The company Repropoint is a commercial digital and wide-format printer that has been in operation for 35 years. This year, it consolidated its operations into its Guildford and Woking sites, closing its Portsmouth plant and selling its Southampton operation, as part of a move away from plotting and copying, to concentrate on its core digital print and design offering.

"The business has changed dramatically over the past 10 years," explains managing director Steve Hallett. "We first got into digital in 2001 and we have grown to the point where we now have two HP Indigo 5000s and two Xerox Nuvera presses, as well as the likes of a HP Designjet L25500."

The company produces a wide range of items, from business cards and flyers all the way up to exhibition stands and banners, for clients including big names such as Microsoft, British Gas and KFC.

The business has also recently made a move into the photobook market with Fotoboox.com and offers design and cross-media services through its agency Round and Red Creative.

The challenge
In a fast-paced digital print environment, it is more often that bottlenecks occur in the finishing department rather than at the personalisation stage or on press.

"We noticed that with lead times ever shorter and with our focus on personalised digital print, the finishing element of our business had become ever-more critical," reveals Hallett.

"Our presses were churning out the work, but we were getting a bottleneck when we came to finish it."

In response, the firm invested over a four-year period in automated creasing-folding machines, industrial laminators and automatic punching. While these purchases did bring benefits, they didn’t really solve the issue and so Hallett and his team were left looking at their guillotine.

"The first process with most of our work is always to get it guillotined ready for finishing," he explains. "We invested in a programmable guillotine, but this couldn’t process the massive workload quickly enough, so we still found ourselves working longer hours, at a cost obviously, to get the jobs out on time."

Hallett knew that unless he could make the process more efficient, he was going to have to buy a second guillotine, and hire an operator to run it – altogether an expensive solution. So he set about identifying the biggest cause of hold-ups on the guillotine and, after some investigation, business cards came out as the major culprit.

"On average, they have 21 cuts," he explains. "We timed it and it was seven minutes to complete a set of business cards. That’s a lot of time when you consider business cards are a major part of the work we do here."

The method
The workaround he came up with involved blurring the boundaries between the bindery and the pressroom. Traditionally, the two departments resist anything crossing the borders between them, other than work. Indeed, at Repropoint, the press minders would run off the work, pass it on to the guillotine operator and pay little attention to him sweating to meet deadlines – he’d often still be there working overtime when everyone else had gone.

Hallet wanted to change that and make the two teams work together more closely to solve his bottleneck problem. For that, he needed a machine to take the most time-consuming work off his guillotine operator, and a business management system that would ensure the blurring of roles would empower the staff, not see them wandering lost, rootless and confused.

The kit
For the machine, Hallet looked at Duplo and Morgana kit that would fit the bill. The emphasis needed to be on ease-of-use so the press minders could cope, as well as on the fact it needed to do a better job than a new guillotine and operator could. After some testing, the decision was made to go with Duplo’s DC-645.

"What swung it was the barcode reader, as we could see that it would save us even more time and make the whole process easier to use for the minders," reveals Hallett. "The machine reads a barcode which identifies a job specs and automatically cuts from pre-set registrations. The operator simply has to press go, so it was perfect for what we needed. It also proved itself quicker than a guillotine operator on pretty much anything where the cuts started becoming multiple."

With the hardware sorted, Hallett then had to work out how to make the system work.

The journey from pressroom to bindery is as old as printing itself, and so in playing with the format, he was perhaps inviting trouble. For starters, the DC-645 was being put in the pressroom, and a finishing machine in the commercial pressroom is often considered out of place, and perhaps even unwelcome.

Fortunately, the company is in possession of ISO 14001 and is working towards ISO 9001, so was well-equipped to build in the production management systems to facilitate the move. Accountability and communication were crucial so that everyone understood their role for each individual piece of work that came through.

"It’s all about information," says Hallett. "We have daily production meetings each morning where we discuss that day’s workload and the next day’s. Then, each individual job is detailed and visible to every member of staff so at any point everyone knows where it is and where it should be going to. Lastly, each member of staff puts their name to the part of the process they are in charge of so the journey can be tracked and any problems can be put to the right person."

What has also happened is that finishing and pressroom staff have been encouraged to discuss each job to ensure that the chosen method of finishing is correct on a job-by-job basis, so that if a substrate being used makes the press minder think twice about running it on the DC-645, he can ask the finishing guys for advice and it can be guillotined if necessary.

The reaction
Playing with people’s set roles inevitably brings up fear of change and finishing staff especially are understandably sensitive to new machines coming in to replace their own skills sets. It’s no surprise then that Hallett admits that there was a little bit of reluctance at first to the move. However, once the machine was in and people got used to how things were going to work, he says the move has been really beneficial – and the ‘paper trail’ support really aided that process.

"The staff have really come together and embraced it," he explains. "Thanks to the production management system, they understand their role in the wider process much more and they are becoming much more ingrained in the business as a whole. As they are having daily discussions about the best way of finishing something and they have access to the whole print process, they are also much more in tune with what the customer wants – they know the standards they work too are often higher than what the customer expects!"

On the last point, Hallett reveals that while he and his team can spot whether the DC-645 or the guillotine has done the cutting ("it’s no better nor worse on either, just different"), customers have not noticed a thing. This is testament to the working practices Hallett has introduced, as errors or lost items in a new and unfamiliar system would have been understandable.

The verdict 
Overall, Hallett says it has been a really positive move for the company in more ways than just removing a bottleneck. However, the latter was clearly the main aim and the new system has done the job.

"We have completely removed the bottleneck," says Hallet. "Where we’d usually start a shift with 50 jobs sat waiting to be completed by 8pm, we now start with at least four or five of those on the dispatch bench as we have increased productivity so substantially."

This production boost has meant cost benefits in terms of no longer having to pay for staff overtime and in the fact that existing resources, bar the machine, are solving the problem, rather than a new member of staff. Indeed, things have got so much more efficient that when a staff member decided to leave, Hallett did not need to replace him.

Arguably more significant, though, is the fact the closer working relationships of those in different parts of the print process, along with the increased accountability and visibility in the system, is making the business perform better than it ever has done. The closer relationships have meant for better, faster or more efficient working as finishers and press minders can understand each other’s work more and so make adjustments to either process to make things faster and easier.

The accountability, meanwhile, means that on the rare instance a problem does occur, the firm has full traceability and can ensure it does not happen again by pinpointing the problem.

COMMENT
Matthew Peacock, managing engineer, Vision in Print
Repropoint managers and employees are to be congratulated for applying innovation and flexibility to improve the business and customer service. Their story demonstrates some fundamental principles of lean thinking and continuous improvement.

It is easy to leap to apparently obvious technical solutions, but this can be expensive and frustrating. Vision in Print (VIP) uses value stream mapping to provide a holistic view and identify and quantify true bottlenecks. After using data to identify business card cutting as the core issue, Repropoint was innovative in selecting good solutions. It objectively selected and tested equipment for a technical improvement and realised that a combination of human and organisational solutions was required.

An increasing number of print companies are re-thinking the print-finish divide and training operators to become multiskilled to smooth the flow of work between processes. However, resistance to this sort of change is not surprising. Changing job roles is challenging for anyone and so involving them and communicating how their job roles contribute to the success of the business is essential. VIP projects often involve multifunctional teams of printers, finishers, engineers and staff to improve processes by sharing their problems and combining their experience to solve them. Because they are involved and learn how their work impacts other areas, they become more flexible and willing to implement solutions.

Adventures in print
Without standardised processes every job can become a new adventure. After identifying root causes and testing solutions, it is essential that every person understands what they are responsible for.

Repropoint has not rested on its laurels; employees are now maintaining continuous improvement by daily reviewing their processes and examining how they can add value.