the best of all circumstances, you will never have to deal with any of it. If you are having problems with a file and you are talking to your IT people, or maybe you have a specific composition team, it is good to understand if they are making references to - “Oh, the programming was done incorrectly,” or “The application is wrong,” or “They did not set up this job to be printed on both sides of the paper, they only set it up to be printed on one side of the paper.” Understand the terms that you see on this page, and you will be able to have a conversation and work your way toward the resolution of problem files.
    • [00:12:57] Ryan McAbee: I like how the graphic on the left really shows at the bottom the basic fundamental level of computer language, right? It is your ones and your zeros, but then it builds as you go up the list here to where we get to the point of something usable that we can print.
    • [00:13:09] Pat McGrew: Yeah. And it is not until we get to the top that we actually have something we need. And so go to the next slide, because I think that will drive the point home. You do not ever want to have to deal with this stuff, right? You do not want to have to be the one sitting there interpreting all the percent signs and all the strange character arrangements or the different command levels. Because frankly, that is what computers are for, and that is what the programs that run on the computers are for. 
    • So what happens is the application layer that we refer to is what is generating this stuff. So on the left side is an Advanced Function Printing 5A record. This gets interpreted into what is called IPDS - Intelligent Printer Data Stream, that the printer actually prints.
    • The middle one is PDF. Go ahead. Guess what that is supposed to be because I am not personally a PDF RIP. The right one is a header record to a PostScript file, and you can see it is readable. But I do not want to have to guess what all those things are and what they are supposed to do.
    • That is what the programs are for. This is where computer programming specialists are your friend because, typically, they do know how to read these things. They do know how to interpret them. One of the things they can do is very quickly open up a file, look at it and go, “Oh, gee, the header is missing.”
    • Maybe when somebody sent it over to you, they accidentally cut off that 
    • % PDF - 1.1. 
    • That is really important because that tells the RIP on the printer how to interpret what comes next. What rules to use to interpret what comes next. The same with the Adobe 3.1. So all of these things are deep in the guts of the program.
    • Hopefully, you will never have to open up a program and ever deal with any of this, but it is good to know that this is what causes print to happen. 
    • [00:14:52] Ryan McAbee: This might be the only time you see the inside of a file. 
    • [00:14:54] Pat McGrew: Exactly, and it is actually hard to get to. You have to have a very specific kind of text editor to open them up.
    • [00:15:00] Ryan McAbee: Very good. Once we do have the kind of print stream, though, it does not mean that we are done, right? We still need to probably do a little bit of what was called normalization or normalizing, which basically means what we have taken in from a data and print stream perspective is actually good enough to print without causing errors and problems, right?
    • [00:15:16] Pat McGrew: Yeah. And so as you noticed, we went through a number of processes to get to the print file, and each one of them was built by very smart programmers who built them in the most efficient way they could. But the generation of a print file often results in very messy print file formats -  the formatting applications, the transform applications, and everything that touches it.
    • They may make a few edits in such a way that it can be hard for the digital front end to work efficiently. To help solve that problem, especially now that printers are so fast and the DFEs want to be as efficient as possible so that you get the maximum capacity off your print devices, we do two things. 
    • We preflight, which is, again, another set of rules - going through the files, looking at them based on a set of rules that are known to say, is this the best file to print? Does it have all of the fonts it is supposed to have? Does it have objects  - like maybe it has photos in it that are at 72 dots per inch instead of 300 dots per inch, and it is not going to print as well? Maybe it has images that are at 2,500 dots per inch, which would be overkill for most digital printing that we do. So we can go through and identify and flag all of these things that might cause the file to not print as well as we would like it to. 
    • But there is this second step called optimization, where we actually fix things. Where we actually look at fonts. Maybe I got a file from a customer, and it was generated by their applications. They generate every customer credit card statement with all of the information that it needs, and then it just stacks them all together into one giant file where fonts are called out and embedded maybe thousands of times. Maybe the logo object is called out tens of thousands of times, depending on how big the file run is and how many records are involved.
    • So an optimization file can go in and say, “Oh, wait, there are 10,000 of these logos that are in the exact same place on every page. I will keep one, and I will just refer to that one over and over again.” “Oh my gosh, it has 5,000 instances of Times New Roman. Let me have one instance and refer the rest of them back to that one instance.”
    • So that is what optimization is. And what can happen is that the file can become as small as 1/10 of the original size because we have gotten rid of all these excess commands, all these excess objects, all the excess weight. Now, when I send that giant job to the printer, it prints significantly faster because the RIP does not have to work as hard.
    • It can be as efficient as possible, and the time to the first page out becomes much smaller than it would have been if the original file had been sent. So that is something we love to do with data streams. 
    • [00:18:12] Ryan McAbee: It is basically taking all the bloat out of things that have been done to it along the way before it gets to the DFE.
    • [00:18:19] Pat McGrew: Yeah. It is like an antacid for your printer. Exactly. Yeah. We absolutely give it an antacid. 
    • [00:18:23] Ryan McAbee: So to summarize here, I think the takeaways are you have to have a datastream to have anything to work with. That then becomes a print stream that the printer can understand as the print language part of it, so your PostScript, your PDF, or other. There are many different ones. No matter what format you have incoming, we have tools and methods to get it into a usable format that we will then take and basically do your preflight and optimization steps to make sure it is not going to cause any issue before you go to printing. Then you are able to efficiently and effectively print your work.
    • Is that a good takeaway? 
    • [00:18:51] Pat McGrew: That is the perfect takeaway. And in the best shops working with data streams is automated. People do not work with datastreams. Automation does. 
    • [00:19:00] Ryan McAbee: That is right. And that is a very good point. You want the tools to do the work and not yourself. Because as you saw, it is not even readable by a human typically, unless you are really knowledgeable in the programming language.
    • With that, we hope you have enjoyed a little bit of introduction here to datastreams and join us here for a future episode at The Print University.

60- TIPS FOR WALKING YOUR WORKFLOW

Your print workflow is not static. It evolves based on your customer set, staffing, equipment, and focus. In this episode, we share five tips for how to walk your workflow to ensure your workflow processes are adapting and keeping up with the business changes.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and with me, as always, is Ryan McAbee, Pixel Dot Consulting, and we're actually together to present this episode of The Print University. This time, Ryan, we are talking about tips to walk your production print workflow, and it's my favorite phrase, walk your workflow!
    • This is where we're really going to put the pedal to the metal, the rubber to the road, and actually talk about those things in your workflow that you might not be paying attention to. It looks like a roller coaster. We call this our roller coaster chart. I call it the roller coaster chart. We do this because every element of the workflow process has a lot more touchpoints than most people realize.
    • In fact, every one of the tags that we've identified probably has 10, 15, or 20 steps behind it. At least if you're walking and looking for these, you have a chance of uncovering the manual processes and the hidden processes that often happen. 
    • [00:01:09] Ryan McAbee: The place that you really want to start is that everyone should be walking the workflow. It should be done on a cadence, definitely once every year, but also if there are any major changes in your production environment; whether you have equipment changes, you have personnel changes or anything that's basically changing in the people, processes, and tools that would affect the workflow. 
    • Like you said, Pat, these are just the big ones. There are many categories and tasks, and everything underneath each one of these. It basically goes from the point where the customer raises their hand and says, “I want to have you print something,” all the way until the point that you deliver it either electronically or physically printed - shipping or fulfilling or whatever you're doing on the back end.
    • [00:01:48] Pat McGrew: One of the things that I think people forget is that there's a lot of software here. If you go up and down the chart with us. When you look at all that software that's involved, of course, they're constantly getting maintenance upgrades. Some of the solutions you have might be in the cloud, where they're automatically upgraded.
    • You still have to pay attention because they could be making a change that has a material impact on other areas of your workflow. 
    • [00:02:15] Ryan McAbee: Hopefully, you're integrating multiple pieces of software together to have that automation. As software upgrades, you need to test it and make sure it's still performing how you expect - as it did before the upgrade happened.
    • The other thing that's important has to do with walking your workflow. I think there are three primary approaches to this. One is to take someone who is basically outside of the business. They have to ask questions like they are a kindergartner, so to speak. That's good because they'll uncover things that you just take for granted because you're so ingrained in the business. But if they're an inquisitive person, you can walk them through your workflow, and they'll bring up questions that make you go, “Aha, maybe I need to think about how to do this differently.”
    • The same kind of approach works with a consultant because they have that third-party perspective. The value that they also bring is that they've done this with many other print service providers. They've probably done it across many different printing segments, so they can bring best practices from each of the other ones. Then the other thing that's always worthwhile doing is getting a mixed team from your environment, from your print shop production areas, and bringing them together - because how you think it works on paper is not how it's actually working in reality. We find that every time we do workflow assessments, Pat. 
    • [00:03:25] Pat McGrew: We do. Very often, we'll walk through it, and we'll notice that there are people who have their private Excel spreadsheets or their tablet full of sticky notes where they're tracking things. When we ask them, they say, "Oh, we're going to put it into the main system at the end of the day. " What that means is that every process that relies on that information, including real-time dashboards, is never correct.
    • So with that, why don't we start walking our workflow? 
    • [00:03:52] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, there are five kinds of points or tips that we want to give you on not only how to do it, but also all the ones that we've done, the common areas that we know are challenges for every printing environment. So let's start with the first one.
    • [00:04:05] Pat McGrew: Alright, take your top three applications and, depending on the kind of shop you are: If you're primarily a sign shop, look for your simplest and your most complex and your midpoint signs. If you're a general commercial printer doing a lot of different kinds of work, again, look for the things that are pretty simple, the things that are in the mid-range, and the things that people tear their hair out over.
    • The goal is to get a good understanding of how each one of these kinds of jobs moves through. What are the processes? Who are the people who are touching them? You might be surprised - there might be people touching these jobs multiple times, where the jobs are actually going in loops. You want to capture that and understand all the tools because this is another place we find hidden things.
    • Somebody over in the shop figured out they could download a free tool off the Internet just to make their life a little easier. That's risky for you. That's something you absolutely want to know. These are the things we're going to be looking for: the processes, the people, the tools; and we want to follow that job from the point where the customer request has been initiated all the way through to the point where they've actually accepted the job, and that invoice is on its way back to them.
    • [00:05:26] Ryan McAbee: We're always fans of using data. If you're not sure what your top three applications are, go into the management system that you're using - that tool that you're estimating and doing everything else with, whether that's a print MIS for you or an ERP solution, depending on what type of printer you are - go pull the report.
    • You'll have that information and know what jobs are your top three. 
    • [00:05:44] Pat McGrew: You will. Now, Ryan, we want to talk about identifying all of these other bits and pieces. Talk us through identifying how customers request. 
    • [00:05:55] Ryan McAbee: The next few are really the problem child areas for most print operations. The areas that we struggle with the most - that we see the most challenges.
    • One of those is what we group as the larger bucket of job onboarding, but that really comes down to how many different ways that customer can request a job or a quote from you. Does it come through a traditional sales channel where they're talking to a salesperson? Does it come through web ordering, through a web-to-print type system? Does it come from the connectivity with their procurement system because they're a larger company that you do a lot of business with? How many different paths do you have where they can actually raise their hand and say, we want you to work this quote so that we can get this print. 
    • [00:06:35] Pat McGrew: They might even come to a counter.
    • [00:06:37] Ryan McAbee: They might even come to a walk-up counter. That's absolutely true. If you're an in-plant, if you're in a retail high street, that happens all the time. Not only how they request it, but when it does turn into that live production job, how do they get the content to you? That's the artwork, that's the data, if you're doing variable data work that they need to give to you in many cases because you might not be creating that as the print service provider. You can sometimes, if you offer graphic design services, but more than likely, it's coming to you from the client.
    • What path does that take also coming into your shop? What you want to do is really minimize the total number of passes to the bare minimum. Then also look at each one of those and figure out which ones are unstructured information. Because email - that's the culprit, right? About 70% of printers say that's how they get most of the content and most of the requests coming in from the customers to say they want to have a quote. The problem with email is that, as a customer, I can give you this much information, or I can give you an entire paragraph or book of information to say what I want. Then it's up to the expertise and the experience of who's looking at the email -  like your estimator or your customer support representative -  to figure out where the missing pieces are to make it whole. That's where the challenge is. 
    • [00:07:48] Pat McGrew: Weirdly, I spoke with a printer recently who still gets faxes from certain customers. Yes, faxes are not dead. Now, sometimes they're e-faxes that come up looking like email, but there are still an awful lot of fax machines in the print industry. All right, so now we've got a next step here. We know that a job is coming at us, but the state of the files that are being sent to us, how they're coming to us, there's a lot of variation here, Ryan.
    • [00:08:18] Ryan McAbee: There can be. Once you have those paths, the number of pathways minimized, then you're going to look to figure out how to automate those different entry points. Go back to the email example. Instead of having the customer email you and attach a file, like a PDF, to that email, maybe you get them to start using a web portal where they can enter specific details about the job. It's still very email prone. They're giving you as much or as little information as they want to, but the file that they are uploading to you can maybe be pushed down to another process automatically without the CSR having to touch it. It could go to pre-flight as the next step, and if it passes pre-flight, maybe you then automate it to go into the impositioning step.
    • There are many different links in the chain that you can start to automate once you've reduced the number of paths that jobs can come in through. The common tools or the kind of functions that you're looking to automate are definitely pre-flight. That's really checking to make sure what the customer has given you will actually be able to print without errors. It checks for things like fonts and resolution and color spaces and all that kind of fun stuff. 
    • Then you want to look to see if you can be more efficient with grouping and holding jobs together that are similar types of jobs. All my business cards - I'll hold in a bucket. All my trifold brochures - I'll hold in a bucket. All my signs - I'll hold in a bucket - until I get enough of them or a certain amount of time has passed, and I'll create a batch. That groups a lot of smaller jobs into a larger one, so it's more efficient when I go into the production steps of printing and finishing. That's one other area you can automate. Then that ties almost directly into impositioning, too, because you want to get smarter about how you do that. If you take that batching, you want to have it automatically create and flow that into an imposition scheme or template, if you will. It's more of a dynamic on demand template at this point that automatically lays it out for the best equipment. You probably have a mix of equipment, right? 
    • [00:10:00] Pat McGrew: That's true. 
    • [00:10:00] Ryan McAbee: But software in the imposition world these days is smart enough to realize what equipment you have, even if it's in multiple shops, and plot the best path from a cost perspective or a time perspective - whatever criteria you want to have.
    • [00:10:13] Pat McGrew: Now, in order to make all of this automation work, you have to be very cognizant of the state of the settings for each one of these software tools. If you've brought new equipment in, you want to make sure that your pre-flight tools, your file optimization tools, your scheduling tools, your batching tools - all of these tools - are aware of the characteristics of any new equipment that you bring in. Any new finishing equipment is included so that the software can make the best decision. Weirdly, as smart as software is, it does not wake up every night and go looking through your shop to see what is there. 
    • [00:10:53] Ryan McAbee: It does what it's told. 
    • [00:10:54] Pat McGrew: It does what it's told. So now we're going to talk about using all of your tools for what they were designed for. This is a tricky one because designers of software always believe that they know who their customers are and they know how they're going to use the tools.
    • In reality, when we walk shop floors, we discover people using tools in very strange and mysterious ways. 
    • [00:11:17] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, I think any software developer will tell you that once they release a piece of software out into the wild, they're amazed at how many different ways their customers figure out how to use it.
    • That's a good thing, generally speaking, because they'll find new creative ways to get more value from the software or the tool. It works the other way too, where there is a lot of resistance to change in all types of organizations, and printers are a classic example of that. Scheduling is one of those areas that we see that a lot. 
    • [00:11:42] Pat McGrew: They often believe that there's a person in the shop who knows better than the software.
    • [00:11:46] Ryan McAbee: Every time, almost. In reality, you don't want to fight the way the software was designed to work. In many cases, you want to adapt the processes that you've documented because you walked your workflow, right? Adapt your processes to fit the way that tool actually works. Getting the most out of that software tool is going to allow you to get more automation, which gives you all the benefits that means. It means cost reductions and also savings in labor hours that you can repurpose to do something better.
    • [00:12:16] Pat McGrew: What we want you to think about when you're walking your workflow is all of these things we're talking about. How are you handling change order management, which is a place an awful lot of money gets left on the shop floor? A salesperson swipes in and goes, "Oh no, we're just going to make this change because they're a really good customer," or the customer calls and says, “Hey, no, I really need it done this way, and I'm going to cancel the order if I don't do it this way.” You need to have policies for all of that. 
    • [00:12:44] Ryan McAbee: You want to get paid for the work that you do. 
    • [00:12:46] Pat McGrew: Absolutely. 
    • [00:12:46] Ryan McAbee: So many times, we see that these kinds of change order requests happen as the jobs get into production and that they're still handwritten on manual job tickets.
    • The challenge with that is when it gets to the actual accounting and billing department, they have to interpret what has been written on the manual job ticket. That usually means that they have to email or call or go walk to whoever made that notation and figure out what they actually need to put as the line item on the invoice to charge back to the customer.
    • Now that takes a lot of time that you don't want to waste getting your billing out the door.
    • [00:13:18] Pat McGrew: This is another reason you want to look at not only your change order management and your scheduling but your approval processes. Automating approval processes can save you hours and hours of time because it automatically keeps track of whether the customer responded or not, sends nudging notes, and lifts it up in their organization. There are an awful lot of things you want to look at in terms of the tools that are available to you, and make sure you're using them. 
    • So let's talk about administrative processes. 
    • [00:13:48] Ryan McAbee: In terms of administration processes, that's really where we see the most upside potential for printers these days. If you think about it, you're probably pretty good at getting ink or toner on paper or whatever substrate you're printing on. You've got the printing part figured out. You've got the finishing part figured out, for the most part. The things that we can improve on are what happens before that job comes in, which is that whole job onboarding part that we talked about. 
    • Then on the other end, the kind of things that happen after finishing. That's the administrative things - closing out the job and making sure that it gets billed on time. What you'll find once you walk your workflow is that you've got a lot of steps in these areas, and you want to minimize as many as possible and eliminate ones that don't make any sense. We've seen shops where they've had to wait for the salesperson to verify the change orders that they probably didn't even know happened in production before they sent a bill.
    • That those are just processes that don't make any money or a lot of logical sense in terms of the workflow. 
    • [00:14:46] Pat McGrew: Sometimes they're in history, right? Because of the personalities of the people involved or because of the nature of the kinds of customers. 
    • But in the modern era, you want to automate as much of this as you can. That's why we are huge fans of digital portals and web-to-print / web-to-pack kinds of portals because they allow you to standardize the inbound part of the job. They also allow you to standardize the administrative processes that go behind it. At the end of the year, you should be able to know pretty quickly that every job that came in was actually billed for and paid for.
    • If, as you talk to your team, it sounds like it takes them maybe 30 or 60 days to get that resolved at the end of a quarter or at the end of the year, you are absolutely a candidate for more automation and more process optimization and rationalization because you should be able to tell if you are making money at any point during the month. It should be a matter of running a report and knowing it for sure. 
    • Ryan, is there anything else we need to talk about?
    • [00:15:54] Ryan McAbee: I would say the bonus tip is to assign someone in your environment to keep an eye on what updates do come across. Software and even updates to hardware will happen over time, and there may be something that you've really been struggling with that just got addressed with the last update. If you don't look into it and then figure out how to apply it in your environment and your workflow, it doesn't exist. That's just not a great thing. You want to figure out how to take full advantage of the tool set that you're paying for, number one, and also because that's going to give you further benefits down the road. The things with software and workflow that we don't think about it too much - once you apply it, it has compounding benefits. It doesn't happen just for one job. It happens for every job thereafter. So it's compounding benefits here when we're talking about automation and software tools in particular.
    • Wonderful. Thanks so much for listening to this episode at The Print University. We hope you'll come back for another!

66- TIPS FOR AUTOMATING PROOFING AND APPROVALS

Learn tips and tricks for speeding up the time between proofing and receiving customer approvals so production can continue.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Print University. I am Ryan McAbee joined by my colleague, Pat McGrew, and we are talking this time about tips for automating proofing and approvals because it is one of those areas, Pat, where you can have a whole lot of time wasted in your production cycle, just waiting on the customer approval.
    • [00:00:19] Pat McGrew: You can. You can lose all your profit in this piece of your workflow because manual emails, chat messages, phone calls... oh, my favorite - getting in the car and driving to the customer to try and get an approval out of them. That takes time. It costs money. And it delays the entire production cycle.
    • The more you can do to automate the nudging that is often required to get the proofs approved, the more valuable it is to your business, even if it takes a little bit of investment at the beginning. 
    • [00:00:57] Ryan McAbee: It is one of those bottlenecks that is universal. In all the research studies that I have seen in doing assessments at all the different types of shops, it really applies to every segment of the printing industry.
    • It is just something inherent in the process; you have to figure out a better way to go about it and approach it for your business because it will pay dividends in the end. To that end, there are different types of proofs that we probably need to level set on, just so we are talking the same language here.
    • So you want to run us through a few of these different types? 
    • [00:01:28] Pat McGrew: When we use the word proof, it is important in our industry to understand that not everybody means the same thing. Depending on what kind of shop you are in, what kind of customers you serve, you may have different requirements. In 2023, when we are recording this, I think we have gotten to the point where soft proofs are widely accepted for most applications, even in highly sensitive commercial work. Most of the agencies that buy this work have learned how to deal with soft proofs. They have the right kinds of monitors. They have calibrated their monitors. They have agreed to color profiles with their providers, so it is possible to do a soft-proofing kind of relationship. What that really means is that it is typically a PDF file. In some cases, in the old days, the soft proof might have been a TIFF file that was generated and viewed in some kind of TIFF viewer on a screen. That is not how it is typically done today. 
    • Typically the electronic proof is a PDF file that is in a very specific X1 or X1A format that is very specific to maintaining all the color quality of the file. What is sometimes weird is that the customer delivers a PDF file. And then, the print company takes that PDF file and normalizes it, color manages it, and returns effectively the same file back to the customer. It is the soft version of the press proof. 
    • You can do another kind of electronic proof that has actually been through the prepress workflow and actually is rendered and ripped by the same RIP software, raster image processor software that is going to be used to cause the print to happen. That typically takes specialized applications and specialized handshaking between the customer and the print site. I do see a lot of those. Depends on how complex your workflow is and how color sensitive and specific your clients are. Some of the bigger agencies require that, others do not.
    • You can do a hard copy proof, and they come in flavors, right? If you were doing a book, say, a hard copy proof might literally just be a single copy print of the book block without any of the cover work. Or it might actually be a hand-assembled piece that is the cover print and the book block piece, slapped together, put in an envelope, and mailed back or handed to you. 
    • It is all down to the intent. You might have one that is for positioning and just to show the general layout - what we call a blueline or an outline proof. Another kind is what we call a contract proof. That is a case where there is a lot of color sensitivity. If you are one of the big luxury brands, if you are one of the big perfume brands, one of the big luxury consumer goods companies, then what you might be looking for is to make sure that your color is being hit perfectly. Tiffany blue, right? Heck, Home Depot orange. Any of these things can be really important. In talking with a lot of agencies over the last year, what I am learning is that most of the agencies only resort to a hard copy proof of contract proof if it is a really sensitive, fairly new project. If it is work that this printer has been doing for a long time or doing regularly for them, the soft proofs are usually good enough and make everybody comfortable. If it is say, a brand new logo, brand new project, then you will see more of a request for the hard copy proofs. 
    • Then press proofs, which used to be the mainstay of every shop. If you worked with the brands and the agencies that serve them, there was always a person who was stuck on a plane and shipped out to the print site to stand at the end of the press to watch the physical work come off the back end of the press. It does not happen very often anymore. 
    • When I was talking to some brand people last week, they said if they are printing outside the country, they may still send people to do a press proof if it is in Brazil or they are in Indonesia, and it is a well-known multinational brand. They may still send people if they do not have a long-term relationship with the printer who is doing the work. Once a comfort level is established, they understand the equipment that is being used and the nature of the team that is going to be responsible. Less and less press proof requirement today than you have ever seen before.
    • [00:06:01] Ryan McAbee: A couple of tips here really, as you are working with your clients to get to these different points. First of all, going from the beginning of the list, at the soft proof, down the list of the press proof, the cost exponentially increases for you as a printer, as you go down that list. When you get to the final one, the press proof, that is literally the same cost as running the job.
    • [00:06:22] Pat McGrew: You are paying for the plate. You are paying for all the operator time for all the color management, the setup, and you are probably paying to put a body on a plane or into a car to get to where that press is, and that all just adds lots of costs.
    • [00:06:37] Ryan McAbee: The other thing to realize is it is really trust in your process. Your client trusts your process. That is how you prepare the work with your workflow. It is how you color manage it which is the big key here. Most of the color management systems that are out there today, they can run reports on everything that you do to say that you are within a certain delta-E tolerance level which is good enough for the agencies usually and any print buyer that is working for a very particular brand. Once they understand that if it is within this range of a delta-E, that it is good enough for them. They do not need to have this press proof and that is really what you want to get to in the relationship. You want to be able to send a soft proof or a pre-press.
    • To me, the difference between the soft proof and the pre press proof is that it is the pre press proof that is usually rendered by the same thing that is going to output it in the end to your printer or to your CtP - Computer-to-Plate machine. Usually, a lot of these are solutions you can add on to your workflow management solutions, whether it is your commercial workflow, your packaging workflow, or your digital workflow, they all have some options for this. What it also adds for your client is the ability to be notified that proof is ready. Usually, as soon as it is created, they get an email notification. Then they can log into these portals as they are online and they have some tools there for collaboration. They can mark it up and say, oh, no, this is the wrong logo. This is last year's logo, or we just updated this. They can annotate it. They can usually view separations. They can zoom in and maybe even see dot patterns and all these other kinds of things. That is a lot more advanced than just sending a PDF file back. Although that is very common today, too. 
    • [00:08:11] Pat McGrew: It is. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of circularity to all of this.
    • Let's talk about electronic proofing solutions for a minute. And I think they are more common today than they have ever been before. I think we are at the point now where most of the major workflow management solutions have these electronic proofing solutions embedded into them. 
    • If you are running - we are saying web-to-print - it is web-to-output, so it might be web-to-document production, web-to-commercial print production, web-to-direct mail production, web-to-packaging production, web-to-fabric, apparel production, web-to-something, right?
    • Basically, we are automating that whole job capture piece and making sure that the job as the customer is specifying it is doable in our environment. We try in a web-to-print environment to ensure that every value that a customer types into a field on the screen is validated along the way, so that if the customer says, “Oh, I need it to be 193 inches wide,” and they really meant 19.3, there is a validation there that says, “Oh, I, we don't think you mean that. We don't print that wide. We can't do this job if that is really the specification you have.” Web-to-print environments very often now can not only capture all the specifications except the upload of the design file. But I can then also return back that proof that says, “Hi. Is this what you meant?”
    • Most of the big sites that do business cards will return the proof of the business card or whatever else you are trying to buy from them. Again, typically it is a soft proof. It will give you the image back so you can make sure that everything is placed correctly on the substrate as you expect, that the margins are where you expect and you are not falling off the page. You have not squished anything or created the wrong thing and in web-to-packaging that may also include a dieline overlay. So you can see where flaps and things will be, and that can be really useful because that is where you discover that the logo is in the crease. Or you have folded the most important messaging into the box.
    • Then there are a lot of dedicated proofing solutions. It was meant to address the problem of trying to get proofs turned around as quickly as possible. 
    • [00:10:27] Ryan McAbee: For a dedicated proof solution, it is really the same functionalities as what you find as the add-ons to the workflow management solutions. However, it is decoupled from that workflow, so it is more universal. It does not have to go through that workflow software to do the proofing aspect, as well.
    • The point to make here is that depending upon your customer, that is really the driver of this. You may have those very advanced detail oriented customers that really want that brand control and want to make sure it is perfect all the time. It is the ones that are, like Pat was saying, the Tiffany's, the Home Depot's, really care about their particular print and output. They are going to want more advanced solutions when it comes to the proofing, no doubt. Whether that is physical proof or it is also any version of the soft proof. 
    • If you are dealing with a consumer - and I think many of us have probably ordered print online at this point -those systems are not super sophisticated. They are very good at making sure that the content and making sure that what you uploaded and everything is going to fit into the dimensions, so it is content and fit. It is not a color-accurate representation of what you are going to end up with in most cases when it is going through the web to print system.
    • It may be that you do not have one type of proof and one solution that does the proofing. You may have it happen in different parts of your workflow based on the customer. What's important to realize is you need to understand how these different proofing software solutions work. Do they actually render it through the final RIP engine, or do they just use some kind of PDF render to generate the output? These are the things that you want to pay attention to when determining where to do it. 
    • That leads us to our five big tips to think about automating your proofing and approval with your customer. This is just what we were talking about. At what stage of your workflow do you actually want to send a proof? This is going to vary by your customers and the applications that you have. If you are doing more B2C-type work, that may be just exactly good enough.What the web-to-print solution gives is a proof with a checkbox. The customer agrees that is okay. It looks fine. And then you go produce it. 
    • Whereas if you have that more sophisticated customer that is working for a global company or brand, you may have to go the extra level there. The other thing I think is an interesting development, Pat, in recent times is that your print management system may actually either be able to do the notification aspect of the to the customer. It may not generate the proof, but it can nudge them to say, "Hey, you have not approved this proof.” It has been 2 days, or it has been a week, or you can set different intervals for automated notifications.
    • [00:12:56] Pat McGrew: It may be able to escalate, too, right? So, I think you are going to see most of the major workflow vendors start to bring these solutions or partner solutions in front of their clients. It is an area that causes so much delay,  just waiting on approvals. You send it off, and then you find out two weeks later that the person you sent it to was on vacation or has gone on a sabbatical and is not coming back for six months. No one is watching their mail, and it does happen all the time. We are seeing a lot of vendors come to market with these solutions that, as you say, they nudge. It will cause it to be sent, and then when it does not see the response come back, it will send it again, but it might actually copy in a supervisor. Then it will wait an amount of time that you set in your configuration, and if it still does not get an answer, it will escalate it again. At some point, the salesperson may be pulled in to actually intervene and find out why the proof has not come back. There are different levels of sophistication, but all the systems I have seen so far give you an awful lot of interesting ability to gate how many times you nudge. Is it once a day, once an hour, does it get more urgent over time?
    • The other thing that it allows you to do is pre-build standard templates for how that communication needs to look, right? So that CSR A is not sending one thing and CSR B sending their own versions. These should be business communications that follow a very standard form because if anything goes wrong, they could be caught up in legal conversation. You want to define your template so that it knows the job number, what the expectation is, what the delivery intended delivery date is, what the on-press date is, all those things should be in that approval notice that goes out, and the system should be watching for the replies. 
    • [00:14:52] Ryan McAbee: You are right. You can escalate it either internally to staff at the print shop, like your customer support reps, probably the first person, and then maybe secondarily, it goes to the sales representative. Same thing is true, maybe on the receiving end of it, you could go to who normally approves the proofs, but then maybe go secondarily to escalate to the supervisor in that case.
    • The other thing that we did not mention is that with some of these proofing solutions, you can have multi-level approvals. There is a lot of different sophistication in these different proofing methods. If you are working with that more sophisticated client where not only does one person have to approve it, but then also somebody in the marketing department has to approve it, there are solutions that can handle that kind of complexity too. 
    • The other tip and we talked about this a little bit already, hard copy proofs are the most expensive and most time consuming to method proofing and approval. Do you want to send those, or do, or can you get to a point where an electronic proof of various sorts will work for the customer? That is really what is going to provide the speed aspect and get that return back from your customer so that you can go into production. Any kind of recommendations from a business practice perspective here, Pat?
    • [00:15:58] Pat McGrew: I think you should always start by offering electronic proofs. Electronic proofs should be part of how it should be built into your costs. More and more, I am seeing that a lot of printers will charge if someone insists on a hard copy proof, and they charge even more if they insist on a press proof.
    • [00:16:15] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, you definitely want to capture your cost for those that are the hard copy route. 
    • The other thing to think about holistically with the workflow that includes the proofing is how many touch points do you have from the time you receive the customer's file until you can get to the point of generating a proof? Are those touch points physical, meaning that a person, an employee in your shop has to move it alone? Or is it an automated touch point? 
    • As an example we talked about the web to print solutions. That is all usually customer driven at that point to where they upload their file. They make any kind of edits that they want to. Then it goes and gives a proof option back to them, making sure that everything looks right dimensionally and so forth, and then it is usually a check box or some other kind of method to say, “Yes, that looks. good. I approve it for production,” and your staff has not touched it at that point. 
    • Other proofing methods could be automated, or maybe you do have intervention from your employees that is needed to push that follow-along in your workflow to the point of getting approved. The best practice and the tip that we are pointing to here is to really look to see if you can automate all of those, as much as stuff steps from getting that file to the point of outputting that proof as you can. Things that are easily able to automate is the retrieval of the file, the insertion of the file into the workflow, the preflight of the file to do all the checks, and then the color management and maybe the ripping aspect of the file to return it.
    • You really have to look at your workflow and your toolset that you have to understand what your options are. 
    • [00:17:40] Pat McGrew: Remember when we say web to print, we are not always referring to something that might be consumer-facing. It may be a web-to-print system that actually sits behind your customer login firewall and is built. Sometimes they are white-labeled by each customer. So the customer sees only their stuff and their site. 
    • [00:17:59] Ryan McAbee: In the print world, it is more common actually, that you do have that B2B setup that you are describing versus the consumer just in terms of how the industry segments. 
    • Tip number four: how do you interact with your customers, and how do you remind them if you are waiting on their approval?
    • That can be very manual and I would argue that in many of the places that we have done assessments, that is a very manual process. That creates a couple of issues, right? One, you already spoke to Pat, which is that the communication can be different between employees inside of your shop, going out to the customer and you do not want that differentiation. You want a standard way of communicating. 
    • It is also the dependency on the employee in many times to remember to do the follow-up, and they may get distracted by all the other tasks that they have to do in their normal day-to-day job. Then that kind of falls by the wayside and next thing you know, we are waiting weeks, days, weeks to get the approval. That is going to change and alter everything from your production schedule. It has a domino effect on the rest of the business there. If there is any way to automate with the customer to go ahead and look at through proof and approve it, that is really the best practice. Pat, there are several ways to go about that.
    • [00:19:07] Pat McGrew: There are and so a lot of the sort of legacy systems, print MIS systems. They have some sort of email reminder system that is built in. We know that a lot of shops now communicate on WhatsApp or Teams. They might communicate on a lot of this or newer communication tools that have come up.
    • If the solution set that you're working with does not have those capabilities to send an SMS or to send a What's App or to communicate in a Team's chat. It might be a conversation to have with your vendor to find out if there is something coming or there is something available as a feature upgrade that is available because I would suggest taking advantage of it. The more immediate the communication is, the more likely you are going to get an answer from your customer. If you can be nudging via an automated What's App or some other chat format, that can actually get you a faster response than waiting on email - in some shops, people do not sit staring at their inbox. And they are not looking at their email all the time. Talk to your primary vendor first. If your primary vendor cannot help you, there are a lot of third party systems out there that are not very expensive. Most of them are available as subscription models and they can help you interact with the kinds of customers you work with. 
    • [00:20:24] Ryan McAbee: The only other consideration I would throw out there is from an audit trail perspective. You do have to think about that with the methods that you may use to communicate with your customers. At the end of the day, you might want to have your proofing and approval system be able to capture that they opened up this email or they opened up this message at this particular time. Then they took action in the portal or the web-to-print or whatever it is to actually look at the proof. Then they actually approved it by clicking this button or doing this process at this particular time and date. So that is another thing. If you are working with bigger clients or in more regulated industries, you want to keep that in mind, too. 
    • [00:21:02] Pat McGrew: A lot of the third-party ones we have looked at shows that are standalone, or they will bolt into an existing MIS - they have the handshake capabilities. They have the ability to capture those audit trails. An older system might not have that. That is an important feature, then looking at something that can integrate into your existing workflow might give you those additional capabilities in a way that protects you and gives you that audit trail.
    • [00:21:27] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. Last tip here is really about setting up the triggers and notifications. What happens, in other words, once a customer does approve that? Is the system capable of letting the rest of your workflow know, "Hey, it's been approved now." What is the next step in the production path that this job needs to take? Does it then need to go to maybe a hard copy proof for your operator? Does it need to instantly send the job ticket electronically to the operator at the next step? Does it need to make plates? Does it need to, what can you automate now that the customer has actually approved it? That's what we are really asking you to think about here with this tip.
    • Any other kinds of things, situations you have seen there? 
    • [00:22:08] Pat McGrew: You want to look across the workflow. We always recommend that assessments are a good idea to understand the workflow you are living in. If you have a workflow assessment that you have done recently, that helps you identify where all the system handshakes are. That is a really good thing to have. When we start talking about setting up these trigger processes, you want to make sure you are triggering from the right point in the workflow. You do not want to be triggering an approval process when the work really is not ready to be approved. In some cases, you may need to do a preliminary approval and then a secondary and a tertiary approval because of the complexity of the job. Books might require cover approval separately from book block approvals. Packaging might require color approval separate from guideline approval. The legal approvals are a big thing, especially in packaging especially in food packaging where nutrition information can really clobber you if that is not being handled correctly. If it is in the wrong location or the font is too small, it might get rejected by regulators.
    • There are so many different kinds of approvals that can attach itself to different kinds of print. Know what is needed for the nature of the print that you are producing and make sure that you understand where and how many times it may have to happen. When you are setting up your nudging as I keep calling it, make sure you understand what is the time on press date and you are backing up appropriately and your shop. If there are lots of delays that happen at a certain point in the process, how much time your average proof and approval environment consumes in your workflow, just spend some time to document it, map it all out. It will likely bring you back well more than that in a return on the investment in the time you make. The more you can streamline it, the more efficient you can make it, the more automated you can make it, the more time you leave for people to take care of the things that really need to be handled by people.
    • [00:24:11] Ryan McAbee: Like we said, it is one of the most prominent bottlenecks that we see across the board. So it is worth taking the time to examine it. Do the assessment. Figure out how to improve and automate where you can. 
    • Thank you for joining us for this episode at the print university. And we will see you on the next one.

69- THE INS AND OUTS OF IPDS VS. AFP VS. PDF

A look back at the key industry highlights from 2023 and what big trends we expect in 2024 for production printing.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another episode here at The Print University! We have Pat McGrew joining us and she is the oracle about this topic that we're going to get into today. And that's all about the ins and outs of these different, sometimes you hear them called data streams sometimes you hear them called file formats.
    • They're got different kinds of names, but there's, it's the acronym soup that we lay out before you, which is IPDS, AFP, and PDF. But without these things, Pat, we simply couldn't print. 
    • [00:00:29] Pat McGrew: It's really funny. I've been around long enough that I remember when we printed pure line data, right?
    • Where data would magically come out of these enterprise programs like bank statementing programs and insurance policy programs. The way we got them to print was we surrounded them with machine code that would make it possible for them to actually print onto an impact printer or onto a toner based printer. We'd have special commands for making things bold or, if that was available, usually meant printing over something twice. There were all sorts of arcane ways that we got print out. 
    • Starting in the sort of in the 80s and then into the 90s, a lot of digital printing technology evolved. As you might expect there were arms races around how the digital print was going to happen and what the files were going to have to look like. Then of course, how much could we do to them in order to make the print pretty and not look like it came off of a courier typewriter. Out of that evolved intelligent printer data stream which is now called intelligent presentation advanced function presentation, print stream and PDF. These are the three biggies. We'll towards the end, we'll talk about some others that you might hear about in your environment, depending on the kinds of print devices that your shop may have evolved through. But these are the biggies. AFP is how we generally refer to it- advanced function. It began as advanced function printing, because in the beginning we were just printing it, but then it became advanced function presentation as people wanted to be able to do screen based review of Of their content as well. While it is a print file format or a data stream format, it's really an architecture. It evolved out of what was then IBM printing systems, which became InfoPrint, which became Ricoh. It's been through a number of lifetimes. In the very beginning, it was intended to drive toner based devices, roll fit and cut sheet based devices as fast as possible. The way IBM looked at it was that if you created something that was independent of the machine's capabilities, but handled all the formatting elements. When do I want bold and when do I want italic and what are the margins and what's the top and bottom margin. If I could handle those things independent of whatever the device was, I would have a lot more flexibility and freedom to create then a device dependent version of that stream and also to make it possible to view it on a screen. They created it as an architecture and we used to laugh because they called them object content architectures. We had presentation text object content architecture and image object content architecture and barcode object content architecture and you have to remember that this was in the 90s. There was a gentleman called Lee Iacocca leading Chrysler then, and we used to laugh that actually Chrysler was just another AFP object content architecture, because they had Lee Iacocca. Object content architectures were how it came together. Each one of them has a book that goes with them that tells you what those elements are supposed to look like, whether it's a barcode or an image or a graphic or its text. What fonts are supposed to look like. 
    • So now you're independent, but if you want to print it, you've got to get to what the machine expects and that's where IPDS comes in. That's the Intelligent Printer Data Stream, and they call it intelligent because it is device dependent. When you generate an IPDS file, and that can happen a lot of different ways. There are some composition engines that will directly generate an IPDS file. Sometimes you put it through a controller that turns it into IPDS. You send AFP in a digital front end turns it into the appropriate IPDS for whatever it's attached to. 
    • There are transform programs you can buy that'll transform files into IPDS. But the whole power of IPDS was that the printer could continue to talk back and forth to whatever fed it. In most cases, when we send a document to a printer, the first time we know we have a problem is if you get an error page off the printer. Or you don't even get the error page, either the print file never prints or what prints is unintelligible garbage. The trick with IPDS was that it was going to be a constant two way conversation so that operators and the folks further upstream in the workflow would be able to keep an eye on what was going. 
    • In the world of AFP and IPDS, we were principally talking to people doing transaction printing. The people who print your bills, your statements, your credit card documentation, policies. It wasn't for the people printing posters and marketing brochures. It was really what we consider security printing. It was very important to those enterprises that everything be under close control. We didn't want anybody sneaking in with a wire and trying to grab that print data stream.
    •  IPDS has a number of interesting features. It has what they call checkpoint restart capability. If the press fails in the middle of printing that file, it knows exactly where it failed, so that it can back up to exactly that part and start the print process again once you resolve whatever the problem was. That's so that you don't double print any pages and you don't lose any pages in a transaction file. Nobody wants to open their credit card bill and discover the page five is missing. That doesn't make you feel too confident and nobody wants to page fives either. 
    • Both AFP and IPDS continue to be widely used today because they typically are embedded in the enterprise. The architectures for how data is handled and print information is handled very often use the architecture of AFP and the print structures of IPDS, but fewer and fewer print pages are actually IPDS today. That was because of the rise of PDF, the portable document format, which we attribute to Adobe and is now an ISO standard. Over time it became clear that AFP and IPDF IPDS are great in an enterprise setting. But they're not universal. It takes a lot of infrastructure to handle managing AFP files and IPDS files.
    • Adobe created portable document format and democratized getting print to a printer as well as to a screen. Getting the content to a screen using one common format, not requiring any special dongles or anything else. The reader was free. As that portable document format started to really take hold towards the end of the nineties, and certainly in the new millennium really took hold, what happened is that a lot of the large enterprises who were trying to serve their customers with bank statements and bills and all sorts of other things online migrated over to PDF for the delivery of those. Over time, more and more of the high speed presses also supported PDF. It's not uncommon today in a large enterprise environment to see all the back end in AFP and IPDS, but the actual print file formats be PDF and the archive formats be PDF because that's become the lingua franca for how we distribute print content as well as viewable content.
    • [00:08:18] Ryan McAbee: A couple of things here. Everybody's familiar with PDF. I think if you've ever gone to look up your bank statement online, or if anybody's ever sent you a document through email, it probably more than likely was a PDF file. It's important to note here that PDF has many different versions of the specification and then special use cases for it too. There's a pDF UA for accessibility. There's PDF VT for variable data. There's all of these different variants. That's part of the true power of PDF, but it's also to some extent, it's limiting factor too. As an example, I know we were just talking to a printer and it's like their customer can open up the PDF on the screen and everything looks fantastic and perfect, but when it goes to the printer, it's erroring because it doesn't have the fonts or it has these other external objects. 
    • [00:09:03] Pat McGrew: And the other way it can happen too, right? 
    • [00:09:06] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, exactly. At the end of the day, the PDF can even contain elements and objects that aren't ever intended to print, like embedding a video. That's just a, asterisk, whatever you want to say on PDF itself.
    • [00:09:17] Pat McGrew: What's also true is like advanced function printing the AFP print file format has probably changed 30 times over the last 25 years. PDF has gone through versions and revs as well at the baseline, as well as with all these additional extensions like X1, X3, UA, VT. There's a host of them, a lot of special purpose versions that are designed for architecture or for CAD.
    • Part of the challenge of being a printer is in understanding what someone has actually sent to you. It's true whether they're sending you an AFP file, they're sending you what they considered to be a print ready IPDS file, or they're sending what they consider to be a print ready PDF file. There are challenges in all of those situations. 
    • [00:10:04] Ryan McAbee: In many cases, it's going to require either some tweaking or some workflow aspects to manage it or even optimize what you receive on any of those data streams. The other thing that strikes me is that there's always this cat and mouse game that goes on in the industry. That's because on the composition or the creative side, the design side, it's always moving forward. It's always getting new features, new capabilities. We're trying to figure out ways to expand that tool set, but at the same time, these data streams and print formats have to expand with that so that they can actually, we can print it and reproduce whatever's created. On the print production side is that you have to, whatever these data formats are, whether it's IPDs, AFP, PDF, or others, you have to be able to quote unquote, RIP it, or process it at the digital front end for the printers to generate the output that you're requiring. That requires some extra thoughts sometimes too, because you've got a finite processing power on the servers that house the digital front end or the RIP.
    • [00:11:04] Pat McGrew: There are two concepts in these print data stream files. One is that you have revisible text and one is that you have fixed format text. Revisible means you can edit it. If you think about a PDF file, that's actually revisible. Even if you think it's a secure lockdown file, people with the right tools can get in there and change numbers and add a period or change an address.
    •  Fixed format content is considered fixed because it's not easy to touch. It's not to say it's impossible, but if you think about the output from a windows print driver is fixed format because it knows what device it's going to. It creates what it needs in order to feed what that device wants. The processes that create the revisable and fixed format texts, they're all configurable. We're mostly talking about, business enterprise level file production here they can choose to include fonts, or they can choose to reference fonts that exist in a library somewhere on a server. They can choose to embed a logo in the file, or they can choose to reference that logo outside of the file format. Each has its advantages and disadvantages and challenges. The file that arrives at the digital front end, that box that sits in front of the print device itself, the DFE has to be able to resolve it somehow. If the fonts are referenced, that's fine as long as the digital front end knows where to go look for them. How many hoops it has to jump through can impact how long it takes. To get the first page on to the press when the file arrives, right? Same thing with graphic images. You could have a logo on every single page in the file. You look at enterprise class print files, they can have hundreds of thousands of pages in them. That makes a really big file or you can reference it, but you've got to be able to get to it. The DFE has got to be able to get to it. Everything that looks like simple push button to print, send it to a print queue and magic will happen. There's a lot of configuration that goes on behind the scenes. With these types of complex print file formats and AFP, IPDF, IPDS and PDF are all complex file formats. There is configuration required in order for the digital front end of the press to be able to turn that file into something that the marking engine, whether it's toner or inkjet or it's a CTP device can actually handle.
    •  There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, which is why understanding what's coming at you is really critical. AFP files can have index records, all sorts of things that are designed for archiving systems and enterprise systems that are not printable objects that make the file really big. The DFE has to know when to ignore it. We've got to be able to configure the file correctly. PDF can have all sorts of, as you mentioned, video files. It can have multiple layers, right? We've seen PDF files where they have five languages they're covering. So each language is in a different layer and they send the whole thing to the press and the D F E has to figure out what to print and what not to print based on configuration. So there's a lot of complexity in these data streams and these print data streams.
    • [00:14:30] Ryan McAbee: Just to give a visual for everybody why you would reference versus embed an object. Let's say it's a a graphic and it's a company logo as an example. You get your bank statement. It probably always has the company logo up in the top left or right hand corner of the page. If you're printing one page, no big deal. You can easily embed that into the document. It's not going to create a big file size. You're going to be able to print it on any print device. Where it becomes more interesting is that when you're at a high production transactional printer, you're not printing one of those at a time. You're printing maybe hundreds of thousands, millions of those at a time. Then it becomes an untenable file size and complexity. If you're embedding all that versus referencing that one logo, because it's going to be not used once. It's going to be used hundreds of thousands of times. 
    • [00:15:13] Pat McGrew: The part that can sometimes fool you is say, Oh the logo is only, 100 K, right? How hard can it be? Then you start doing math, right? And when you start doing the math, that turns into gigabytes of excess data that you're carrying into that DFE, and the DFE has to rasterize each one of those copies. 
    • One of the other pieces of magic that can happen in AFP, IPDS, and in PDF is that you can cache resources. These are complex, sophisticated data streams, and they do have the capability for you to define an object for reuse. It appears once in the file, and then the file actually refers back to it within the file. That is how you get around this problem of the logo appearing on every page or other common graphic elements appearing on the page. 
    • It is important to understand the capabilities of the data stream you're working with and the nature of the files coming at you because your customer may not. If your customer doesn't understand that when they embed the logo, it's appearing 100, 000 times in the file they're sending you, then you, as the print provider, need to understand what your options are to solve that problem before you send it to the DFE.
    • [00:16:33] Ryan McAbee: It's just incremental computing power that it has to contribute to those kind of situations. So real quickly, we have these three formats. Each one has its use case, its benefits, its disadvantages. I will tell you that in my. growing up more on the commercial side of print, you never really ran across AFP, IPDS, or any of those kind, because they're really a domain of transactional kind of printing environment. On the commercial side, the precursor of the PDF was really PostScript, and then it evolved, of course, into PDF once that became available.
    •  If we want to take the pro of each one of these, and then everybody can obviously read the grid here for some additional information. What's the pro to each one of these, Pat, from your perspective?
    • [00:17:14] Pat McGrew: AFP, it's scalable, it's flexible, and it's really common. The one thing that you might see where you might see AFP and IPDFs in kind of a commercial shop are those that specialize in direct mail. A lot of brands, a lot of the big enterprise brands who manage their marketing output as well as their transactional output may actually be managing some of their marketing output as AFP or IPDS files.
    • If you think if you think across most organizations, PDF has become the print output standard across all of them. It's easy to understand, easy to create, easy to produce. They're all scalable. They're all flexible. I think AFP and IPDS are not as portable as PDF is right. You need a pretty solid IT infrastructure behind you to be able to maintain the requirements of producing AFP and IPDS files. PDF you can produce on the desktop without too much difficulty. It's not hard to create. The thing to remember, is that in all cases there are cost differences and there are complexity differences to consider.
    • AFP and IPDS environments are IT oriented environments. You typically will see them in in-plants that are part of a large enterprise, or you'll see print service providers that specialize in those formats and have built the IT infrastructure to handle it. 
    • The rest of the world uses PDF, right? We all used to use Postscript, now we use PDF. PDF is very easy, it's very manageable, but it's very easy to create bad PDF. You will hear printers name names when it comes to certain products that produce really poor PDF.
    • One of your responsibilities as a print service provider is to understand what is coming at you and to what extent you can have conversations with your customers about what's creating PDF that's coming at you that might be causing you problems.
    • We call it choking a DFE or clutching a DFE. That's when you send the file to the DFE and then you go get a cup of coffee before the first page actually arrives on the printer and starts printing. That's the hint that you have a file that has unintended bloat in it. The good news is there are things you can do to solve those problems, but you have to recognize it's happening.
    • [00:19:34] Ryan McAbee: That's true even in the PDF world. For years now, we've had tool sets to help us try and fix and optimize some of these, very well known issues that we would have in the printing world once we try and output those files. One example is just image resolution. A designer can put an image in there at 3000 DPI and the printers needs a 10th of that and it just creates a file size that's not required for what the purpose is to print. The one thing that strikes me versus AFP IPDS and PDF is just like you said, those top two require very specialized environments. If you flip it around to the consumer or the consumer end of it There's not a tool, I can't just take an IPDS file or AFP file and easily open it on my computer screen and look at it, but PDF certainly you can, right?
    • [00:20:19] Pat McGrew: Yeah, so there are some enterprise output environments that have what we call AFP readers embedded in them. They tend to be giant enterprises that decided some time back that they didn't trust PDF for some reason, so they invested in AFP readers and made them part of their display environment.
    • If you were, logging into a site and going in to find the archives of your bills or your policies. There are AFP viewers, not IPDS viewers, but AFP viewers, the device independent version. 
    • [00:20:55] Ryan McAbee: From what you just pointed out, though, they're more specialized use cases where the enterprise chose to actually provide that tool.
    • [00:21:02] Pat McGrew: Yeah, I don't as a consumer. I don't have to go buy it. That's not a thing. The free PDF reader is how you view things as a rule. 
    • [00:21:11] Ryan McAbee: That begs the question, why do these different type of file formats or data streams? Why do these things still exist? Why hasn't one become available to rule them all? 
    • [00:21:22] Pat McGrew: It would be lovely if you could just, plant a seed, pour water and tree grew, but everything takes time. We often refer, especially to the US market as trying to turn the Queen Mary. It's not an easy thing. It's not like you're dingy where you just row on one side and you're turning the other way. These are long tail projects. 
    • How most large enterprises have chosen to address the issue is to over time slowly bring PDF capable print hardware into the environment, adopt the ability to produce PDF for view and then make decisions on a two or three year cadence about how much of what they produce is in AFP versus in PDF.
    • How long do they want to maintain the licenses on their IPDS controllers versus how, when do they want to cut over to PDF? In many cases, the answer is they buy controllers, digital front ends that are capable of process switching between IPDS and PDF. In those cases you're typically contracting for five to eight years at a time for those devices, so nothing moves fast. It's just easier to maintain both. 
    • [00:22:45] Ryan McAbee: We've talked about in the past, especially with some of the legacy data formats that there's almost a resistance and a little bit of a fear factor to really mess with those too much, because you may be contractually obligated to make sure that content stays, a hundred percent where it was.
    • [00:23:02] Pat McGrew: Years ago, we were involved. We were involved in a project where an organization reached out to us for a transform, and they wanted to transform a very specific data stream into PDF because they felt that the PDF would be easier for the organization to manage. The problem was that this was a utility organization managing a nuclear power plant. The code that was producing the print file for their daily reports was in a language that virtually nothing on earth spoke anymore, and they couldn't change the program that produced it there was nothing they could do to go back and get it to generate a PDF file. It just wasn't possible.
    • [00:23:45] Ryan McAbee: But you certainly want those reports on a daily basis. 
    • [00:23:48] Pat McGrew: You want those reports but the printing the printing device that was printing them was no longer supported by the vendor, and they could even buy parts for it anymore. Nuclear power plant, right? Nobody wants to be responsible for that going down.
    •  We worked with them to be able to do a middleware transform of the print file into PDF so that it would be distributed, printable and viewable at the same time. There was 9 months of testing. To make sure that every variation of those files would be handled in the transform and we got there. To the best of my understanding that transform is still running today and we did that in 1993. 
    • [00:24:28] Ryan McAbee: That speaks to the longevity of these file formats, data streams and how they'll be with us for time to come. 
    • [00:24:35] Pat McGrew: Yeah, these are not going anywhere. 
    • [00:24:37] Ryan McAbee: The testing aspect that you brought up it also speaks to the kind of best practices that we're going to end with here.
    •  Obviously the first place to start is just knowing what kind of data streams and formats. File formats you have coming into your environment to begin with because it may not be one. It may be three. It may be five. You just have to audit and figure out what you're dealing with. Honestly, the print shop you're working with within already has done that work because otherwise they wouldn't be able to output in print. It's just a good awareness to know if there are what's there. It could be transforming along the way and you think it's completely PDF. But if you go look at the front end, it could be several different things. 
    • [00:25:15] Pat McGrew: Maybe a lot of things. And so all these at this alphabet soup that you see in this sub bullet. Those are all actively available print streams and print file formats. And that's not all of them. I could have filled several screens full of all the variations and that doesn't even speak to the fun of enterprise class systems, especially in banking, insurance and health care that are still producing line data that gets conditioned by something along the way and then get fed into maybe not just one transform program, but multiple transforms along the way to produce a final print file or a view file or an archive file.
    • LCDS, metacode were the product of Xerox. Xerox printers from the 80s and 90s spoke these languages, and they are still out there. You may hear those terms. If you do, it's likely your shop already has some sort of transform middleware that's turning it into something that you can actually print. You might also hear VIPP, V I P P. I didn't add it to the list, but that's another Xerox format that is used in variable data. 
    • Interpress is an older format. CPDs, composed page data stream was the precursor to AFP. PCL is your HP laser printer and inkjet printer speaks PCL, but there are dozens of variations of it. There's not just one PCL version, I'm not kidding, there are dozens and dozens of them, and PGL for the graphic devices that they produce, PPML is an XML based format, XMLFO is commonly found across Europe, where XML was adopted much earlier than it has been in the US.
    • So if you're in an environment where, customer files come in and go through some sort of transform program before they go to print or view, knowing where they came from can help you track down the experts that can help you solve the problem and there's some of us out here. 
    • [00:27:07] Ryan McAbee: The best practice for a print environment these days, or at least the trend that we've seen is that regardless of how many of these print data streams you have coming in, the practice for efficiency sake is getting it to a common language on the print output side.
    • And most of the shops that we've been involved with lately is, it's really going to PDF for that side. 
    • [00:27:29] Pat McGrew: While there are still some pure AFP shops out there PDF, I think has really become the 800 pound gorilla of print streams in our environment.
    • It's been a slow road, right? It wasn't like Adobe announced it and magically everybody adopted it. It has literally taken 25 years for it to get to where it is now the dominant format. It took a long time to displace Postscript. Postscript is a programming language, so you know, Innovative print shops would go into the postscript and make the postscript do what they wanted to do and tray pulls and all sorts of interesting things. PDF didn't have those facilities for a very long time. You couldn't do tray pulls, you couldn't do the things. I worked with any number of shops that used to get in PDF from their customer, turn it into postscript, put the tray pulls in, and then send it off to the press.
    • There are a million ways to solve a print problem, but PDF does rationalize your approach to it and give you a basis for best practices in managing how work flows through your print shop.
    • [00:28:34] Ryan McAbee: So to close out this episode, I would just encourage you to look for others that are related to data streams and everything about data. I think we have two or three others in the library at this point.
    •  We just wanted to have this special one focusing on these three primary formats, because they're the ones that you're probably most likely to see out in the industry today. 
    • Thanks for joining Pat. And we hope to see you at a future episode here at The Print University.

75- Ways to Automate Customer Experience and Proofing Approvals

Looking to increase customer experience to drive more sales? Want to decrease the time and effort of receiving customer approvals? In this episode we review some of the technical methods to automate these tasks using four off-the-shelf software solutions as examples.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Are you looking for ways to automate your customer experience to convert more business? Or perhaps you're looking for ways to speed up that proofing and approval process that involves your clients? Then stay tuned for this episode of The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee of Pixel Dot Consulting and has always joined with Pat McGrew of the McGrew Group.
    • We thought it would be nice to talk about a couple of ways to automate things that we know when we've done assessments with all of various types of print shops. These are things that fall by the wayside because they require people to do it and people get busy, they get distracted and so on and so forth.
    • One is just how to provide better experiences for your customers. This is just highlighting two different types of examples here. They're more in the industry. We can't cover them all in a short video, but we're going to take a quick look at Plan Prophet and LoyaltyLoop and what they do and why it would benefit that type of solution would benefit your business.
    • So let's start with Plan Prophet first, Pat. 
    • [00:01:00] Pat McGrew: I love Plan Prophet. I like how the company came together. I like how they leveraged experience to determine that they had built a great process that could be automated that they could now sell to other people. 
    • What they do is they help you automate your customer engagement. If you are a mid tier print shop or a smaller print shop where you just don't have five people on a marketing staff sitting waiting to try and figure out some cool campaign to bring people to your shop, or you're relying on sales people to also be your marketers that can be tough. Or your CSRs because we know that sometimes CSRs get burdened with these communications.
    •  What Plan Prophet has done is made it really easy for you to find some templates. They even let you create personas, which I love. You can create, Mary and Bob and Jerome and Heine and, whoever else you want. You can create all these personas who are virtual customer service agents who then are doing the nudging on your behalf not just for quote, follow up, which is one that is often a chasing adventure. 
    • [00:02:06] Pat McGrew: You asked for the quote and here it is. It's been 3 days and we haven't heard from you. We'd like to know. And those nudges can take up hours and hours of people's time. So it not only allows you to build a persona who can do that nudging. So the sales guy doesn't get tarred with that brush, nor does the CSR, but it also allows you to determine the cadence. How much time should elapse after the quote is issued before you send a nudge note. "Hey, gee, I haven't bought from us in a while. We'd like to know you'd like you to know we have some new things that we're offering." 
    • How long for an account goes inactive? Would you want to send that kind of note? All the things that everybody wants to get to. But never has time to do. Plan Prophet lets you automate it and do it in a way that once you set it up, it just goes.
    • And that's what I really love about it. 
    • [00:02:55] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. I think it's like virtual staff to do the things that you want to do and you should do, but nobody gets to that kind of thing. And it really can affect your bottom line because you're letting your customer base kind of fall through the cracks.
    • A perfect example, and you mentioned it already, is that I went to a local print shop and said, I want to quote on brochures or something. Sure enough, I got the quote like the same day. But I never had a single follow up in any method. . Phone, email, anything that said, "Hey, are you gonna go ahead and purchase this? Is there something else that we need to tweak on the quote?" it just fell off. And I think that happens more times than not.
    • [00:03:27] Pat McGrew: I think a lot of times, especially for those of you who are part of franchises this could still be a valuable tool for you because we know that most of the franchise software doesn't give you that nudge capability. They're great at helping you manage, taking an order in getting a job ticket built and managing it through the shop. Even their marketing tools very often require you to do things. You need to be master of the ship plan. Prophet lets you designate a virtual master of the ship. You're still controlling the rules. But it's taking care of that follow up. 
    • [00:03:59] Ryan McAbee: It's worth noting that it works in conjunction with a handful of print management systems. 
    • [00:04:03] Pat McGrew: It does. Yeah, they are nicely integrated into quite a few, which is very nice, but we like it. 
    • [00:04:09] Ryan McAbee: So LoyaltyLoop is on the opposite end of the transaction.
    • It's after things finish and you want to do post sell engagement. One of the things it does is just, it just sends out a simple survey. They try and keep it to a couple, maybe three questions. One of those questions is going to be a net promoter score. Basically the question, would you recommend us to other people? It's usually on a scale of one to 10. You, anything from a one to I believe six is considered a detractor, which basically means that you need to take action to figure out why they weren't happy. Then there's the passives that are the seven and eights or mabye six and sevens, I get the numbers confused.
    • [00:04:44] Pat McGrew: It actually depends. So that scale Ryan, that you're referencing, there are different scales you can use in net promoter scores. And a lot of it has to do with how deep your engagement is with that particular kind of client. the deeper the engagement levels you would normally have, the longer this, the scale usually is.
    • [00:05:02] Ryan McAbee: Regardless of the scale, it's like detractors, passive and then satisfy the promoters as they typically call. What happens is it automates the engagement. So if you have a detractor it can notify your salespeople or your CSR to do immediate follow up and take action so that you don't create a negative review online or you don't have a negative experience that they go tell ten other people about. For a passive it engages them a little bit further to understand why weren't they really raving about what you did? And then for the promoters, the people that are already fully satisfied with you, they can do other things like maybe suggest other products or other services.
    •  It's that automation point again, think of it like your virtual CSR almost that's trying to engage the customer after the sale. So it's just a way to automate things that again, we know we should do, we want to do, but oftentimes we don't.
    • [00:05:50] Pat McGrew: I know. I've had the LoyaltyLoop demo a few times and I always go back and get it again when I'm at a show where they are, because they do continue to add features and granularity to the kinds of things that you can test for with them. I always love hearing their success stories, especially if you're suspicious that I know my customers. Yeah, I got them. I, I don't really need help figuring out if they're happy with me or not.
    • They've heard that story so many times and they have the proof points. What you think you're engaging in and what you're actually engaging in may not be the same thing. And they've unlocked net new opportunities for a lot of the people who sign on with them. 
    • [00:06:30] Ryan McAbee: Real quickly, another way to automate an area that we know most printers struggle with, and it's a struggle because it's an interaction and a handshake, not only with your internal print staff but with that external customer who needs to look at something known as a proof, usually electronic these days, and then needs to either mark it up and comment and say, "I need a correction done", or they're going to go ahead and approve that. Again, there's many examples in the market for solutions to do that. But we thought we'd highlight two of these. 
    • One of them is Good2Go, which is an industry specific solution. And then page proof, which is a universal, not specific to printing. It may be a valid solution if you get into a lot of diverse things that you need, file types that you need to proof and approve.
    • So with Good2Go, we know it's been around for several years now. It's a little bit more than proofing and approval to be honest. It's more like how to onboard jobs, but proofing and approval is definitely one of the things they help speed up. The way that these solutions speed up and get you to that approval faster is because it does that automated nudge again.
    • It says, "Hey, You haven't looked at this proof yet. It's been 24 hours. What's going on? And then, keeps nudging and nudging until the people actually take action." The other thing Pat, that you might want to walk us through is that Good2Go re recently released this functionality called order pilot, right?
    • That has a little bit of AI chat GPT ish kind of technology into it. 
    • [00:07:49] Pat McGrew: It does. Good2Go is it's a small company and but it is built on the history and the subject matter expertise of Michael Reiher, who has been through this so many times and has helped so many customers when he's worked for other vendors, that he spun himself out and decided to basically create a platform based on what he knows helps customers become more automated. He started with the premise that email is evil. We don't disagree with that on a basic basis that doing order management by getting emails with attached files is not a fabulous way to run your business.
    • Because 1st, it requires you to be paying attention to your reader. It assumes that you never have anything go to spam, or if you do that you always check it. And emails can very often become more of a dialogue than anyone has time to actually manage. He took a lot of what he was building into the whole Good2Go platform beyond what the proof and approval pieces do.
    •  He came to the market with the story. There's got to be a better way. And there are so many nice AI tools available now that could interrogate an email, get the information out of that email that could actually help us create a job ticket . You still might want to have that job ticket reviewed by somebody. But at the end of the day, all of the silly work that goes into chasing specifications could be automated using a conversation with an AI based agent that looks at the email, then creates the actual job ticket that will go the rest of the way through the automation.
    • It's hard to explain until you see it in action. Michael will do demos for anybody. So all you have to do is go to his Good2Go website. If you have the problem of too many emails coming into you, each of which have their own specifications. My favorite, or when you get emails from two different people in the same company about the same job and the specifications are different I would be worth getting the demo of it. I like the way it behaves. 
    • [00:09:49] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, an example would be if your client emails routinely to ask for quotes for things or to start new orders and, in the body of the email, it's typically going to have, " I'm looking to have 1000 brochures that are this finished size that are trifold, et cetera. It tries to pick out those key pieces and put them into the system so that an operator doesn't have to sit there and read that email and parse it. It just speeds things up and makes things. 
    • [00:10:13] Pat McGrew: It does and it tries to normalize as well. 
    • It can allow you to get into a different kind of dialogue with the customer and gather data that helps just continuously improve the relationship with the customer, which is another thing that these kinds of systems allow you to do. 
    • [00:10:28] Ryan McAbee: I would say the compare and contrast the PageProof option it just allows you to do more file types beyond PDF. If you want to work with native Adobe Creative cloud files, if you want to work with Microsoft files, if you even want to do video and audio proofing and approval, or some of you may be getting into shape printing or 3D printing of some sort. It will support certain types of those files as well to some of the Potter files to yeah, show it to the customer online and do multi level approval.
    •  If several people in a department that the client that you're working for has to approve it, basically the direct report will approve it and then their manager can approve it as well. Do those sort of things. 
    •  
    • [00:11:06] Pat McGrew: Anytime you're looking at your shop, we always encourage you to do an assessment because I want a regular cadence because what was true in your shop a year ago may not be true now, right?
    • The kinds of work you're doing may have changed. The equipment you're using may have changed. All of the customers may have changed and how you work with those customers may have changed. And so products like this allow you to do things that automate more and more of the features and functions so that you can have a smarter dialogue with your customer and start to get more of their work.
    • That's one of the really nice things these things do. And PageProof is nice because, if you're using something like Monday as your sort of overall project management approach to your business or, Asana or something, they've got the integrations already, which is really nice. They've done a nice job of integrating. 
    • We are users of Canva. We are users of Monday. We are happy users of the Adobe tools. And I think a lot of you guys are as well. Having something that will help you manage the conversations with your customers in this kind of proof and approval piece of the business that, that you're trying to manage, it can just add hours back into your day.
    • [00:12:22] Ryan McAbee: It's really a few dynamic pieces that these four different solutions kind of highlight under the getting better customer experiences and also the automation for proofing and approval. It's gonna save you time so that affects your bottom line and frees up labor.
    • But the other fact of the matter is it's going to provide a better experience for your customers. So they will continue to come back to you and use you and not search for alternatives. Print buyers these days they want the least amount of barriers or hurdles to get to what they need.
    • And I still find that in many print shops just the ordering process and the approving approval process, it's too manual and you're probably losing out on some business because of that. 
    • [00:13:00] Pat McGrew: Yeah and this is a time to fix that.
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