Colors are passion, emotions and personality. At Siegwerk, inks and coatings are our specialty and we use color to bring the packaging and products of our customers to life.
Floundering to Foundation, the Importance of Data
A stable pressroom is the foundation for optimum performance and successful repeatability. To understand where essential areas for improvement sit, the tracking of the right data is key. Benjamin T. Lyle, Head of InHouse Services USA, about the importance of KPI tracking and data accuracy and how Siegwerk’s On-Site Consulting (OSC) Group can help to stabilize a pressroom for optimum performance output
What information do you have available that can begin to tell the story of your pressroom’s performance? How much time is spent color-matching on press per job? How many jobs were produced last month without needing to adjust color on press? What is your pressroom’s success rate on running new colors vs repeat colors without having to color-match on press?
If answers to these types of questions are not accessible, this will be an important place to begin. Without knowing where your pressroom’s performance is today, it will be extremely difficult to monitor progress as you make changes in the future. Identifying these KPIs will give your team a continuous “report card” to see how changes in your process can affect the output performance of your pressroom. But be careful, tracking too many KPIs leads to the same frustration as tracking too few or even no KPI at all. The challenge is to track the right KPIs and limit the activity to only those that can be used to improve the process.
Understanding which KPIs to track can sometimes be a daunting task but coordinating this information with data coming out of your ink room can give you a firm starting point on the path to improvement. If the ink room can verify that the ink being delivered to the press is “quality controlled” to the correct standard and viscosity, then any data that shows ink adjustments were required, becomes an opportunity to identify variation in the pressroom.
Eliminating variation in the pressroom is never going to be a “quick win” or even a “battle” in most cases, it’s rather going to be an ongoing “war” as things are constantly changing. This is where Siegwerk’s OSC Group can help you to peel back the layers of variation and eliminate them systematically as a partner in your facility’s continuous improvement program. Our On-Site Consulting (OSC) experts can offer an outside and objective view, supporting the identification of valuable improvement potentials to increase efficiency and productivity with improved and simplified processes.
Find out more about our OSC offering at https://www.siegwerk.com/en/services/consulting/on-site-consulting.html