Bottleneck reduction
The new pre-press revolution, once all the copious teething problems were out of the way, suddenly freed up the human and analogue bottlenecks, allowing for the industry emphasis to be placed on the presses themselves. The late 80s and early 90s saw a huge increase in the amount of multi-colour installations, but more importantly than that we began seeing presses that were sporting ingenious solutions for automation.
By way of example, it was around this time that Heidelberg and Komori both introduced their first automatic/ semi-automatic plate changing models on the Speedmaster and Lithrone respectively. The early 90s also saw more and more presses with remote format and register adjustment from the machine’s CPC units at this time.
Another key area where massive progress has been made is on press colour management which is linked directly to pre-press. This allowed for colour profiles to be sent over with the job, even before the plates reach the machine.
This one area of closing the colour loop has probably been responsible for the most dramatic reduction in make ready times. At first manual densitometers, and now online spectrophotometers, calibrated to large format proofing systems and fingerprinted presses, have together turned printing from a black art, into a measurable science, and have all but taken the last remaining skill away from the machine minder.
It is also in the early 90s that we see a whole raft of offset machine manufacturers beginning to descend upon the UK printing industry. In the earl 80s, it seemed that the ‘big three’ dominated the medium sized offset supply landscape, namely Heidelberg, manroland and Komori, but suddenly, most probably due to the emphasis turning to electronics as opposed to simply heavy metal, all sorts of other players were becoming involved, including Akiyama, KBA, Sakurai, Shinohara, and Mitsubishi, and then later Ryobi, which had been dominant in the smaller offset market. All these machines were and are now fitted with varying degrees of automation, but they key areas are fully/semi-automatic plate loading, automatic sheet sizing from feeder, cylinders and delivery, remote register adjustment and automatic blanket and cylinder washing. These key additions on modern presses have not only transformed a machine minder’s life, they have significantly reduced make ready and downtime, added to the fact that minders could be doing much more important tasks as the machines cleaned them selves automatically, and then set up for the next job.
To be continued…
Peter Harrison is Joint Managing Director of The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK.
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