Williams Lea Tag is rolling out a cloud-based colour management tool for brands to control the print result of brand colours regardless of the print technology used and regardless of location.
Tag Colour Connect is launching first in Europe before moving across the remainder of Tag’s production network. It enables brands to monitor reproduction of their brand colours via a cloud application, saving time and the time and cost of passing jobs on press.
Printers load the numerical data from printed work into the cloud application where it is deemed to meet the requirements or to have fallen short. Once on target the job is released and produced. If the service provider has relevant on press systems, Heidelberg Inpress Control for example, data can be taken directly from the press.
Scott Barclay, head of strategic sourcing EMEA for Williams Lea Tag, says: “Tag Colour Connect also benefits our print partners by connecting them to global quality programmes, aligning to industry standards or the clients’ unique guidelines and providing access to robust analytical and reporting tools to demonstrate their efficiency and expertise.”
Profiles are set for the different processes and the materials that can be used by the client, covering marketing collateral and extending into packaging. A PMS referral is not enough says Barclay because the same reference will print differently on different substrates and with different technologies. “Colour consistency is critical for clients,” he says. Pantone GoLive addresses some of these issues but does not cover process colours.
“We can match any colour or print standard,” he continues, “so if we are running a campaign and set a standard for reproduction, we can offer the client consistent quality whether printed in New York, London or Hong Kong.”
Suppliers are measured against the Williams Lea benchmark and if the job meets these within the limits of the set delta variations, the printer gets the go ahead to run the job. There is little cost as the cloud is used to run the application. It also allows a client to log in and monitor job progress in real time.
The application has been tested and refined over the last 18 months says Barclay, who joined Williams Lea Tag following the collapse of Paperlinx earlier this year. “It has been trialled in the UK. Now we taking it to Europe and then to North America and Asia-Pacific,” he explains. “We have talked to fmcs brands, to publishers and across many different sectors. We don’t believe it needs to be limited to any one particular sector. And we can see how it can be applied to packaging materials.
“It is on a voluntary basis for our suppliers at the moment. Most have welcomed the idea andean see the benefits to them as well as the benefits for the clients. It will bring real value to clients and we think it will be a real differentiator in the market place.”
Williams Lea Tag is introducing a cloud based system to monitor colour remotely and ensure that customer jobs are reproduced accurately regardless of process and where they are printed.
