How the Bigger Get Better II
October 2001
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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."
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."
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