Innovation has never been more important to the business success of a company. Without innovation there is little to distinguish one supplier from the next, except perhaps size and price, and without it a company can only shrink as it is left behind by others and finds its customers moving to more forward thinking printers.
The great conundrum is how to define innovation and how to acquire it and the competitive edge that it delivers. It used to be that the investment in a new machine would be enough, a press that was faster or more automated, or one that had six colours not four, or a digital press capable of single-copy printing. Ownership of any one of these is no longer an innovative step, but perhaps the minimum that is need to stay in the game. Digital printing is now so standard that it is just printing. There is innovation in digital finishing, with inkjet applied varnish, foiling and cutting tables. These are devices that enable innovation and are a good starting point. Though perhaps real innovation today might be possession of a 3D printer and finding an application for it.
Innovation is nebulous, hard to define and impossible almost to buy, particularly when pieces of metal no longer cut the mustard. This is why we are looking hard at innovation in this issue and will continue to do so.
To our mind innovation comes when three factors overlap: people, technology and the products or customers. People have the ideas, the technology helps to implement and enable them while the products and customers are needed to reward the innovation. Timing is also important. QR codes were an innovation a decade ago and have languished until recently. They are now ubiquitous.
Or take Canva. The Australian start up that is now valued at impossible to conceive of amounts. It is about easy to follow online design for cards, business cards and more. It is not the first business in this space, others have also introduced easy to use online design tools. But none has gone global in the way that Canva has. Is the killer factor the timing, when people are forced to work from home? Is it the people behind the business and the networks and experience that they have with Google and others? Is it the ability to adapt to include collaborative working – a feature of working via a browser, but oh so useful during lockdown?
All come together like the ingredients in a cake. The people element requires that staff have the confidence and the attitude to think beyond the existing process. Look at the need for apprentices. Most of the time printers specify a youngster for a specific job as it was perhaps a decade ago. With the speed that the industry is currently moving why would a job standing alongside a flexo press appeal? Yet that is what is frequently advertised. The future success of a business depends on attracting the right people and nurturing them. Hence there is a need for ongoing training, to train those too that are running the business, especially perhaps if they ‘have come up the hard way’.
Anyone that has participated in management training at a senior level will endorse this. They speak of new insights and a new awareness of how to manage and motivate people and the value of the support networks created.
In future the employee will figure out a way to do something themself. Relying on training someone to do one job, by explaining what buttons to press the end of a press or a folder, is no longer sufficient. The number of jobs printers cope with each day is growing fast, runs are shorter and turnarounds quicker. This deluge is impossible to manage using tools that have been honed over the previous 50 years. Innovation is required and it will come from those doing the job, if properly equipped to think and supported to come up with ideas.
The need for technology is obvious. But it does not always have to be the fastest and most automated machine on the market. That will depend on the nature of the customers and applications the business has. However, there needs to be automation from order received to job produced and delivered in order to create the space for changes to the way that the job is done. It is difficult to find that space to think from the bottom of a pile of paperwork, proofs, job tickets and phone messages asking about where the client’s job is. This can all be assigned to technology and should be.
The data collected can equally be mined for insights into which jobs work best, which processes are popular and which materials are least troublesome. Information like this is fuel for innovation.
In future there will be more opportunity to use robotics. This too is an essential technology to understand and if feasible, to implement. Robotic arms are starting to come into the pallet loading process after folding, relieving operators of the strain of moving tonnes of paper each day. There will be more robot vehicles to move those pallets to the next production task and to move jobs from one piece of machinery to the next, particularly in finishing areas. Heidelberg and Koenig & Bauer have innovative robotic systems to move plates from the plate room into position on press.
It is perhaps too rich for the vast majority of printers in its current form, but the seeds of an idea are there. Plate changing was once for only a very few companies and an expensive gimmick for the majority. Few now would be able to change plates with lock up keys and inching mechanisms.
Use the technology to minimise the repetitive and mundane work that people are asked to do. Technology can minimise errors, raise productivity and allow people to think about ways to deploy the next round of technology and automation in creative ways. At Enfocus the company suggests rolling out a simple implementation of Switch to begin with. This provides the results and feeds back into the next more sophisticated workflow process to be automated. And so the virtuous circle goes upwards, leading to the differentiation and the margins that printers require.
Understanding the technology external to print has always been important, but rarely more so than in the current age. The speed at which IT is moving means that a company with what was a perfectly serviceable computer network ten years ago finds it is now hopelessly out of date. It is more about the myriad applications and tools that populate the IT universe than the operating system chosen.
Cloud watching, in the technology rather than meteorological or whimsical sense, is crucial. IT is moving to the cloud, consequently it is where the innovations are to be found.
And it is where customers are to be found, whether large businesses that want to integrate seamlessly with their suppliers or individuals that want to interact directly, and via the worldwide web, with printers that can make real a design or product that they have developed.
The pandemic period has really brought home how important print is, how humans love the tangibility of print, its haptic possibilities, its absolute benign-ness. But just as much as people have always loved print, they have always hated printers. Printers are up there with dentists, plumbers and builders. Nobody knows what the job will cost, what the quality of work will be, how to go about specifying what is wanted and everyone discovers that the estimate has only a tangental relationship with the final bill.
The greatest innovation in recent years has been the rise of online print. For the simple reason that it takes away all the fears that people have when dealing with printers. A website never sucks in through its teeth. As a result people are producing more and more printed items. What may have started with a set of business cards, a birthday card for Auntie Sarah and a photobook, is now encompassing a book of granddad’s memories, posters, banners and flyers for the school fete, and labels for homemade chutney to sell at the village farmer’s market.
At the same time companies and designers who have bought print for decades are wanting print with a greater impact than the catalogue that was first produced in 1990. This is an opportunity for an innovative printer to come up with a different approach as, say, Latcham has done. The result can be something more relevant to the end consumer, that is more appropriate and which engenders a stronger bond between the end consumer and supplier, and in turn, we hope, engenders a stronger bond between that company and the printer. The printer is no longer a commodity provider chosen mainly on price.
And there is no sign of the online tide stopping. Investors are continuing to pour millions of dollars into companies that are supporting new printed and personalised experiential products. The prize may go also to those businesses that can execute the products that these selling companies create. It’s a joined up world and printers need to join.
For this reason Dectek is aiming at luxury packaging, using spot varnish and foils to enhance a boxed gift; Actega’s EcoLeaf technology enables something similar, currently for labels, but in future who knows? These are applications that are innovative because they did not and could not have existed before.
Nor would they exist now if it had not been for the powerful combination of the people with new ideas, the technology that fertilises these ideas and enables the ideas and products to grow and the customers that are ready to buy. This is innovation at work. This is where the future for print lies.
Innovation is the map to the future
Innovation has never been more important to the business success of a company. Without innovation there is little to distinguish one supplier from the next, except perhaps size and price, and without it a company can only shrink as it is left behind by others and finds its customers moving to more forward thinking printers.
The great conundrum is how to define innovation and how to acquire it and the competitive edge that it delivers. It used to be that the investment in a new machine would be enough, a press that was faster or more automated, or one that had six colours not four, or a digital press capable of single-copy printing. Ownership of any one of these is no longer an innovative step, but perhaps the minimum that is need to stay in the game. Digital printing is now so standard that it is just printing. There is innovation in digital finishing, with inkjet applied varnish, foiling and cutting tables. These are devices that enable innovation and are a good starting point. Though perhaps real innovation today might be possession of a 3D printer and finding an application for it.
Innovation is nebulous, hard to define and impossible almost to buy, particularly when pieces of metal no longer cut the mustard. This is why we are looking hard at innovation in this issue and will continue to do so.
To our mind innovation comes when three factors overlap: people, technology and the products or customers. People have the ideas, the technology helps to implement and enable them while the products and customers are needed to reward the innovation. Timing is also important. QR codes were an innovation a decade ago and have languished until recently. They are now ubiquitous.
Or take Canva. The Australian start up that is now valued at impossible to conceive of amounts. It is about easy to follow online design for cards, business cards and more. It is not the first business in this space, others have also introduced easy to use online design tools. But none has gone global in the way that Canva has. Is the killer factor the timing, when people are forced to work from home? Is it the people behind the business and the networks and experience that they have with Google and others? Is it the ability to adapt to include collaborative working – a feature of working via a browser, but oh so useful during lockdown?
All come together like the ingredients in a cake. The people element requires that staff have the confidence and the attitude to think beyond the existing process. Look at the need for apprentices. Most of the time printers specify a youngster for a specific job as it was perhaps a decade ago. With the speed that the industry is currently moving why would a job standing alongside a flexo press appeal? Yet that is what is frequently advertised. The future success of a business depends on attracting the right people and nurturing them. Hence there is a need for ongoing training, to train those too that are running the business, especially perhaps if they ‘have come up the hard way’.
Anyone that has participated in management training at a senior level will endorse this. They speak of new insights and a new awareness of how to manage and motivate people and the value of the support networks created.
In future the employee will figure out a way to do something themself. Relying on training someone to do one job, by explaining what buttons to press the end of a press or a folder, is no longer sufficient. The number of jobs printers cope with each day is growing fast, runs are shorter and turnarounds quicker. This deluge is impossible to manage using tools that have been honed over the previous 50 years. Innovation is required and it will come from those doing the job, if properly equipped to think and supported to come up with ideas.
The need for technology is obvious. But it does not always have to be the fastest and most automated machine on the market. That will depend on the nature of the customers and applications the business has. However, there needs to be automation from order received to job produced and delivered in order to create the space for changes to the way that the job is done. It is difficult to find that space to think from the bottom of a pile of paperwork, proofs, job tickets and phone messages asking about where the client’s job is. This can all be assigned to technology and should be.
The data collected can equally be mined for insights into which jobs work best, which processes are popular and which materials are least troublesome. Information like this is fuel for innovation.
In future there will be more opportunity to use robotics. This too is an essential technology to understand and if feasible, to implement. Robotic arms are starting to come into the pallet loading process after folding, relieving operators of the strain of moving tonnes of paper each day. There will be more robot vehicles to move those pallets to the next production task and to move jobs from one piece of machinery to the next, particularly in finishing areas. Heidelberg and Koenig & Bauer have innovative robotic systems to move plates from the plate room into position on press.
It is perhaps too rich for the vast majority of printers in its current form, but the seeds of an idea are there. Plate changing was once for only a very few companies and an expensive gimmick for the majority. Few now would be able to change plates with lock up keys and inching mechanisms.
Use the technology to minimise the repetitive and mundane work that people are asked to do. Technology can minimise errors, raise productivity and allow people to think about ways to deploy the next round of technology and automation in creative ways. At Enfocus the company suggests rolling out a simple implementation of Switch to begin with. This provides the results and feeds back into the next more sophisticated workflow process to be automated. And so the virtuous circle goes upwards, leading to the differentiation and the margins that printers require.
Understanding the technology external to print has always been important, but rarely more so than in the current age. The speed at which IT is moving means that a company with what was a perfectly serviceable computer network ten years ago finds it is now hopelessly out of date. It is more about the myriad applications and tools that populate the IT universe than the operating system chosen.
Cloud watching, in the technology rather than meteorological or whimsical sense, is crucial. IT is moving to the cloud, consequently it is where the innovations are to be found.
And it is where customers are to be found, whether large businesses that want to integrate seamlessly with their suppliers or individuals that want to interact directly, and via the worldwide web, with printers that can make real a design or product that they have developed.
The pandemic period has really brought home how important print is, how humans love the tangibility of print, its haptic possibilities, its absolute benign-ness. But just as much as people have always loved print, they have always hated printers. Printers are up there with dentists, plumbers and builders. Nobody knows what the job will cost, what the quality of work will be, how to go about specifying what is wanted and everyone discovers that the estimate has only a tangental relationship with the final bill.
The greatest innovation in recent years has been the rise of online print. For the simple reason that it takes away all the fears that people have when dealing with printers. A website never sucks in through its teeth. As a result people are producing more and more printed items. What may have started with a set of business cards, a birthday card for Auntie Sarah and a photobook, is now encompassing a book of granddad’s memories, posters, banners and flyers for the school fete, and labels for homemade chutney to sell at the village farmer’s market.
At the same time companies and designers who have bought print for decades are wanting print with a greater impact than the catalogue that was first produced in 1990. This is an opportunity for an innovative printer to come up with a different approach as, say, Latcham has done. The result can be something more relevant to the end consumer, that is more appropriate and which engenders a stronger bond between the end consumer and supplier, and in turn, we hope, engenders a stronger bond between that company and the printer. The printer is no longer a commodity provider chosen mainly on price.
And there is no sign of the online tide stopping. Investors are continuing to pour millions of dollars into companies that are supporting new printed and personalised experiential products. The prize may go also to those businesses that can execute the products that these selling companies create. It’s a joined up world and printers need to join.
For this reason Dectek is aiming at luxury packaging, using spot varnish and foils to enhance a boxed gift; Actega’s EcoLeaf technology enables something similar, currently for labels, but in future who knows? These are applications that are innovative because they did not and could not have existed before.
Nor would they exist now if it had not been for the powerful combination of the people with new ideas, the technology that fertilises these ideas and enables the ideas and products to grow and the customers that are ready to buy. This is innovation at work. This is where the future for print lies.
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