The Academy of Screen and Digital Printing Technologies (ASDPT) is composed of professionals that have dedicated a large part of their career to the education, development and innovation to the industry. In this interview, Bruce Ridge, Director of Technical Service at Nazdar Ink Technologies discusses the future of the print industry with fellow Academy member, Tim Quinn, Consultant with Nazdar Consulting Services.
Bruce Ridge: The Academy has a diverse group of members. Traditionally, the members have been the writers of technical articles, or award winning printers. You do something very different. You spend a week at a printing facility and implement change. Do you know other people in our industry that do this type of work?
TQ: No, I don't see many. It seems that most out there doing consulting are theory guys. I am an implementation guy. There is a definite divide there. Don't get me wrong, we need theory guys, and I may not even understand some of the theories, but most of the theory guys cannot actually implement them.
My success in implementing change is from learning how to work with the tools you have available to create a solution or to make a theory work. There are a lot of roadblocks in a production environment in implementing theoretical ideas.
BR: What do you think is the most important characteristic a company must have in order for them to use and retain the things you teach them?
TQ: For a large percentage of the time shops that fail to implement change simply paid me to fix a problem. There are no people assigned to be with me to learn what it is I am doing. My experience indicates that the only way for a company to actually learn how to implement the work or changes I am being paid to resolve, is for them to assign a champion to the project. This way, someone has time to spend with me, and takes ownership for what happens after I leave. Most of the time there are follow up questions, remote computer access, and the exchange of printing data in order to maintain the work that was done on site, and to address new issues as they arise with different print jobs.
BR: How many years have you been doing consulting and on-site implementing?
TQ: I have been working as a consultant with Nazdar for 11 years. 20 years prior to that, I began my career in prepress. I worked at ReyHan PGF generating large format screen-printing films, and helping screen printers print to the numbers. The consulting work at Nazdar is the first in the industry at least in North America where problem solving technicians were required to be able to solve problems from file to finishing. We cannot place the blame on one area outside our expertise and leave with the problems unresolved.
BR: Most of the consulting work you do now is spending three to four days on-site at a printing facility with a list of specific objectives to achieve in that time. How often do you find yourself mid-week thinking there is no way I can do everything promised?
TQ: Well, basically, every time I go in on the first day I think there is no way I can get everything done. Then I remind myself that my expertise has really morphed into explaining and managing people's expectations. I have learned that once you can define people's expectations, they are more likely to be met. There are usually many expectations from top to bottom that are not clearly defined, such as expectations of what a piece of equipment will produce within it's own drift, to what the sales staff commits to producing, and what the brand owner expects to see produced. Rarely are all of these people's expectations defined and on the same page.
It usually comes down to simply failing to have specified a printing aim and a tolerance, and then defining the capability of the shops manufacturing variation. Sounds complicated, but picking a target and tolerance is easy. Then, considering the sum of the shops variation minus the allowed tolerance is critical but rarely considered.
I use a tolerance analysis to determine tolerance and delta stacks. Basically you add the sum of all the process variations to the degree you can quantify them over time, minus the deltas you agree to produce within. In order to make money, you must be able to produce within a reasonable amount capable delta e minus your stack. A simple scenario of this is when a print buyer expects a shop to match a color within 2 delta, but your measurement device has 1/2 delta e variation. Then other equipment has a variation of 1, which totals 1.5 leaving only one half delta e. It is highly unlikely you can produce product within one half delta profitably, especially if you are not even aware of the stack factor.
BR: Does this make you think that many printers do not understand the concept of tolerance stacks?
TQ: Yes but it's an easy concept. If I take a calibrated spectrophotometer and read the same exact spot multiple times the numbers will always vary to some degree. We have ways to know for sure, but in this example, if I take highest reading from several measuments, that would be the variation delta for that device. Now if you add all the variation numbers for all your processes, this would give you the detlta stacks number for your process.
BR: We just saw a presentation on how X-Rite recommends using the Net Profiler software to check your X-Rite spectrophotometer, to see if they are operating in calibration.
TQ: This is the kind of software that printers need to be using to maintain any kind of a consistency in their process. Most printers rely on instruments that they have no idea if they are in calibration or are measuring accurately.
The other software that X-Rite demonstrated was the PantoneLive software. This is an example of what printers are now seeing, which is the brand owners are now driving the delta e variation concept down to the printers. This is now part of the trend that brand owners can monitor all their print providers via the cloud targeting a certain delta e tolerance. It will become very important for printers to know their shop variation in relation to the job tolerance. Print buyers aren't interested in tolerance stacks because it's not their problem. This will be forced down to printing companies by the print buyers making tolerance stacks a critical consideration.
BR: Are there accounts you have been to recently where managing expectations has been critical to the success of your work?
TQ: Yes, I can. For example, a company I was at last month. They wanted color profiles generated for all their medias, all their machines, in all resolutions. This all added up to 144 custom built profiles to build in 3 days. There was an internal debate in the company as to if doing all this work was really necessary.
So my goal was to find out what their expectations were first. Were they really able to manage 144 different printing conditions? No, they weren't. So we settled on enlarging their tolerances, and grouping medias in to three primary categories. The result was to use three primary print conditions and the results were excellent and manageable.
BR: When it comes to the experts in the field, who do you read or rely on for inspiration or technical insight?
TQ: Well, I give a lot of credit to Ron Ellis, who passes along a lot of his knowledge to the industry and is an on-site implementer. He is someone that shares knowledge through his work with IDEAlliance.
BR: You have come up with several innovative methods and products while consulting. You have qualified more screen printers in the G7 color control methodology than anyone else. How have you done that?
TQ: Well, G7 qualification in screen printing is very time consuming and costly. Traditionally doing a G7 qualification would require three four color press runs, which would take up to three days. And the final result didn't always look that great. We made a lot of corrections even on press run number three.
I went back to focusing on the mapping of the tonality of a single color, on a single screen to target neutral print density by dispersing the tonal response equally from 1 - 99%, and using the solid ink densities to build the curve, which does not usually require a lot of modification. This has resulted in being able to achieve a G7 qualified print while calibrating all the substrates and all the line counts in less than a day of press time using one color. There is additional time spent reviewing the prints in order to group and smooth the curve data into common printing curve sets.
When all of the curves are plotted on one graph, you can see how the curves can be grouped in to curve families. So this results in a handful of curves which can be averaged into a few curve families. Beyond that, the curves can be monitored and adjusted as printing changes.
BR: You also apply this same technique to calibrate direct to screen systems to neutral print density in multiple line counts on one screen. Has this practice been adopted by the direct to screen manufacturers?
TQ: No. It is a similar situation in most of the equipment installations of printing presses, ink jet printers, and direct to screen machines. By the time the installation technicians have installed a machine that has shipped a huge distance and got it calibrated and working properly, those technicians are done. They have achieved a huge task. Getting the machine to print or image accurate color is a separate task. It is not easy to do, and rarely done.
Another issue is that many of the printers that are purchasing these expensive pieces of equipment already have one or more similar machines. The printer now wants the new machine to print like the existing machine for back up and production flexibility. The installation technician has no interest in getting the new machine to print like an older machine that may be from another manufacturer.
BR: It seems that printing is becoming more complicated yet there are fewer printing programs in the education system. Do you see this as a problem in the industry?
TQ: There is a little bit of a divide. The last place I worked at had hired a recently graduated engineer to make processing improvements. He followed me around and worked with me on the direct to screen machine. He brought a high level of technical understanding to the work I was doing which will benefit that company.
When it comes to printing production, there is a gap. It seems that people that enter the printing production environment are a bit scared of the noise, the smells, and the hard work. I do not see many young people getting into the print production at the businesses I go to.
BR: When you are hired to do consulting or training, how often is it that the people you are training document what you are telling them in some manner?
TQ: Rarely does anyone take notes. This is just not a common practice. It is mind boggling. If I am going through new information and notes are not being taken, there is no way you are going to retain the information.
BR: You also work in Ink Jet, Flexo, and Offset printing. What are some of the new and exciting things you are doing in those print processes?
TQ: I think Ink Jet is the most common area for setting expectations. When printers purchased their first Ink Jet printer, there were few expectations for that one machine to match or even look similar to their other print devices. Printers may have had an industry common target like GRACoL or SWOP in a proof or monitor, but there was a fair amount of tolerance in color deviation due to format, resolution, or media differences.
Once Ink Jet printers acquired multiple machines, the expectations changed. Now the expectation was to have all their Ink Jet printers print similar if not the exactly the same.
This is a great area of opportunity for consultants like myself.
I do a lot of work determining how accurate wide format inkjet printers are to established printing aims, each other and in particular how consistent they are to themselves. Without measuring and verification methods you really don't know.
BR: Do you know if any consultants like yourself are hired by printers to advise printers on which machines are best to buy to meet their expectations?
TQ: IDEAlliance released a study in 2013 with a list of attributes to consider when purchasing a new printer, which included RIP, ink consumption, speed, fade weathering and a few others. Not much has been done to help printers since then until now. I would advise anybody interested in knowing more about how to assess a potential inkjet press's capability to check out ChromaChecker's Large Format Benchmarking Exercise.
BR: Do you have confidence in the longevity in Screen Printing as a commercial printing process and is the SGIA show still valuable for you?
TQ: I do. I am seeing printers that are very busy. The biggest benefit I get from the SGIA show is to meet in person all the vendors we work with to discuss existing products and to learn about new ones. I do review all the new ink jet printers which I end up seeing in many of the shops I work at.
BR: What has been your initial impression of the Academy?
TQ: When I was nominated, it was an honor to meet so many talented individuals. It was also very impressive to listen to Michel Caza talk about his upcoming book at the meeting at SGIA and to hear him speak about his accomplishments in a long career.
BR: Another great idea you have brought to the Nazdar technical support group is to introduce and establish the use of Slack communication software. Why is this so important?
TQ: My whole focus in consulting and training is about making things more efficient. As I see corporate life moving toward a team structure approach on everything, relying on emails, phone calls, and conference calls with different groups, we are losing track of lines of sight with accounts. These older mechanisms of communication are becoming insufficient. Slack is one of the ways to chronologically organize all communications with one account in a single place that is accessible to those in the office and those traveling in real time.
BR: What are your favorite places to go to find new information on the industry?
TQ: Things are changing so fast, keeping up with our industry is like trying to keep up with technology. I think it's important to team up solutions providers like myself because that is my full time job. Considering the fact that printing companies are in business to print, there's not time keep an eye on everything that changes. I always joke that I'm a walking trade show. I have the unique benefit of working with and selling all the available equipment and software solutions. We tailor make every solution to fit the customers needs. Beyond that, we are lucky to have so many great organizations available to us these days. Obviously there's SGIA, but also IDEAlliance, CGATS and PIA to name a few. These organizations do a great job of bringing experts and users together to either create standards or share information for the betterment of our industry.