How the Bigger Get Better II

At prepress trade shop Southern Graphic Systems, "to measure is to know."

by Terri McConnell, Prepress Editor

Last December, I was tickled to see Denny McGee—a man named one of the 1990s' "ten most influential people in the packaging industry"—address a room full of his peers with a giant piece of cheese on his head. McGee, hosting the Educator Seminar Series, was playfully hammering home the point that someone has been messing around with the printing food chain. Markets are moving, demands are changing, and we can't expect to find our profits in the same place we found them yesterday.

No single group of printing service providers understands this uncomfortable reality more than prepress trade shops and separators. Since the late 1970s, these companies have been learning and relearning a new maze every few years in their attempt to find the elusive cheese. Whereas the fundamental product of printers—ink on substrate—has remained relatively unchanged, trade shops have gone from selling type galleys, drum scans, and film to a wholly different marketplace of PDF files, laser imaged plates, and digital asset management systems. Those trade shops that have survived, that is.

Indispensable resources

One such survivor is Southern Graphic Systems (SGS). Founded in Louisville, KY, in 1946 and purchased by Reynolds Metals in 1958, who was in turn acquired last year by multinational ALCOA; SGS has been snapping the traps for annual revenues of $200 million US. And where is all that cheese coming from? From 1,300 employees working at 12 gravure cylinder engraving facilities, 13 flexo imaging facilities, and 24 offset imaging facilities all over North America.

Says SGS Corporate Director of Technology and Innovation, Gary Bernier, "Today, our most important product is probably the support work we do with printers—the onsite consulting services, the press fingerprinting, and the way we help them establish baseline print standards for repeatability."

According to Bernier, image carriers that produce the best results are manufactured with a complete accounting of all printing variables. "When we make a set of separations and plates, we're factoring in impression, densities, trap, press speed, ink viscosity, etc. It's important the press actually runs under those conditions. If not, our separation process becomes a liability because we're trying to hit a moving target."

"When we can't get a fingerprint, the proof becomes the target. But there is so much more cost involved for the printer that way. Invariably he will spend extra time in make-ready, and waste more substrate and ink, than if we'd taken a few hours ahead of time to get a snapshot of press conditions. When we know how a given ink set and substrate are going to react, we can make separations and plates that come up to color quicker and represent the proof better."

When a printer won't, or simply can't afford to invest in a preliminary fingerprint, then SGS operators can refer to a very extensive database of information gathered through legacy jobs. "We can scan the historical information about jobs of a similar profile—say a flexo-printed poly bag of medium quality printed with 300 line anilox rolls—and make some reasonable assumptions about how the job should be treated."

According to Bernier, taking those kinds of shortcuts is much easier, and the results are more predictable with offset print jobs. Flexo jobs, primarily because of the vast range of substrates employed, are the most challenging to prepare on the basis of past experience. Gravure, says Bernier, falls somewhere in between, depending on the application. In this area the enormous size of SGS's operations constitutes an inherent technological advantage. The more jobs logged into the database, the more accurate the "standard" profiles are likely to be.

Digital traffic control

The substantial number and location of SGS sites is also strategically important to order input and delivery. It allows the company to provide graphic services physically close to the designer and/or brand manager, while building the image carriers as close as possible to the printer.

Keeping all sites digitally connected is mandatory for maintaining this level of flexibility. A high speed Wide Area Network extends across all SGS facilities and serves as a major highway for two kinds of traffic. In the first place, production employees may be given special privileges to retrieve critical information from SGS's robust print process database, such as ICC profiles or gamma curves associated with a job.

As well, the WAN is accessible on a limited basis to external partners so that they may retrieve their own proprietary image data. "Clearly, the trade shop is in the best position to supply digital asset management," he says, "because we're the entry and exit point for digital art used in the manufacturing process."

Bernier explains SGS doesn't believe, however, a "one size fits all" DAM system exists today. He cautions launching a DAM effort can become very complicated, very fast. "We're using three, and soon to be four, systems for managing assets from a simple local level to an enterprise wide level. Some of our customers merely want a simple structural die database; others just need access to photographic or line art branding graphics; still others want all of the above plus the finished files. And they may want sophisticated query options for analyzing deeply embedded production data. In all cases, we have to implement strict controls for security and confidentiality."

Technology task force

SGS has already opened its Intranet to the external world for the purposes of data transfer and remote approval and collaboration. Explains Bernier, "We employ a number of file transfer systems and communications packages, though Mass Transit has proven to be the most secure and reliable over our Wide Area Network. From my desktop, for instance, I can see all the nodes (customer and SGS online facilities) and move 300 MB files to or from any location in seconds."

The advantage of using a remote approval and collaboration system is that all key people in the production chain can view print images and share ideas throughout the entire manufacturing process. Potential problems can be identified and corrected in the early design stage, thereby speeding up overall turnaround times.

The engineering and testing of these systems falls on Bernier's Technology and Innovation Group. Seven highly skilled, full time technicians bustle around SGS's laboratory in Newport, KY. It's a Hammacher Schlemmer showroom of alpha, beta, and even pre-alpha products from virtually every premier supplier to the industry.

Prior to full commercialization, the T&I Group evaluates hardware and software from companies like Agfa, Barco Graphics, Daetwyler, DuPont, Oracle, PCC-Artwork Systems, Realtime Image, and X-Rite to discover the distinct benefits of each. Explains Bernier, "A customer can visit our lab and see four different stripping platforms, or three different color management systems, and we can demonstrate the advantages of each for their specific workflows."

Concludes Bernier, "SGS is here to problem solve and develop new strategies for improving the packaging printing process. We have a huge commitment to technology of course, but it's still people who manage that process."