He presses the green button for ‘go’ and then the red button for ‘stop’ when he’s run out of sheets. Then he collects a couple of freshly laminated pieces... and shows them to his dad.

Harry is just 10 years old. His Saturday-morning lesson in how to follow in dad John Gilmore’s footsteps is evidence, claims the managing director of laminator and UV coater manufacturer Autobond, that operating some finishing machines is now so easy it’s child’s play.

"We try to design things from an operator’s view," says Gilmore. "We export to 160 countries and the skill levels across them differ vastly, so it’s important to make machines as simple to use as possible."

Autobond is certainly not alone in the green-button revolution. As technological progress marches on, printing machines, from the simplest of cutters and creasers to the most sophisticated of litho presses, are becoming increasingly automated. Gone are the days when an operator had to know which screw did what in order to get a decent result out of a machine.

But is enabling people to get results without having to know a great deal about their kit, necessarily a straightforward case of progress? Wounded pride in the face of redundant skills aside, some would argue that training a generation of pressroom staff to push buttons rather than print is unwise. This is certainly the feeling that David Henningham, owner of trade finisher Dalston Bloc, has on the matter.

"People don’t know enough about the machine they’re using now," he says. "They’ll say ‘Oh it doesn’t do that’ but you know full well it does and that you could do it in front of them very easily. But they don’t want to hear that sort of thing; they have their green button and they don’t want to know anything beyond that."

Andreas Schillinger, managing director of Muller Martini, agrees that increased automation can have the unfortunate side-effect of decreased familiarity with kit.

"We often find that people just use the very superficial functions of machines and don’t delve deeper into what can be done," he reports, saying that printers should be careful not to be lulled into a false sense of security by user-friendly technology, with the result that staff training is sidelined.

Trained staff move on
"Sometimes it happens that the training operators are given is just not good enough," he reports. "This will be because a printer has changed staff without retraining them, so the people we trained will move on and suddenly you see the production deteriorating because the overall understanding hasn’t been built yet or passed along."

The result, Schillinger explains, is a lower quality, less innovative offering and, with staff less aware of the need to carry our regular maintenance procedures and less able to service the machines themselves, increased downtime.

To rely completely on unskilled labour to operate most finishing and printing machines would seem, then, to be a bad idea, particularly in a climate where more than ever printers need to differentiate themselves with the originality of their offerings and of course fast turnaround times, unmarred by downtime.

Autobond’s Gilmore would counter this by saying that printers simply need to differentiate between machines that will benefit from someone experienced enough to experiment with new ways of running them, and those that will produce the same result no matter who is pressing the buttons.

Many finishing machines, Gilmore says, fit this latter mould, and so offer the ideal opportunity for printers to populate their pressrooms more economically, with people cross-trained to run several different machines.

"I know a man in the West Country who runs two machines, a laminator and a die cutter, at once," he says. "That’s a clever business strategy as the more you can multi-task, the more valuable your operator is."

Tony Lock, managing director of Duplo UK, agrees that a new breed of finishing machines has emerged that genuinely doesn’t require that much skill to operate, and that the advantage is intelligent division of labour.

"What clever printers are doing is focusing their experts on real value added stuff," he explains. "So they’re taking away the need for skill in the guillotining, creasing and cutting, and focusing it on the more innovative stuff, like intricate hand-finishing or hardback binding."

But while this strategy might be all very well for a green-button finishing machine, you might counter that the actual printing side of things is a whole different ball game. Surely, some would argue, the complex art of printing is an area where, apart from in the case of the simplest green-button Xerox and Konica Minolta machines, any decline in operator prowess will quickly become all too apparent.

This is not necessarily so, says Phil Smith, operations manager at AJS Labels. "We tend to go for printing machines that will produce higher quality, innovative results, but the way technology has developed has also gone hand-in-hand with reducing the number of skills needed to operate the presses," he reports.

This is the case with both AJS’s flexo and digital machines, says Smith, dispelling the myth that a greater level of printing and particularly mechanical expertise will necessarily always be required on the more traditional processes.

The example of ESP Colour backs this up. Operators with years of experience of tinkering with machines aren’t needed for ESP’s highly automated Heidelberg Speedmaster XL litho set-up, explains managing director Anthony Thirlby.

"We batch all of our paper weights together," he explains. "If we change anything it’s normally on pre-defined shifts on a Tuesday and Thursday which allows us to ensure we get the same output regardless of the skills of the minder."

Printers can now afford to employ less highly skilled minders, adds production print director at Ricoh UK Stephen Palmer, because most of the work is now done on the pre-press side of things.

"The skills needed are really understanding the workflow and the front end of the machine, the RIP or the controller, being able to pre-flight the jobs properly, prepare them, manage colour, understanding the variations on the stocks and selecting the right settings," he says.

But other staff also need a firm grasp of the software they’re using, say Smith and Thirlby, explaining that taking advantage of new technological developments is not simply a case of deskilling the pressroom. While these skills won’t necessarily take as many years to develop and might be considered less advanced than the ability to tweak a press mechanically, computer knowhow and an aptitude for a production line environment are now key.

And this applies throughout the printing operation, says Muller Martini’s Schillinger.

"People need more of a production line mentality now rather than a mechanical one," he says, explaining that both the simple finishing equipment as described by Gilmore and Lock, but also complicated finishing kit which would once have entailed lots of tinkering with weights and Allen keys to operate, now require a different outlook.

"You don’t necessarily need a high level of knowledge about binding processes – for example – any longer," he says. "You need logistics around your lines to be well organised so you can present the product at the right time for quick changeovers."

When skills are a hindrance
In fact being well-versed in traditional, engineering-orientated printing skills can actually be more of a hindrance than a help in some scenarios, says Thirlby.

"Our staff will have a better skillset for our operation than someone who has been in the industry for years and is used to interfering with the machine all the time," he reports.

AJS Label’s Smith agrees. "It can be disadvantageous to have someone with a mechanical mentality because when there’s an issue they tend to look at the nuts and bolts of the machine first rather than the electronics," he says.

But this shift in pressroom skills begs the question of what happens when the mechanics of a piece of kit, still very much present under the machine’s slick chassis, do go wrong.

Green-button technology and its attendant deskilling or reskilling has to go hand-in-hand with strong service support, explains Duplo’s Lock.

"You do need to have the service support to make this set-up work," he says. "And you need machines to be more reliable than they’ve ever been before.  Maybe 15 years ago, some complex, automated machinery had the potential to be unreliable but, as we’ve moved to a servo motor, electronic world, I think the reliability has moved on a long way too."

Printers may want, then, to do as Thirlby has done, creating a set-up where Heidelberg engineers can dial in remotely to resolve around 75% of issues.

Or they will need to follow AJS Labels’ example and keep those with engineering know-how still close at hand. "With both our flexo and digital presses, if everything’s running smoothly, and everything’s prepared properly, then it becomes a less skilled job, but you need your best operators when something goes wrong," he says. "So we’ve taken the most mechanically highly skilled guy off the standard shift pattern so he is more available across the other shifts."

But while this resolves the issue of how to avoid increased downtime through changing the nature of your printroom skillset, this highly automated, production mindset still won’t be suitable for every kind of printing, warns Thirlby.

ESP’s strategy, of offering a certain number of popular formats within very quick turnaround times, is quite niche he says. And it is a very different strategy to a printer like Geoff Neal Litho for example, which focuses on producing innovative print solutions on a wide range of substrates for high-end, often fine art, clients.

"I believe that there are two distinct areas coming through in print," agrees MD Sam Neal. "You’ve got cheap-and-cheerful printing and people who narrow their market sector to 115–170g, A-sized brochures, and do those to a good standard. Then you’ve got companies like ours where, one minute, we’re running the highest quality silk art paper going, the next, 100 micron folding boxboard. Chopping and changing all day every day like this takes much more skill."

Skills add up to quality
For Neal, experience and mechanical skills still have an important role to play in enabling such a flexible and quality-focused operation. For him, just because once complex machinery has become automated enough for the likes of AJS and ESP to use in operations where fewer production-type skills are utilised, this doesn’t mean every printer should jump at the chance to deskill.

"We have a Konica Minolta mono laser machine, which can be run in a fairly simple way to produce a clean sharp result without any background tints," he says. "There’s a place for that and that’s absolutely fine. But if you want to be in a marketplace where you’ve got top-end clients asking ‘can you make this a bit punchier, a bit stronger, a bit warmer, make this guy look a bit healthier’, that requires an enormous amount of skill on the minders’ part."

Whether a printer deskills or recruits different skills to certain areas of their workforce should depend, then, not on whether the technology it has invested in allows this, but whether this would suit its overall strategy as a business.

"A lot of people try to get into certain areas of the trade but don’t realise that you can’t choose a strategy half-heartedly," confirms ESP’s Thirlby. "You have to ensure you have the investment plan behind your business model and the conviction to follow it through."

The rise of the fully automated printing and finishing machine should, then, mean very different things for different people. For some it will facilitate a straightforward deskilling of certain areas, for others a switch to a software and production-orientated mentality right across the board.

For another group, it will allow their still precious print experts to carry on as before, benefitting from increased automation but still tweaking their machines to get very specific results.

It is this latter group that will need to be wary that, just because you can now run a green-button print or finishing machine without pushing for better quality and more innovative results, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

"Don’t worry, you’ll be fine; it’s just common sense." If there was ever a sentence guaranteed to make me worry, this was it.

Give me an issue to debate or a feature to write and I’ll hold my own. But give me a plane to catch, a rainy day to dress for, or a cake to be cooled before buttercream is applied, and it quickly becomes apparent – as the butter melts and the two cake halves slide dejectedly apart- that common sense is not my forte.

This is especially the case where technology is involved. So it was with trepidation that I approached my unflattering mission, one grey April morning at Duplo’s Weybridge HQ, of proving that any fool can operate the DC615 Pro slitter, cutter and creaser.

The machine, showroom manager Ian Gribben explains, as he reassures me that all I need is common sense and leads me to my potentially embarrassing fate, epitomises Duplo’s ethos of making machines as user friendly as possible.

"You’re going to get sick of me saying that using this machine is incredibly simple," he says. "It’s so straightforward that, once a job is set up, a baby could use it."

And it turns out that setting a job up is pretty easy too, even for a self-confessed technophobe (who has only recently discovered the wonders of predictive text on her phone).

The machine can be set up, explains Gribben, on the photocopier-like keypad but it’s actually easier to do it on the DC615’s PC interface, and bypass the green and red buttons altogether. 

So he shows me how to measure the length and width, lead and side spaces, and gutter widths of the postcards we’re cutting, and input this on screen, something that only needs doing once to make sure the correct information is stored ready to be matched next time the number 70 barcode comes along. "The skill now lies in the pre-press preparation; in getting the barcode and the registration marks right," explains Gribben.

"The whole idea is that the machine is so good it will compensate for any errors the operator makes," he adds, somewhat deflating my smugness at the perfectly cut postcards now whizzing out of the end of the machine.

But he’s right. As we move on to jobs that would once upon a time have taken several machines, many more man-hours and much more skill to complete, such as desk calendars and CD wrappers, the machine takes care of pretty much every stage.

Rise of the machines
It’s certainly not me who predicts the illogical, gaping gutter that my measurements will produce if not adjusted, but rather the handy onscreen visual of what is about to be cut and creased. I’m starting to feel a little upstaged.

So what skills, I ask, would I need in the unlikely event of being the most competent finisher around in a pressroom emergency?

"People forget that a good operator still needs to be skilled at basic but essential pressroom activities," says Gribben. "You have no idea how long it took me to learn how to fan paper correctly," he adds, explaining that producing a neat job will always require the paper to be handled correctly before being inserted.

So I’m not quite there yet. And I’m certainly nowhere near ready to work on the more skilled, hand-finishing side of things which, Duplo says, experienced staff can be freed up for with the implementation of green-button technology elsewhere.

"You can set this machine going and go and do something else," says Gribbens. "Or you could get the receptionist or someone from your office to man it in an emergency."

"Perhaps you could help us out now, if we’re ever short of people to do demos," he quips as we proudly survey our –or rather the DC615’s- handiwork.

He’s right; the machine requires so little technical know-how, or even common sense, to operate that I could indeed moonlight at Duplo as a DC615 Pro demonstrator.

But unfortunately for me, life’s other little common-sense challenges are less foolproof. There’s still a chance I’ll arrive for the day wearing flip-flops in the rain.