EFI FEATURE — PART II

EFI ARE YOU GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR DIGITAL PRESS INVESTMENT? — PART II

By John Henze of EFI

In Part One of this article (visit, p18, QPP September 2022), we covered some of the business challenges the industry is facing today and reported on feedback we received during a recent survey of printing companies like yours. We also explained how an effective DFE such as EFI Fiery can help prepress departments be more productive and profitable.

In Part Two, we take a look at how EFI Fiery helps make production more efficient and the importance of on-going training for your staff in ensuring continuing improvement over time.

Here, we start with one of the operations most in demand from printing companies, variable data printing, that can also be error prone and very time consuming. Let’s see how EFI Fiery can help change that, as well as explore other tools and capabilities spanning the production process. VARIABLE DATA PRINTING

Get personalised jobs out faster with Fiery VDP processing technology. Whether you need to produce a simple direct mail postcard project or a complex crossmedia campaign, Fiery technology ensures that your VDP jobs will process quickly and accurately, satisfy your customers’ demands and meet tight deadlines. In fact, you can RIP VDP jobs two to 50 times faster than other digital front ends. During the recent survey we conducted among printing companies, we were surprised at how many leave VDP production in prepress, sending extremely large files to the RIP which take a long time to process. In these instances, each personalised version is its own PDF file with images and other variables included. With Fiery VDP tools, images and other objects that are reused are only RIPed once and then cached for future use, significantly reducing file size and processing time.

colour issues in the first place? How much time and material would that save? That respondent admitted this was likely due to lack of knowledge and that perhaps they should look into how to better manage colour!

Fiery colour management tools give you maximum control over colour quality. ICC-based colour management technology is integrated in every Fiery server and works directly with advanced controls in Fiery Command WorkStation. Fiery Color Profiler Suite is integrated with the Fiery server to create best in class ICC output profiles for each substrate in a few simple steps. Fiery JobExpert adds intelligent automation technology which saves your staff valuable production minutes in job setup time by automatically choosing the right colour and imaging settings based on elements in the PDF file. It enables less experienced staff to produce optimal output like a pro.

One large in-plant noted, “Fiery is definitely a better solution. We take our colour to extreme levels and Fiery was a better fit in that regard than other options we looked at.”

PROCESSING

This was an area we found quite interesting as we spoke to printing companies for this research. The natural inclination for many companies is to combine their new digital printer with the least expensive option. While this has a short term benefit, it can have long term ramifications that significantly diminish productivity. The embedded servers have less processing power than external servers; and as files get more complex, processing time increases, reducing throughput on the printer.

As a technical support professional at one of the print franchises explained, “What I have found is the one time initial cost of an upgraded Fiery is well worth the investment because of the impact on labour. When you use embedded, it takes a lot of time to RIP or open for preview or do modifications. The impact for that time for labour is devastating. I tell everyone, people are one of your highest costs. If you can make a one time investment to save you time that’s what you should do.” This franchise organisation recommends making that one time investment in the most powerful Fiery DFE available for the chosen press.

FINISHING

Most modern finishing equipment can be automatically set up by reading barcodes. Fiery Impose templates can include barcodes and registration marks recognisable by finishing equipment from a wide range of suppliers. These instruct the finisher on how to position its blades, cutters, and creasers to finish the document appropriately. There is no question that the most expensive waste is in the Bindery, and quickly and accurately setting up equipment can minimise that waste.

GETTING UP TO SPEED

We’re all busy these days; taking time out to sit through training seems like it can be put off till employees have more time. But that is a mistake. As we have discussed here, just taking advantage of the tools that come standard with Fiery can save a great deal of time and labour. But only if staff is aware of them and knows how to use them effectively. As one of our survey respondents recommended, “The best way for an owner or manager to get people to take advantage of the resources is to challenge your operator on a task, and through task execution they educate themselves, and they will have to read to do that. It has a real end game to it. It will make their life easier and learning to achieve a specific task tends to stay with a person longer than if they are just randomly reading training materials.”

Another respondent stated, “When we installed our digital press, the technician spent six hours training us on Fiery and the press, and we still only knew about 50% of what it all could do.” This reinforces the need for on-going investments in training, both to increase staff knowledge base and to keep up with new features and capabilities. It’s not a one and done thing.

Yet another respondent compared Fiery to Adobe PDF, saying, “A PDF is a PDF. It’s an industry standard. The same applies to EFI Fiery.”

In almost all cases, our respondents noted that regardless of which manufacturer they acquired their printer from, one of the benefits of Fiery is that operators are already familiar with it and the learning curve is minimal. Many, in fact, stated that having a Fiery DFE is a requirement for any digital printer investment, both because of the benefits it brings, and because staff does not need to learn an entirely new interface. As one owner said, “Once I understood how to use Fiery, it was pretty much a no-brainer to keep the same system.”

There are a great number of resources available online through EFI, especially our EFI Communities page and our Learning@EFI (learning.efi.com) training offerings. Every business has promising people who lack the skills to move ahead. But on the job training can disrupt production and take time from existing operators. Learning@EFI has a variety of ways to make it easy and quick to train existing staff or new hires to meet your needs.

With over 400 educational resources, Learning@EFI includes short express videos and how to guides focused on key Fiery features or processes, webinars that cover in-depth concepts such as optimising workflows and improving print quality through colour management, and e-learning courses that provide comprehensive learning on Fiery products,

All these learning tools help develop skillset and increase productivity. Best of all, these materials can be accessed anytime, anywhere on our learning platform so print professionals can learn at their convenience. www.efi.com