Worth Knowing

Does “lean manufacturing” apply to digital printing?

Most people have heard of “lean manufacturing,” but they think of it in terms of mass production. Does it apply to digital printing? Well, no and yes.

“No,” because some lean manufacturing techniques are focused on repetitive manufacturing processes, such as those of an assembly line. That type of process is not a good match for the “job shop” nature of much of digital printing. In particular, most digital print runs are not long enough to benefit greatly from statistical process control during the course of the run.

But the question can also be answered “yes” to some degree. Let’s take a look at the Toyota Production System (TPS), the philosophy that was the source of much of what we call “lean manufacturing.” In TPS, problems are put into three categories which carry the Japanese names “muda,”  “mura,” and “muri.”

Muda. Muda means “waste,” and this has been the focus of much lean manufacturing activity in the US. Printers have tried to address this by reducing the number of sheets required to get an offset press up to color, for example. This analysis would not apply to a digital press, with little or no start-up waste.

But muda has a broader interpretation that includes problems that digital printers need to work on. For example, waiting for a proof to be approved is a form of waste—a waste of time rather than materials. Techniques like color-managed virtual proofing could address this waste. In some cases, providing higher quality than required for the application could be muda. Does your company strive to provide “offset quality” in products where the customer clearly isn’t interested in it? That is a type of muda.

Mura. Mura means unevenness. In the manufacturing context, it means a steady production flow and just-in-time receipt of raw materials. These concepts are harder to fit into many digital shops, but they can provide some useful insight. Look around your shop: what equipment and supplies do you see that are sitting around not being used? That’s a sign of mura. Do you have press checks, where a customer can delay or cancel a press run at the last minute? Mura again. Is there a resource in your shop which is often a bottleneck for getting jobs out? That’s mura too. A certain amount of mura may be inevitable in some printing environments, but some reduction is almost always possible.

Muri. Muri means “overburdening.” It occurs when a machine or a person is required to do more than is reasonable in a given time period. For example, a press operator who receives a file that does not print correctly may spend time trying to salvage the job instead of spending that time printing, thus putting subsequent steps (and subsequent jobs) behind schedule. Muri can often be addressed by setting a standard for the result of each process and making it the basis for beginning the step that follows.

We hope these examples make it clear that there is indeed a role for lean manufacturing principles in digital printing. We can’t get into the details in this post, but those of you attending PODi’s Application Forum (January 28-30, 2008, in Las Vegas) will be able to hear more in Rab Govil’s keynote presentation. Here’s a link for information about the conference: http://www.podi.org/events/index.php?mode=events_regcontent&menuid=3.1&direct=events_regcontent&eventid=59

What’s your web-to-print business strategy?

Getting involved with web-to-print technology involves making a lot of choices. The first (and most important) choice is deciding how web-to-print fits into your business strategy.

What are some examples of business strategies applied to web-to-print technology?

• Our goal is to build closer relationships with our customers. For that, you want a system that supports log-ins, catalogs of existing jobs, and approval processes over the web.
• Our goal is to make job processing more efficient. In that case, you’ll want to be sure that customer files can be automatically preflighted and passed on to your production system with little or no manual intervention.
• Our goal is to pick up lots of new customers from the Web. If that’s your goal, you’d better have good facilities for credit cards and instant quotes. (Be prepared to spend a lot on web advertising, too.)

Here’s an example of something that’s not a business strategy:

• One of our key customers wants to be able to submit jobs via the web. Yes, this is a reason for taking a closer look at web-to-print, but it is not a strategy. Until you figure out a strategy, your web-to-print efforts will flounder. You won’t know what you want, so you’ll end up with whatever your vendor thinks you might need.

Unfortunately, the majority of PSPs who are considering web-to-print are doing so because of customer pressure, not because it’s part of their strategy. If you’re in that category, now is the time to step back, consider where you are headed over the next few years, and then implement a web-to-print system that will help you get there.

Océ enters the high-speed inkjet market

Océ is going after the high-end transactional and direct mail printing markets and competing with Kodak Versamark and InfoPrint Solutions. Océ introduced a new high speed drop on demand ink jet press with Miyakoshi heads called the Jet Stream 1100 and 2200 (two engine configuration). Each engine runs at 500 fpm. So if you buy one engine you get 1080 images per minute and twice that with 2 engines. In the one engine mode you can run simplex or duplex. Duty cycle per engine is 33 million images per month. They are claiming terrific reliability—3000 hours of run time on the heads. Image quality is full 600x600 dpi and looks great at first glance, although samples are not yet available.

The press runs AFP/IPDS format with full data integrity now and will run Postscript and PDF shortly. The engine has the same operator interface as all other Océ print engines. One engine lists for $2.8 million and the twin configuration is $5.4 million.  For high volume users the operating costs are in the 1 to 2 cent per page range. Orders are being taken and shipments will begin in Q1 2008.

Web-to-print systems: are they all the same?

PODi has been surveying vendors of web-to-print systems with the goal of helping PODi members decide which systems are most appropriate for them. We sent 12 of the primary vendors a list of questions about the features of their systems, and then we analyzed their answers. Perhaps the biggest surprise was how little their answers differed.

Of course there are lots of differences in the details, and we don’t mean to minimize that, but it is striking how similar many of these systems are. Many basic features are shared by all of them.

For prospective buyers, there are two ways to look at this apparent similarity. One group of buyers, those who are looking for the best match for their situation, find they have to dig deeper into the details than they might have expected in order to uncover differences on which to base a purchase decision.

A second group of buyers have few special requirements and are just interested in finding an adequate solution for their needs. They find that many (or even most) systems on the market can support what they want to do, and they can choose a system based on factors other than features (factors such as customer support, size of installed base, the vendor’s financial strength, or—most typically—price). 

In other words, for many printers, web-to-print systems are becoming a commodity purchase, and that does not bode well for the vendors. When all the players at the low end of the market are included, there are almost 20 vendors competing for market share. Only a few of the largest will survive as general-purpose choices; the rest will need to find niches that they can serve better than the big boys. A market shake-out seems inevitable, and the majority of today’s web-to-print vendors will not survive as independent companies.

It’s annoying: “PURL” has been usurped by the computer people

Personalized landing pages and PURLs (which are Personalized URLs, the “addresses” of personalized landing pages) have garnered a lot of attention within the digital printing community and among marketing professionals. Just for kicks, to understand the extent to which the acronym has become part of our nomenclature, I typed PURLS into Google with interesting results. Although every pay-per-click ad was about a provider of the Personalized URL technology, the results list from the organic search part of Google was quite amusing. Reading the entries, all I could gather was that PURL could stand for either Persistant Uniform Resource Locator (which, according to purl.oclc.org, is a way to keep a permanent link to something whose URL might change) or something to do with yarn (for more details please refer to pixiepurl.com or www.frecklesandpurls.com). There is a surprising amount to learn about “purls” in the context of yarn, but (unless you’re a knitter) I would only recommend it to people who are insomniacs.

In any case, I think we have at least three confused audiences trying to figure out what the heck everybody else is talking about.  However, since the geeks or IT people (I say this with the utmost respect) have already cornered the market by getting the most important real estate which is a mention in Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_Uniform_Resource_Locator) and the first page of Google, I think we should give up the good fight and come up with a different name.

Here are some of my ideas (though I admit that none of them really grab me viscerally):

Personalized Page Locator (PPL)
Personalized Landing Page Locator (PLPL)
Personalized Page Identifier (PPI)
Variable Information Resource Locator (VIRL)
Single-user Page Identifier (SUPI)
Single-user Page Locator (SUPL)
Your Own Personalized Page Locator (YOPPL)

So that we do not lose these new acronyms to some other group of interlopers, I suggest we start staking out some territory on the World Wide Web by defining it. Here is the definition I would suggest.

Definition for what we currently call a “PURL”:

A unique identifier used as a response mechanism in a marketing campaign or other Web-based project. The identifier is structured like the URL of any page on the server, except that it has a personalized component that tells the server who is responding so that a suitable page with personalized contents can be served.

This blog entry was actually meant to be about best practices for designing landing pages, but it seems I have made a detour. I promise that the next post will actually be something useful about the above subject instead of night-time musings about acronyms.

In the meantime, please share any thoughts or ideas you have about what we should call this great tool!

Adding a personalized map to your variable direct mail piece

Personalized direct mail that targets consumers (B2C mailings) can often benefit from a personalized map. For example, a map on a personalized postcard or letter could show:

• the retail location(s) nearest the recipient
• the values of recently-sold homes near the recipient’s address
• the route to follow to get to a nearby car dealer

Variable-data software packages do not include mapping tools, so adding maps requires some additional programming.

There is intense interest these days in adding maps to Web sites, and that has resulted in a number of new services that provide maps for that application. The good news is that these services are relatively easy to use (although some programming is definitely required for the application we are discussing) and the cost is often low. The bad news is that they are focused on maps for Web display, and that means it will be up to you to determine whether you can convert these maps (mostly HTML) to a format suitable for the use you have in mind. Printed maps are just not on the radar screen of these services.

The main sources of web-oriented maps are:

Yahoo! Maps Web Services: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/

Google Maps for Enterprise:  http://www.google.com/enterprise/maps/

Microsoft MapPoint web service:  http://www.microsoft.com/mappoint/products/webservice/default.mspx

MapQuest Business Solutions: http://company.mapquest.com/mqbs/8.html

GIS tools. Mapping tools that are more compatible with print are available from the traditional suppliers of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The GIS vendors, however, are usually focused on systems to handle lots of information overlaid on a single geographic area (for example, a city’s system of utilities or the population density and traffic patterns in a county).  Still, their software can often be scripted or otherwise adapted to generate large numbers of simpler maps for printing.

Two  prominent GIS vendors are: MapInfo (www.mapinfo.com) and ESRI (www.esri.com).

Do you have ideas or experiences with variable maps that you would like to share? We welcome your comments!