COMEDY DUO ERIC MORECAMBE AND ERNIE WISE are crucial to the print operation of the UK Hydrographic Office in Taunton. This is the business which produces the charts that help ships navigate the globe without collisions or running aground. What was once very much part of the Civil Service is now considered a trading body within the Ministry of Defence and is expected to pay its way. It does, returning a dividend to the public purse and on the way has become one of the most successful short run print businesses in the country. Runs on its three large format litho presses can start at a mere 50 copies.

A bank of inkjet presses takes care of shorter print runs while standard guillotines and folders are adapted to handle the requirements of the charts and publications the operation produces. In the press hall are large format Mitsubishi and Roland 900 four-colour presses and an eight-unit KBA 142 perfector fed from a reel sheeter. Eric and Ernie are the print operation’s pair of Luscher Xpose! 160 platesetters churning out the enormous number of plates the operation needs.

Presiding over this from what he jokes is his crow’s nest is Paul Kelly, officially production manager of Admiralty Charts and Publications. He joined the business six years ago from William Pollard in Exeter. The UKHO had shortly before called in the BPIF to review its print operation, then dominated by Crabtree Sovereigns, manual platemaking and an inward looking civil service attitude.

That outlook has long vanished, though government rules on procurement remain (explaining why there are different providers for each of the presses and folders in use), and being part of the Ministry of Defence, security levels are tight. Within this the print business is sharply focused on what is a highly specialised product. The remainder of the site in Taunton sets about collecting the data, shaping it and creating the files which will become digital or printed charts.

It is exacting work and needs to be spot on to ensure that the files supplied to the print operation are only the most up to date versions. Such is the level of detail that each chart will be a file of 25Gb.

Print employs 130 of the almost 1,000 staff at the UKHO in the Somerset town. The organisation moved to its current site, built to resemble a brick aircraft carrier with its funnel amidships, in the 1940s. A new office block was erected 30 years ago and now a further redevelopment is planned. As part of this the print operation will move off site, somewhere within 15 miles of Taunton, Kelly explains, with a completion date of autumn 2010. Planning for this move is well underway. Meanwhile the daily business cannot afford to stop.

New charts are needed constantly as new hazards at sea are recorded and changes to the regulations governing shipping lanes are notified. These result in what are called Notices to Mariners, covering obvious problems like wrecked ships, but also changes to lights, buoys or radio signals, movements in ship lanes and so on. Each has to be logged, the relevant chart or often charts (to cover overlapping areas or different scales) amended and the updated version made available for publication to comply with the internationally agreed Safety of Life at Sea regulations. This is not always in printed form. This year Admiralty Vector Chart Services has been launched to meet growing demand for digital charts. And as part of the print operation there’s a line of CD replicators handling demand for 26,000 CDs a week.

Says Kelly: “The demise of paper has been forecast, but we don’t know when it will happen. It’s been sitting over us for a while. It has been five years away now for 10 years and we recognise that there’s a point where the value of digital and paper will cross.” But that is not yet imminent.

The Ministry of Defence, which at 10% of the business remains the largest single customer, receives its modifications in digital form, as do the growing number of ocean-going vessels that have a digital bridge; but print retains the lion’s share of the output.

Charts are shipped from Taunton to a network of agents around the world and from there to the shipping companies. Each sea-going vessel above 26,000 tonnes is required to carry proper charts (not necessarily from Taunton, though 70% are) and many will buy a portfolio of charts to cover a specific voyage.

The trick is to manage supply and demand so that there is always sufficient supply of a chart without there being so many that hundreds of copies of a chart have to be thrown out when a Notice to Mariners amendment renders it out of date. Such corrections come in at the rate of 20-30 a day. By Thursday each week charts in stock need to be the latest version. A chart for a busy area like the English Channel can have several updates during a year.

This adds up to a constant workload revising and printing charts on demand and to short runs. “We like to think that we are using all the latest technology to bring down press make ready times. On average we are planning three jobs an hour and we can get through 78 jobs in a 24-hour shift,” Keily says the average print run on a chart is 250 sheets.

The UKHO holds 3,500 standard navigational charts plus other more specialist products. Its stock control system needs to be highly sophisticated to handle picks of single items; if a pack comprises five items this becomes a volume order says Kelly. It could manage 20,000 single item orders in a day. All of which places a burden on the print side having to predict which charts need to be printed in order to keep the stock levels so that availability is above 95%. As well as updated charts resulting from the Notice to Mariners changes, stock is reprinted on cycles according to popularity.

For Kelly this means a scheduling and planning system that is looking and trying to anticipate demand five days ahead, and is revised two days ahead, to work out which items are needed and then whether to print offset or on its inkjet printers. Inkjet will step in to print one or two copies to keep stock levels topped up until a litho run is scheduled as well as handling the less requested products.

The inkjet room has a bank of six Roland DG machines, replacing twice as many Epsons. Like the Epsons the Rolands are using special inks to match the colour palette that the charts use and to match the quality of the offset job, meaning accurate rendition of fine type as well as colour. The charts are printed on a 150gsm cream paper produced and watermarked to the organisation’s specifications.

The inkjets operate for 14 hours a day taking seven minutes on average to print a chart. Average weekly production is 4,000 charts, compared to the 80,000-120,000 printed on the litho presses. The inkjet charts are folded by hand; the litho charts are folded on a bank of machines with inkjet to identify each chart and when it was printed.

But charts are not the only product coming out of Taunton. The KBA was installed to print the 200 book titles that the UKHO publishes. Like the charts the requirement is to maintain set levels of stock, meaning that short print runs can be necessary. The best-sellers will reach 38,000 copies, the book on radio signals for example will also be split over three volumes each comprising fourteen 32pp sections. The annual directory listing all the Notice to Mariners modifications will print 30,000 copies.

Again says Kelly this is a fairly complex logistical exercise involving careful justification before the investment could be approved. “The large format KBA and Shoei folder is the most economical way of producing this work,” he says. This was decided through a two-part tendering process, one team looking at the technical specifications of the selected equipment, and another to look at the financials. Only at the end were the two brought together to achieve what in government parlance is the ‘best value for money’.

“It involved a technical evaluation of perfecting printing,” he continues. “If I were doing the highest quality work with lots of ink coverage, I wouldn’t be doing it on an eight-colour perfector, but for our type of work the quality is more than acceptable. Then any equipment purchase has to be supported by a business case over a pay back period of five years, which is a challenge. But the evaluation showed that we could achieve that.

“If we had gone down the B1 route, we would have to print and fold twice as many sheets. The B1 press will run faster, but not twice as fast at the KBA while if the B1 alternative is not perfecting, that is four times as much production from the larger format press.”

Digital was quickly rejected as an option, at least at the current level of demand and technology. Kelly is expected to be forecasting three years ahead, saying that “one is viable, years two and three are much less certain” adding: “Digital is good for 40 or 100 books, so it is still cheaper for us to print off 1,000 books and keep them in stock. But having said that there are lots of developments on digital web printing which I am trying to keep abreast of and to understand what it could do for our business. At present the quality is acceptable, the cost isn’t.”

This is without bringing into consideration the finishing issue, he adds. The large format sheets are folded on a highly automated Shoei folder, the first of its spec in the UK, chosen for its technical prowess and for the back-up support from Encore Machinery. It too had to go through the tough procurement process to earn its place on the shop floor. The UKHO is such a tight ship that Kelly cannot afford to have equipment waiting for a service engineer to call. The operation has its own maintenance teams and servicing is rigidly adhered to. “We have our own team for first line support and they have been trained on all equipment, including the ctp, but we need service support cover as well. The nature of the business is that with the daily demand for correction activity, we are in a situation where we can’t afford to wait if something goes down.”

Standards too are applied rigorously. When Kelly took over one of the first actions was to select a print standard to work to, settling on ISO 12647-2 well before any real work by Fogra and the likes. The company prints on a limited number of papers on the KBA, which allows it to run reels through a sheeter into the press, and to have density profiles for the different papers. As the press has Qualitronic and Densitronic controls, once the required density is reached, the technology will maintain the consistency. Kelly is now assessing whether this is the correct approach to take and whether after six years any modifications need to be made.

As with any commercial print business, the pace of change affecting UKHO’s print operation has not slowed. In the last year or so, Kelly has been talking with other similar operations in the UK: the army print operation at Feltham, the airforce unit at Northolt and Ordnance Survey in Southampton; discussing common issues and knowledge that can be shared going forwards.

The Taunton business has already considered placing remote printers with its agents around the world to allow them to print out charts on demand, but has ruled it out. The agents can make modifications to the charts they have in stock using transparent overlays of the changes printed in Taunton, but policing a true distribute and print operation cannot be done at present. There is the question of ensuring that all the information has been reproduced correctly because of knock-on liability issues, the matter of maintaining environmentally sensitive printers in the correct conditions and then the issue of controlling the number of print-outs of what are valuable products – each chart retailing for £20 on average.

It’s something that Kelly is going to be looking at again and again in future. For the moment, the set up works well. And the immediate issue is managing the move that’s on the horizon, a move that will take the print business into uncharted waters.