WHICH PRINTER WOULD PASS UP THE opportunity to become more efficient, to reduce down-time and shorten make readies, to make ink savings and to improve print quality? Stones the Printers in Banbury, the sheetfed sister to BGP, didn’t, and the decision to introduce process control and ISO 12647-2 for its printing is one that is paying off.

Steve Palmer returned to become managing director of the plant two years ago and has instigated a migration from price-demanding magazine work to quality-demanding commercial work. The variety of work that is on pallets around the factory confirms this. Here is a jewellery brochure, here a catalogue for an electronics company specialising in the music business and here is the programme for the football or theatre.

Stones continues to print for publishers and to produce covers for the web plant a dozen miles away. But the change in direction has been to seek out higher-margin commercial work, and that has required a step change in quality and the way the factory operates.

Ironically it was Bauer, one of the plant’s publishing customers, that introduced Stones to Targetcolour, the colour management specialist that is helping the company print to the ISO 12647-2 standard. Palmer explains: “As we tried to move into commercial work for customers in finance, fine art, travel and so on, we found that the client was driving us. They were providing us with Fogra 39L certified proofs and were asking questions about how we controlled colour. For these customers colour is crucial as the job is likely to be a one-off project where it has to be right first time, unlike a regular publication where the job has time to settle in.

“We realised that our knowledge about colour wasn’t always as good as those clients providing us with the certified proofs. And this meant that we weren’t in full control. Our decision to work to ISO 12647-2 was driven by our need to show clients a proof that would match what we could produce on press. And there have been all sorts of spin-offs from that decision.”

If the UKAS-approved specification for a quality colour management system based on ISO 12647-2 is approved, Stones is well placed to qualify. It has the ISO 9001 quality management standard and ISO 14001, so the new standard will fit neatly into the jigsaw. The continuous improvement culture, for example, is already in place. “We are big on management procedure, so this works very well for us,” says Palmer. “In many ways this has been the missing link for us. We did so much work on the other procedures that colour had become something of an Achilles’ heel.”

Targetcolour made a presentation replete with graphs and curves to demonstrate the value of printing to the ISO standard and the way that its technology would characterise the presses, draw up the curves to match the profile of each press or paper type, and organise files that would optimise separations to these profiles. It would also ensure that the company could produce a certified proof. “When we saw the presentation of the graphs we knew early on that we had to go down this route,” Palmer says.

Targetcolour has been a colour management specialist and evangelist for monitor proofing, working mostly with publishers. When Mark Priest joined, the company gained an expert in controlling conditions on a printing press. Priest has, over 10 years, developed and refined means of understanding what is happening on a press and then characterising that press so that printed results from one machine will match another. His Germinate application has delivered remarkable results doing this for web presses, where a new machine can be lined up against a veteran press with hundreds of millions of impressions on the clock.

It is this experience that he has brought to Targetcolour and to Stones. Immediately, the proofing set-up of Epson proofers was calibrated to generate a proof to ISO 12647-7 and to Fogra 39L, as a first step towards matching client expectations and giving a target to shoot for. Priest explains what happens next: “The first task is to check the densities. If the press cannot reach the ISO densities, it will be necessary to change the ink. Once this is done, the density readings will provide the flat baseline setting for on-press colour control by using ICC targets. The information is read and edited to provide exactly the right dot gain curve using our software.” The processing power is held on Targetcolour’s computers, where the algorithms Priest has devised and the 4D look-up tables are used to create dot gain (TVI) curves which are a precise match to the ISO standard.

A number of sheets are used to build the profile. This profile can be specific to the press and paper type for the greatest accuracy, or can be generic for papers which fall within the Fogra paper categories. The profile can also be built to apply to more than one machine, by taking an average of all the presses in the plant, or evening out those that are closely matched. This will reduce the number of profiles that are held on Stones’ Rip. As a consequence, different sections of a job can be printed on different presses to the same quality and visual appearance, creating a balance so that read-across spreads can be printed on different presses without fear.

The profile can be further adjusted by use of Alwan’s CMYK Optimiser tool, which delivers the best level of grey component removal to different images in a job, so saving ink while retaining the TVI curves. The result is that the black ink does more work on a sheet, making it easier to control neutral colours and saving ink into the bargain. It’s difficult to quantify the savings achieved, as Stones has only been running this way for a few months. However, the feeling is that consumption of black ink has increased, while that of coloured inks has dropped.

The software that manages the calculations for the profiles is housed at a website, mypressexpert.com. As the readings are uploaded on a regular basis, Targetcolour carries out trend analysis, and offers troubleshooting advice when problems occur. This will spot problems before they develop, says Priest, making it a predictive maintenance system to allow engineers to step in before an unscheduled breakdown causes production problems. “It covers all chemical and mechanical problems, including plate, blanket and roller wear, allowing a business to become more efficient because there is less down-time,” he adds.

Targetcolour also offers Colour Partner, a service where it will help set up a colour-managed workflow between printer and customer within the same price.

Stones has yet to take advantage of this, but Palmer says the work on process control is having an impact on sales. “It is important to our clients that we can work in this way. We are finding that we are getting more and more high-end products through, and are getting favourable remarks about the quality of our print, even from those customers we haven’t spoken to about ISO 12647-2.

“For commercial work we are finding that this is a strong sales tool because more and more clients are specifying the quality standard,” he adds. A further benefit is that press passes become quicker. This is because the ISO standard is the starting point and there is no push and pull needed to achieve an acceptable colour balance before the customer starts to make the fine adjustments to deliver the perfect result.

Stones has created a strong commitment to the project across its departmental managers and has presented the work to the sales team. Details are also to be rolled out to the account managers and then to shop floor staff so that the entire complement of 150 staff is behind the work and understands what it all means. It is important that account managers understand what the sales teams have been telling customers so that they can answer any queries, Palmer explains.

The aim is to move the discussion with customers away from a negotiation based purely on price. Working to the ISO standard has already helped in negotiation after the job has been printed because the company can show that the job was printed within the agreed parameters. The discussion becomes an objective one, Palmer says. “That is because the customer knows what we are doing and it takes away any negotiations over who is right and wrong, where before there was always room for a negotiation.

“If customers want us to provide reports about the job we have printed, we can do it by taking the information from the presses,” he says. “We can prove that the reprint was printed in exactly the same way as the first run.”

It is going to be another few months before Targetcolour’s work is completed, all five of Stones’ 10-colour perfecting Speedmasters are characterised and the company is printing every job to the certified quality levels. It will then be in position to start to quantify the efficiencies it has made, how much time has been saved at make ready, how much ink has been preserved, and how much early intervention has prevented avoidable breakdowns.

Palmer, though, is just as interested in the response that commercial clients have. The company has been steadily busy through the autumn and winter, but as with every printer, the outlook is uncertain. For him the most important metric will be the number of customers that return to Stones with their most sensitive work because they know that Stones can be guaranteed to deliver a perfect job.