Everything Is Connected

In today’s modern production facilities, the seamless transfer of production and business information is used to drive fact based decisions to facilitate increased performance and profitability. The more information that can be used to drive downstream operations, the more efficient, repeatable and profitable companies can become.

What do we normally think of when considering the downstream benefits of a production workflow system? The first thing that comes to mind is the use of ink key settings that are transferred with a job number to the press, as is illustrated below. This transformed the effectiveness of make-readies, allowing presses to achieve target colors faster and with less waste and are now a standard procedure in production facilities.

How do we take this to the next level of productivity and consistency? While the example above can be achieved with all other prepress solutions, when Prinect is used in a production environment the number of presets increases significantly, as shown below. Uniquely presetting the press with more than 25 individual settings from prepress data, for example, makes it possible to automate make-ready tasks – improving  consistency and eliminating the cost-accumulating touches associated with them.

These savings add up rapidly. Cutting just two minutes of make-ready from a press with a budgeted hourly rate of $300 recovers $10 per make-ready. Multiply that by two make-readies per hour over two eight-hour shifts, and the savings add up to $320 per day. A two-shift plant operating on a five-day production schedule saves $1,600 per week and a total of $83,200 in a year.

Prinect is the only solution to have a ROI on the downstream activities.