Print Innovation Asia Issue 10 2021
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Getting the best out of inkjet th To remain competitive in today’s print production market, commercial printers need to be agile and adapt to the ongoing changes being driven predominantly by the impact of digital transformation and accelerated by the pandemic.
Canon iX-series
The increase in digitally driven ondemand printing, combined with the uptake in online ordering, has multiplied the number of print jobs at lower volumes that a print service provider (PSP) must manage and produce. In fact, according to Keypoint Intelligence research, the average number of monthly print orders received by European PSPs in 2020 surpassed 3,500 – that’s 117 per day. Meeting customer demands for the progressively faster turnaround of these shorter run jobs requires the right print production processes and technology, which means some form of digital production printer. And with the quality, flexibility, productivity and
Steve Ford, Managing Director, Production Printing Asia, Canon Singapore
cost efficiency of high-speed inkjet presses now recognised as being sufficiently mature to merit investment, more and more PSPs are adopting the technology. One such company is CB, the leading distributor of books in The Netherlands. The production manager Dave Van’t Wout comments on the value digital inkjet has provided, “Digital brings enormous benefits. With offset, you produce separate sheets that then go through a production chain, from folding, gathering and sewing before a book is completely finished. Digitally printed books are created so swiftly. With digital print technology, you can have a finished book within five minutes – that’s the beauty of it.” But a digital inkjet press in isolation is
Philip Chew, Director, Regional Commercial Printing, Canon Singapore
not a silver bullet and such an investment may necessitate a complete rethink and a re-engineering of a business’s production processes, especially if your business has not previously embraced digital printing on any level. There are lots of opportunities to achieve greater operational efficiencies, reduce costs and enter new markets with digital inkjet, but there are also a lot of variables to consider. However, anyone with experience of running a manufacturing operation understands the challenges of keeping an operation running efficiently and maximising the efficiencies of production. To identify areas where processes could be improved, manufacturing managers regularly carry out an analysis of the 4Ms – manpower, method, machine, and materials – the most important factors involved in the production process. In taking this approach, it’s clear that being “lean” is not just about a single piece of equipment or software, but is really about looking at all variables within the operation, at how people are behaving as much as how well equipment is performing. As most industrial manufacturing lines have already done, print production lines are optimising more and more of the processes involved by automating them with software or machinery that requires minimal or
