Four years ago, ESP Colour managing director Anthony Thirlby took a long look at the print industry and decided he had to change the way his business operated. He could see margins being pinched ever tighter and the economic situation was starting its drawn-out derailment into recession. What he needed to combat this, he decided, was more control. And for that, he needed software, money and quite a bit of imagination.
By control, Thirlby meant two things: a concentration on three print formats – namely A4, A5 and DL – and a way of retrieving accurate, real-time data from the entire print process to ensure that those formats were printed as efficiently as possible. On the first point, he’s very nearly achieved his aim."We’re at the point now where 96% of our work is in these three formats, so the pre-press, press and post-press departments can be set up with a constant configuration and the work can be put through with maximum efficiency," he explains. "We opted for these formats as they give the simplest sheet size methodology, enabling us to maximise efficiency and uptime in each department. This enables us to batch manufacture and combat the competitive pricing the market demands."
For other work, ESP charges a premium, but if it doesn’t see a space for the work within the four days following the order, it will turn it down. Considering the £11.7m-turnover business is a jobbing commercial printer, with no contractual work at all, this is a brave policy in any industry let alone one as under pressure as print. However, Thirlby sees it as necessary if he is to achieve his goal of one-touch manufacturing.
"We are passionate about achieving our aim of having one-touch manufacturing, where the need for human decision-making is removed," he reveals. "We want to make it clear that we are a manufacturing business, not a printer."
Precision processing
While the paper format limitations sort out the product side of things to achieve this vision of a one-touch manufacturing approach, Thirlby also needed to sort out the process side. This meant delving into the complicated world of workflow, MIS and data retrieval software.
What led ESP to this excursion into IT was a realisation that to achieve the desired process efficiencies, the company needed a way of monitoring its performance in real time, and for the data collected to be easily accessible and understandable by the staff as a whole. The latter point is crucial for Thirlby, as he believes that for this type of system to work, the staff are "pivotal" and have to be on board and in the loop.
And so, four years ago, while it was cutting paper formats down to just three, ESP was also investing a substantial sum of money in software and a sub-contracted IT team to customise that software.
"We hired a sub-contractor to develop a system that built on Tharsterns costing software and Kodak’s Prinergy/InSite to create a full-blown Rules Based Automation (RBA) system," explains Thirlby. "The trouble with the Tharsterns system was that the data output was not very user-friendly so the sub-contractor built a script that goes into the Tharsterns software and retrieves the data. It then populates this data into Microsoft Sharepoint where the data is presented in user-friendly ways such as in graphical information and real-time data sequences."
To generate the data to feed this system, ESP Colour became fully JDF integrated 18 months ago, so from the point of taking the order to the job going on press, everything is automated and reporting data back to the workflow as it goes through the pre-press process. From the press onwards, ESP worked with its press and bindery partners to create a system where data was fed back as well. This required some extra data control panels fitted to the post-press kit, with data being fed back via JMF signals and electronic pulses. The whole package of reporting software means that the company now knows exact makeready time and makeready waste, along with overall equipment effectiveness, which gives them a true sellable uptime.
The cost of implementing all this software, and training staff up on it, was more than £180,000. This may seem a hefty investment but Thirlby says it was well worth it and that ROI was incredibly quick.
"It has been completely worthwhile as an investment," he explains. "The initial set-up and training costs paid back within a year, partly down to the fact we were able to reduce our headcount by four staff, but also we decreased spoilage in the business to less than 0.02% of sales and it enabled our plate count to go from 800 plates per week to 2,000 plates per week."
What the system has also enabled, through the integration of the Tharstern MIS and Microsoft OpenSpace, was real-time sales forecasts, meaning accurate costings can be made depending on what is going through the factory at that time, and at what point of the financial month the business is at.
"We know where we are at any point and how much work we need to do to recover the overheads," explains Thirlby. "So we can change our rates depending on how many days there are left in the working month and what product range we have pre-loaded in. So, on a 20-day month our rates are increased, and on a 23-day month our rates are reduced.
Likewise, if we have the required amount of fold-stitch-and-trim products loaded, our rates will increase and decrease accordingly. As a result, a customer that rings in the morning may well be offered a different price to one that rings up in the afternoon."
Thirlby says the real-time costings ensure that the firm can maximise efficiencies and target the short-run, just-in-time market. And while this may seem like an already complex and detailed system, he reveals that he would like it to go even further.
"I look at it that we have complete one-button integration at the front-end feeding into the press, but what I want to do with Kodak and Tharstern is to develop a truer JDF that we can run the whole plant from," he explains. "This would allow a job to move through the whole plant without any human intervention in terms of decision making, as in how we batch and how we produce."
What’s holding this up is the fact that, at present, it is difficult to get the press and finishing kit talking to each other in the same language. As a result, sending a file through the whole system without human intervention is currently, according to Thirlby, frustratingly out of reach.
Possible problems
If this were possible, however, it would pose a few questions. Firstly, the company would be completely dependent on the reliability of its data. Thirlby has no doubt that the information he receives is correct, but he still double-checks all his readings at the end of each shift to ensure everything is reported correctly.
The second issue is a staffing matter. The improvements ESP has already made have reduced the headcount by four people. Further automation would inevitably mean more jobs would have to go, so has Thirlby witnessed any dissent in the ranks?
"Absolutely not," says Thirlby. "It has simplified their workload and enabled us to process the work more efficiently and with minimum input. We had full briefing sessions from the outset with a complete timeline mapped for the integration and we ensured all the features and benefits were communicated accordingly to all staff."
The last issue is one that could apply to the majority of moves by the industry to counter ever-decreasing margins: the commoditisation of print. The danger of the latter is that the skill and the quality is taken out of print in the hunt for profit. Thirlby, however, does not believe his system creates this situation. He says that, in fact, it enables the company to maximise the skills set and experience of the staff within the business, ensuring quality remains at the forefront of what the company does.
And what the company is doing may undergo a further transformation in the next year as it is trialling digital presses and has developed its own web-to-print portal.
What won’t be changing is Thirlby’s approach to his business. For him, this use of data and technology, as well as choice of formats, is the only way he can achieve the profits in his sector that the company needs to survive. And when he says "It has retained the profitability of the business despite pricing taking a double-digit percentage drop," he’s very persuasive.
COMMENT
Last summer, Vision in Print (ViP), in collaboration with Kodak, studied the workflow habits and economics of eight medium to large commercial printers. One key measure was the number of plates output per hour. The average, excluding one company, was 2.75 plates per hour (p/h). That exception was ESP Colour whose figure was 21p/h. When ESP managing director Anthony Thirlby reported that figure to the ViP conference last November, I had two well-reputed managing directors ask me to confirm that the figures had been cooked. I assured them they had not.
This remarkable feat was the result of the application of a single, simple principle – removing variability. All manufacturing systems pay an enormous price to cope with variability and sheetfed commercial print copes with more than most. Thirlby has developed a complete business model predicated on the principle of minimising variability.
Complementary factors
Thirlby has also made up-to-date costing a core feature of his commercial policy. While many sheetfed commercial printers fail to update their cost rates even once a year, ESP updates rates several times a day, ensuring good utilisation.
The final key element of ESP’s business model is to embrace the power of data. Good data, managed in an effective and linked system, is the future for effective print manufacture. Sadly, even now the promise of a fully integrated JDF workflow cannot be delivered in practice – at least in ESP’s experience.
Of course, ESP Colour’s business model will not suit everyone. But one of the striking findings of our study was the discovery that one of the worst performers in terms of plate output was one of the most profitable. How has it done this? By making the client pay well for the flexibility it offers – by embracing variability and exploiting it as a USP. It just goes to show, it takes all sorts.
Richard Gray, commercial director, BPIF
