Technical Articles
Good
Communication is Critical For Bindery Success
Published in New England Printer & Publisher
by Frank Shear
Success in
the bindery depends on choosing the right paper, layout, binding method
and bindery partner, right? Is this is all? Not
unless you want to ignore the most valuable key success factor: Good
communication.
Today's
print buyers are stretched so thinly that they must rely on their printing
suppliers to guide them through the complicated process of buying print. The best printing companies help customers maneuver around
landmines and achieve their business goals.
Let your bindery partner help you in the same way.
In addition to simply faxing over job specifications, pick up the
phone and discuss your project with them.
Good communication allows you to reduce costs, eliminate
frustration and be a hero in the eyes of your customers.
If customers supply their vendors with accurate and timely information, everyone's lives will be less stressful. The number of problems will be reduced, customer satisfaction will rise, production costs will be lower, and profits will be higher. When job specifications are unclear, and questions go unanswered, bindery production problems increase exponentially.
Binderies want to be a valuable information resource for their customers, but effective two-way information flow is needed to achieve this goal. Before bindery professionals can present alternative bindery solutions to their customers, they need information about a job's end-use. To help our customers make wiser decisions, Seaboard Bindery tries to offer a lot of information in the form of articles, technical booklets and layouts. But we need to know the minutia of your job to be of the greatest value to you. In short, we depend on good communication.
Begin With The End
Let your bindery know your job's end use. For example, in response to a faxed estimate request, any bindery will gladly give you a price for perfect binding. However, if you mention that the product being bound is a cookbook, good bindery professionals will ask the following question: "Do you need these cookbooks to lie flat?" Once it's determined that usability would increase with layflat properties, then options such as Wire-Oä, plastic coil and layflat adhesive binding (i.e., Otabindä and RepKoverä) can be explored. When the binding decision has been finalized, other pertinent details should be discussed. For instance, if Otabind is selected, the job must be laid out with the grain parallel to the spine for maximum page pull strength and straight-as-an-arrow spines. However, in today's harried business world, none of this advice will be offered if the end-use remains a mystery.
The best printing layout isn't necessarily the most efficient bindery layout. If a job is bindery intensive, it may be in the printer's best interest to change the layout to save on outsourcing costs and production time. For example, we recently received a request to saddle stitch an oblong 7"x 4Ÿ" book (bound on the 4Ÿ" side). This would have been a fine job except the book had already been printed one-up, which meant that the spine length was below the minimum size for industry standard stitching machines. Had this customer consulted with us prior to printing the job, we would have advised them to use a two-up layout. As a result, this poorly planned job had to be hand-gathered, hand-stitched and hand-trimmed, all of which are terribly inefficient and costly.
Contrast this negative experience to a different project - an oblong 8"x 3Ÿ" (bound on the 3Ÿ" side) perfect binding job - with a company that involved us early in the planning stage. Our customer was tempted to reduce prepress costs by laying out the job one-up, but fortunately they called us for layout advice prior to doing any prepress work. We quickly pointed out that a one-up layout would be too small for automatic bindery production. The end result is that our customer happily spent a little more in their prepress department to lay the job out two-up, which saved them much more time and money in the bindery.
In addition, minor product design changes sometimes allow machines to run faster and reduce spoilage. The bottom-line? There are definitely times when printers should spend a little more in the layout and prepress stages to reap much larger bindery savings. But this process can only start with good two-way communication.
Scheduling
Printers shouldn't wait until their job is printed before contacting their bindery representative. Scheduling conflicts are a way of life in the graphic arts industry and the best way to ensure your due date is met is to schedule your job in advance. Good binderies know that problems happen and do their best to accommodate minor changes to schedules. However, it's sometimes difficult for busy binderies to offer quick turnaround times on unscheduled work. This problem is magnified if materials need to be ordered. Take mechanical binding elements for example. Wire-O, plastic spiral and plastic comb binding elements come in a lot of thicknesses, pitches and colors. Few binderies keep many types of binding elements on hand, and those that do usually only stock white and black ones in the most common sizes. If material components are needed, be extra careful to allow enough lead-time for advance ordering.
When Sending A Job
Before sending your job to a bindery, write an instruction sheet explaining what you want done with a sample and rule-out of the press sheets. You may not know when or how this minor time investment will help you, but be assured it will. No one is as familiar with your client's requirements as you are and what seems obvious to you may not be to someone else. Purchase orders are certainly preferred, but at the very least, describe what operations need to be done and define success. Think of your job from the perspective of someone who has never heard of your client and doesn't know what items are on the "must" list.
If your job has paper lot changes, clearly mark where they occur because paper varies from lot to lot, and brand to brand. Unexpected variations in paper characteristics negatively impact bindery performance. Switching paper lots and brands in the middle of a run is no problem as long as your bindery knows where the changes are. For example, let's consider folding. If a fold unexpectedly moves, the folding operator must "chase" the fold, which slows down production and reduces yield. However if the change is clearly marked, the same folding operator can run a few sheets from the new lot, make minor setup adjustments and confidently run the job out.
Other areas that require good communication are packing, labeling and shipping. Binderies frequently are not advised about packing and shipping instructions until the job is partially or completely produced. In the past, my company has had to make costly boxing and packing assumptions without official customer OKs. Re-boxing and re-skidding jobs costs a lot of time and money. Labeling can also be problematic if not preplanned. Few things are as exasperating as producing, packing and skidding a job only to have a customer request the application of labels after the fact. This adds a lot of unnecessary labor and eliminates the possibility of applying the labels inline during production.
It's very uncomfortable for a bindery to have an important production question for a rush job and not being able to get an answer. When in this awkward position, binderies have two choices: either wait for information and miss the deadline; or, make an unauthorized production decision. Either way, they risk incurring the wrath of their customer if they are wrong. Jobs with quick turnaround times and poorly communicated instructions are disasters waiting to happen.
* * *
Help your bindery help you. In today's high-paced business environment, one unplanned detail can break the camel's back. Good communication with your bindery will make your life easier and increase your profits in this hectic graphic arts world.
Frank Shear is President of Seaboard Bindery, a service-oriented trade bindery located in Woburn, Massachusetts. His company specializes in offering high quality perfect, PUR and layflat adhesive binding, saddle stitching, Wire-Oä, plastic coil, laminating and other bindery solutions. Call Frank at (781) 932-3908.