You're a marcom professional, and you've just won a prestigious award for your company's annual report, a complex job involving technical mastery in design as well as printing and bindery.
You take your team to celebrate at a favorite restaurant, ordering its best entree and most expensive wine--it's all great. And now comes the coup de gras, the perfect ending to a perfect meal: dessert. You're about to dig in, when the thought occurs to you . . . did the restaurant bake this yummy pie? Did the printer actually do the bindery work on your annual report?
Restaurants, like printers, often outsource work that is outside of their core capabilities, a fact that has major implications on our work. The decisions we make at the design stage affect the bindery, and the bindery affects our finished product.
I know of two companies--Seattle Bindery and Springs Printing--that often work together and know well the importance of including all production partners in early design discussions.
"Think of the whole process as a giant jigsaw puzzle," says Joanne Winston, production planner at Springs. "To make sure the finished piece is exactly as you, the client, envision it, involve us early on. Use our expertise. Not only can we save headaches down the road, we can save dollars up front by showing you ways to make maximum use of our equipment and production efficiencies."
Having worked with both Springs and Seattle Bindery on several projects, I agree--the number one priority is early communication. "We always appreciate being called into the project during the design stage," says Bill Davey, Seattle Bindery's production manager. "It always helps. Otherwise, by the time we see a job, it may be too late to fix any problems."
He gave me a recent example. A job came into Springs, the printing went smoothly and it was palletized and trucked to Seattle Bindery for folding. When Davey examined the printed sheets, he discovered that one of the folds in the piece fell across ink. To prevent scuffing or rubbing, it needed to be varnished, an unforeseen delay and additional cost. As we all know, this doesn't go over very well when we've already maxed our budget and we're up against a deadline that can't be compromised.
"If we'd been included in the loop at the beginning, this would have been caught and corrected at the design stage," emphasizes Chris Carlson, assistant production manager at Seattle Bindery.
Davey offers another example of why early and ongoing communication is essential in this age of truncated lead times and shorter production cycles. "Just last week we got a shipment of presentation folders from a local printer (not Springs, by the way) that had to be folded and glued overnight. When I reviewed the piece, the off-center design makes it impossible to machine-fold and glue. My only option was to do the job by hand."
On a machine, he explains, 5,000 copies might take an hour and a half, but by hand, they might take ten hours. Again, a huge impact on cost and delivery. "It saves us all to be able to explain things up front instead of at the end," Davey says.
Not all printers and binderies work well together, another fact that can compromise a project's success. The printer and bindery should have a history together, so they are very familiar with each other's operations: estimating and scheduling procedures, equipment configuration, pick-up and delivery services, billing practices, etc.
"When working as production partners, every step in the process has to be performed seamlessly and flawlessly," says Springs' Winston. "We must work in tandem so that every piece of the puzzle--stock, ink, varnish, folding, etc.--fits together perfectly. The goal is a perfectly finished piece plus speed and efficiency."
In addition to good communication, setting realistic deadlines and being responsible for them are the parts of the puzzle we hold. I know in my own case, I have been responsible for throwing off scheduling.
Change orders are a perfect example. Certainly, last-minute revisions are a fact of life. But we need to be aware of how those changes play out. "When clients wants to change something at the last minute," Winston points out, "what they're doing is changing multiple pieces of the puzzle, resulting in a chain reaction down the production line. For us, this affects everything, even other clients."
When notified of a change order, Winston first looks at where the job is in process. The farther it's progressed, the more time the change will take. She notifies Davey or Carlson immediately if she thinks a delay will result. At that time, Davey explains, "my only recourse is to move jobs around, placing one of comparable size into the delayed job's slot, or add overtime. Neither is a perfect or easy solution."
How to avoid these costly hiccups in production? Again, communicate early and often with your production partners--all of them.
So, at least one message should be clear. The more information we have from our production experts and the more information they have about our job, the more we'll gain in time and savings. And remember, while the bindery might be the last piece in the printing puzzle-like dessert at that great meal-it's far from the least important.
© 1998, Marchand Marketing, Inc. Reprinted with permission from Media Inc.