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A2 Sheet Fed 8 Colour

Traditional Press Setup

In 2006 I was hired as the Special Projects Manager in a large sheet fed printing company. A bigger printing company with bigger problems. My signature project for this company was a system that transferred digital data from the platemaking machine over to the console of the printing press. Traditionally when the operator first runs up a new job they need to set the ink ducts on the press manually to accomodate heavy or light ink usage across the printed sheets. Otherwise the printed colour changes density across the sheet. Running up a job usually takes about 20 minutes and around 250 sheets of A2 paper, (thats 1000 A4 sheets!) to get the right result. Those sheets are then thrown out and the correct amount of sheets for the job are printed. Just one 32 page A4 brochure would generate 4,000 A4 sheets of waste! A system of getting digital data (called CIP3) to the press already existed, but no one knew how to make it work, not even the supplier who installed it! Communicating with the printers, the plate room staff, the pre-press staff and the supplier allowed me to resolve all the issues and then train the print operators on how to use the digital data to set up their press. Once they got the hang of it they were running up their presses in less than 5 minutes and using only 50-60 sheets. Given there were three presses and two shifts per day we calculated a time and stock saving to the company totalling over $16,700 per month.