A conference to commemorate Belgaum's 75th print anniversary - The Noel D'Cunha Sunday Column

There are two lessons – one get an “idea” into your print business, and two, every entrepreneur is creating business for the printers.

Get print efficiency

Paul Bradley of ESP Colour

During Print Summit 2018, Paul Bradley, chief executive of ESP Colour had said that around 2006, UK’s print industry was having a tough time. It was also the time when the print sector across the printing industry faced a decline in profitability as they aggressively slashed prices.

The challenges that printers in Belgaum faced on a day-to-day basis are no different from that he faced. But he countered them with a very simple project that drove everything since.  He devised a Project 2.5K. It was to produce 2,500 good sheets for every set of plates that went on the presses. It was a focus on the market, focus on a product type, and focus on the perfect run length per set of plates.

Eleven years on ESC has two automated B1 multicolour presses, one is a three-year-old and the other a four-year-old. Three men run the two presses – one each on the two machines and a boiler to make the marks. Each of the machines averaged 62-million impressions per year on triple shifts (111 hours) in 2017. “Our presses run at 18,000 sheets per hour (sph), every job, every day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year,” said Bradley.

How did Bradley achieve what he did? With people and cost. Efficiency can always be improved, but we have to have our 3M’s – man, machinery, and materials. Run the machine at the speed it is brought for; employ the right people to run the machines – and they are also rightly paid, and present the paper in a way that can let the machine run at that speed.

Investment dilemma

One of the pain-points of the Belgaum printers is: decision making. Dhond says, they do not know whether to move from small offset to bigger press or to digital, or whether to buy a new or a used four-colour press. “Plus of course, if his competitor has already bought a four-colour press, how would his investment in a similar press work.”

We at PrintWeek India recently did two case-studies which were the perfect examples, of need-based investment.

Ramdoot Packaging and Bramha Print Pack are two carton packaging firms at a walking distance of five minutes from each other in Ahmedabad. Both firms have installed a Bobst Ambition 76 folder-gluer.

Why did Ramdoot invest in Bobst kit?

Pragnesh (l) and Pradeep Patel of Ramdoot Packaging

The company had three local made folder-gluers but in the 50cm size. So bigger cartons were folded and glued manually. A simple calculation showed that a person employed to fold and glue cartons would complete around 500 cartons in an hour. If the lock-bottom feature was to be added, that number would drastically fall. A typical run of carton jobs at Ramdoot is in the range of 1,000, 2,500 or 5,000.

The Bobst Ambition did the 5,000 run carton job in half an hour. Pragnesh Patel, one of the owners at Ramdoot, said, “It saved us time, reduced expenses on labour, and moved the stock out for delivery in quick time.”

Rajesh Patel (l) and Harshvadan Patel of Brahma Printpack

But they also had similar problem like Ramdoot, but their runs were longer, and besides mono cartons, it also produced fluted carton boxes. The company invested in the Bobst Ambition 76, its first Bobst. Rajesh Patel of Brahma, said, It was our perception that Bobst machines are expensive till they saw the entry level machine at an Open House show in Vadodara’s Concorde Printing, which fitted their budget. We got rid of the bottlenecks.” With the investment, the firm’s productivity has gone up by 60%.

The digital investment dilemma

The other challenge that the Belgaum printers faced was as a sheetfed offset operation, should they invest in a digital kit? If not, in a new sheetfed or a used one?

PrintWeek India’s case-study on Surat’s Progressive Printing Press provided a classic example of how despite reduced print runs, Progressive invested in sheetfed presses, new ones at that.

Progressive is a catalogue print specialist. “Digital prints for catalogues have many restrictions. You cannot varnish, and there are other finishing blocks,” said Asgar Sanchawala, director at Progressive.

Progressive considers printing 200 copies of a catalogue on offset, as a viable proposition. Sanchawala says, we can print 200 copies with 50 pages each at a lesser cost than digital (Rs 50000 at Rs 5 per A4 page), and add value to it, which digital can’t

Progressive has been a user of pre-owned four-colour machines for over two decades now. There are two major reasons why Progressive opted for new presses, says Sanchawala “Quick delivery and consistency of quality. We have been running secondhand machines all through, and somewhere down the line, we used to be hampered by consistency in print quality.”

So when and what with digital? There are certain things offset can’t do – VDP, personalisation, very short-runs, and print-on-demand. When your existing customer, demands few copies, you need to supply that...

Like Paul Bradley says, we must give customers what they want not what we can produce.

Some time ago, I asked a digital print vendor, considering I bought a digital machine, whom should I be consulting for the jobs. As an offset printer, customers used to come to us, I would print it and provide the service?

His answer was: Today printers who are surviving and thriving are the ones who are going out. Successful printers in Mumbai are the ones who go out and sell. 

He added, five years from now, print service providers will not be present; it will be marketing service providers. The print is a way to sell my product. If you are not giving me better advice through package design or print, then it is nothing for the customer.

Costing and saving

Shailesh Sharma, managing director of Inndus

Fixing the cost of printing is the most debated, but the least implemented concern. I often remember one story about the simple vada-pav. Shailesh Sharma, managing director of Inndus in Mumbai, says, about 15-20 years ago we bought a single vada-pav for as little as one rupee. Today it costs Rs 15 and above. “The cost of print which was Rs 5,000 per 1,000 copies, is down to Rs 2,000, some print it for less,” he says.

The same concern was echoed by Anil Joshi of K Joshi & Co in Pune, when I met him at the Bobst Open House on 22 February 2018.

Sharma asks, ever thought of asking the vada-pav vendor to give the vada-pav on credit or bargain on the cost?

Some food for thought here.

P Narendra of Pragati Offset

As for savings, I recall what Narendra Paruchuri said when Pragati Offset took the top honour at the PrintWeek India Awards 2013. He treats vendors as partners in progress, and today Pragati has an impeccable name amongst its suppliers, and they give Pragati the highest preference and service. This according to Paruchuri is one of the reasons he has been able to manage the levels of growth for both the topline and bottomline. “Being a zero-debt company has allowed us to get the best procurement prices by paying vendors in a timely fashion. Our vendors often go the extra mile to service our requirements due to these reasons,” he had said.

Pragati’s success march continues.

The lesson here is: you can negotiate on prices if you make the payment upfront. The vendors, I was told, would be willing to share the margins, which he would otherwise be paying the banks as interest.

That’s one way.

Shopfloor boost

The other way is to improve what you are doing on the shopfloor.

Rahul Zaware, director at Zaware Creative Enterprises, Pune says, he has taken steps in the past 18 months and the results are generating revenue for our company along with more work. These are:

• We made our entire staff go through a rigorous three month - 3-hour training each day on the basic technical aspects of printing the industry
• At the end of the technical training an exam was conducted and the promotions and incentives were given according to the results of the exam
• Wastage or loss, the problem is nailed down based on scientific evolution
• Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, half yearly and yearly charts for maintenance to each machine operator
• One supplier and one brand of plates, inks and pressroom chemistry
• All communication pertaining to a job is done through email by keeping various departments in the copy.

The result: he could deliver printed material to 1,593 schools. For this, Zaware printed 94,800 books in two months and 10 days.

Conclusion

Correction – everybody, from a toddler to the young teen to grown-up printer, instead of accepting the wrong, try to resist, prove that we are right, or justify why we did what we did.

Kiran Thakur, the group editor of Tarun Bharat Daily and founder chairman of Lokmanya Multipurpose Coop Society, who presided over the inaugural function of the Conference, had said that he too had ventured into a truck transport business, but once he found that the business is not his cup of tea, he retreated. “I did not continue just for the sake of it,” he said.

It was course-correction.

PS: Have you responded to the five-minute PrintWeek Survey: Sheetfed Offset Outlook in India? If not, I will urge you to do so. To begin the survey, please click here.