How do you maintain your profitability in the increasingly competitive print industry?

Lean printing shows the way ahead.

Intense competition, print prices going downhill, customers expecting more for less… can you relate to this scenario?

With basic print products becoming commoditized today, printers aim at differentiating themselves on the basis of quality and service. But providing great service at the cost of profitability is difficult.

Print buyers may want prices to be low without any compromise on the print quality. How do you ensure that your print buyers’ demands are fulfilled, your profit margins are safeguarded and the print quality is retained?

Discover “Lean Printing”!

Your print buyers increasing demands offer you the opportunity to tap into lean printing. Exploring lean printing will help you ensure quality, cut costs and maintain profitability. This becomes possible by maximizing efficiency throughout the company and minimizing wastage in every way.

Wastage is not just about raw materials or energy. There are numerous points of wastage in the print shop, across processes. Some forms of wastage being:

• Below standard production: This refers to the kind that your customer might refuse to pay for.
• Transportation: By not automating processes, many printers create wastage through unnecessary transportation of raw materials, both in and outside of the production setup.
• Waiting period: If production has to wait for some particular people, materials, information or another job, this is also a waste of time.
• Unnecessary processes: Several processes get developed to ensure quality. You need to check if all of them add value to the job at hand.
• Under or non-utilization of resources: This is a big issue, as every resource, be it people or equipment add to the cost.
• Undue movement: This is different from transportation wastage and involves unwarranted movement of people or other resources.

These might be some of the ways in which wastage frequently occurs in your print shop. To make your print shop more efficient, you need to prune wastage from all the points where it may be occurring. You need to create a printing eco-system that combines the best practices and processes, the most efficient equipment, and a set of well trained employees.

Heidelberg enables printers to create such a printing eco-system. We offer a range of equipment, consumables, workflow optimization software and training facilities to help reduce waste and raise productivity in a print shop.

Our integration solutions, like Prinect Integration Manager and Prinect S, help printers to optimize their processes and build speed and efficiency in the pressroom. Our range of Saphira Starter Kits consumables offers excellent value for money. Our presses, including the Speedmaster SX 102, Speedmaster XL 75, Speedmaster XL 106, Speedmaster XL 145 and Speedmaster XL 162, ensure maximum productivity and high quality. And in the post-press segment, Stahlfolder TH/KH, Stitchmaster ST 350 and Eurobind Pro help raise efficiency.

To find out more about our range of solutions for lean printing, visit: http://www.heidelberg.com/www/html/en/content/articles/solution/solutions_trends/lean_manufacturing