They don’t always operate as efficiently as possible, but because head counts have been significantly reduced on factory floors over the past decade or so, these inefficiencies often go unnoticed. That’s why a growing number of businesses across a wide range of different industry sectors are wedded to production key performance indicators (KPIs).
But for some companies – particularly SMEs – it may seem like a daunting path to go down. So what do they need to know before taking the plunge, what benefits might they ultimately enjoy from using KPIs and what software is out there to make the data collection and crunching process as pain-free as possible?
Many printers have in fact been using production KPIs for a while now, says Nigel Street, services director and business lead of unified workflow solutions for Kodak.
“Depending on the nature of the printer’s business they have been in use for many, many years,” confirms Street. “I was personally using a mass of KPIs when working at Pindar in the late 1990s – from estimate conversion, to output by machine, to staff retention.”
But the real change in the printing industry has occurred over the past decade or so, according to Steve Richardson, sales director at Optimus. Recently he’s detected a much greater focus and emphasis on the use of KPIs in the “print production arena”, which has “been in part driven by organisations like Vision in Print (VIP), who have been strong and successful advocates of KPIs as part of taking a lean manufacturing message into print production”.
In addition to VIP ramping up its promotion of the use of KPIs, significant changes made to pressroom technology have also helped boost take-up rates, with printers now able to create and capture vast reams of additional information, says Peter Griffin, director of I-teba/SolPrint.
“The tools available to better highlight the key business drivers have improved and allow for these indicators to be more readily available with tools such as dashboard reporting,” explains Griffin. “With real-time integration available either via JDF/JMF, direct machine links or our own shop floor data collection, a large amount of data is captured.”
Thanks to the sheer amount of data generated in a modern press hall, Griffin says that it’s imperative companies are armed with the requisite set of tools, allowing them to highlight important data quickly and efficiently.
The good news for printers is that most of the leading pre-press, press and post-press vendors now provide software tools and data that is KPI specific, with options to suit all budgets. To ensure that you pick the right software package for your business, Griffin says that you simply have to take into account the age of the equipment and who it was manufactured by.
“With SolPrint we can mix and match using JDF/JMF integration where the equipment is compatible, direct machine links with pulse monitors for non-JDF compliant kit and our own touchscreen shop floor data collection and digital/studio focused browser-based interfaces.”
Although there are many software vendors to choose from, rival packages do tend to deliver the same benefits: the ability to monitor in real time what’s going on in your production department and to immediately identify inefficiencies that might be overlooked if you relied on gut instinct alone, says Kodak’s Street.
“With KPIs you help remove the emotion of decisions as the numbers tell the story,” he explains. “They can be challenged or re-interpreted, but they are what they are and it helps to make sure the discussion is focused and not just driven by opinion.”
Cut to the chase
It’s a view shared by John Murphy, Prinect technical specialist at Heidelberg. “The biggest benefit of having and recording KPIs is that it gives you the ability to cut through the chaff and get to the results as soon as possible. Once you’ve set up the rules and the targets it gives you the ability in a very short space of time to get a true indication of how productive a shift has been.”
But to enjoy the maximum benefits from using KPIs it’s imperative that you identify the right areas of your business to measure in the first place, according to Street.
“It’s vital that the management team sit down and agree what is important to their business and then decide on the data to collect in order to measure their achievement in that area. It is definitely still a case of less is more and the quicker you can distil it down to no more than 20 data sets the better able the management team are able to drive the performance they’re looking for.”
Although Bryan Aplin, business development manager at Shuttleworth Business Systems, agrees with Street that the responsibility for identifying the production areas to measure rests on the shoulders of a company’s management team, he believes that the smaller the number of KPIs the better.
“We don’t like to see companies coming out with 20 KPIs,” says Aplin. “We feel that you should have four or five active KPIs that cover the range of your business, from production to financial and commercial.”
And these KPIs needn’t be set in stone once you’ve decided on an initial list, says Aplin. “Once you’ve selected a KPI and you’ve nailed it there’s nothing to stop you from moving onto another KPI and using it to drive the business forward.”
After you’ve identified the areas that you want to measure your performance against you need to do a full week of production (on an average week) and use that as your benchmark going forward, advises Heidelberg’s Murphy.
For users of the manufacturer’s reporting tool Analyze Point, which tracks KPIs and is available as an option within Pressroom Manager and Postpress Manager, Murphy says that the company does “the initial configuration and then a month after it’s been installed we go back to have a look at the data that’s been produced to train the customers in how to interpret it. Analyze Point is something that continually evolves and moves forward so we not only run training that helps customers to interpret the results, but we also help them to create strategies for monitoring the performance”.
The interpretation process is vital as it’s crucial that printers realise that “software alone will not provide the answer” to a problem, says Optimus’ Richardson.
“There is a danger that people can get blinded by the numbers and lose sight of their objectives,” he explains. “So critically, data for the sake of it – or information overload – serves no purpose. ‘Measure precisely’ is the Optimus message and we have the tools to help with that.”
In addition to measuring precisely it’s also important that you don’t look at a set of numbers in isolation, according to Aplin. He believes that to get the most out of KPIs they should be used to measure efficiencies across an entire business and not just in the production department.
“It’s no good having a machine battering away at 85% efficiency if you’re not making any money,” says Aplin. “Ideally you want to put data into your MIS from different sources to create a range of KPIs that represent a broader look at your business rather than just your production efficiencies. There’s a relationship between KPIs – if your efficiencies are going up then you would hope that your profit is also going up – and the MIS is probably the one place where you can bring all of that information together to give you an overall picture of your business.”
Sales figures
A simple way of ensuring that increased efficiencies equal increased profit is to use your KPIs as a marketing tool. Printers are famously not the best at marketing their services so why not use impressive KPI statistics to win new business, suggests Aplin.
“There’s no harm, for instance, in telling your existing customers that 99.5% of your deliveries are made on time,” says Aplin.
Some canny printers have already adopted this approach, with Street highlighting the efforts of ESP Colour, in Swindon.
“Anthony Thirlby [ESP managing director] has used his obsession with driving down makeready as a point on which to differentiate his business. He manages this minute-by-minute through a desktop/phone, or tablet-based dashboard, that he can access day and night and can interject at any point if he sees the trend going in the wrong way.”
Ultimately there’s no right or wrong way of using KPIs, but given the potential benefits and ROI that printers can enjoy from embracing this approach, you’d be wrong to ignore them completely, cautions Heidelberg’s Murphy.
“To spend a significant amount of hard-earned money on a piece of equipment and not accurately analyse the machine’s performance with real-time data is unforgivable in the current climate,” he concludes.
