Quality Assurance in Print?

Wouldn’t You Say the Time Has Come?

By Scott Gerschwer, OutputLinks

I have had the pleasure of a series of meetings lately with Michael Lambert, VP of sales for Sefas Innovation. I’ve already written about a few of these conversations. I find them very entertaining and informative and I feel like I should share what I learn.

What Mike brings to the table is the Operational Viewpoint. He is not a theorist or a pundit, as many of the people I regularly speak to in Print are (not that there is anything wrong with it). He started his career in print as an operator right out of high school. He gained a deep understanding of what putting print on paper entails and he carries this perspective with him all these years later.

I urge you to see him in booth No. 7137 at Print ‘09. His sense of how to improve operations has great value to you; you will hear things from him that you do not hear elsewhere. If you are a VP or CEO or owner, the things he’ll tell you are what your own staff knows but doesn’t want you to hear. If you are on the floor in operations, listen to what he has to say about how to do things better. You’ll come away with a minimum of three really good ideas. (I believe Sefas has a coffee maker in their booth. I am not sure if it’s espresso but even if it’s just plain strong coffee it can do you a world of good in a place like the McCormick Center. So, go have a cup of joe).

Our latest conversation had to do with quality assurance. Apparently, quality assurance in print is mostly accomplished by pulling print pieces from the queue and examining them. If these pieces look OK, the rest of the print run must look OK. Sometimes they get put back into place; sometimes they don’t (integrity issues follow one way or another).

Sefas Innovation will launch a QA feature at Print ‘09. Demos are available at booth No. 7137. Producer’s PrePrint QA feature embeds Open Print Projector within the Producer user interface and lets you search and view documents for QA purposes before printing. Open Print Projector is a Java-based document search and retrieval application that can display any document produced and archived by the Open Print suite without having to scroll through a large file containing many documents. View the document as Adobe PDF documents or in Sefas’ Virtual Page Format (VPF).

If you don’t currently have the means to check for quality prior to printing, it makes some sense to pop into the Sefas booth (No. 7137) and try out the demo. At the same time, look at BackOffice (also to be launched at Print ‘09).

With BackOffice you can process multiple data streams without worrying about incompatibilities in page description language. Standardize on a common format and optimize your workload across the board, or import one format and render it in another as needed to accommodate available capacity in your shop. That’s a benefit of the operational viewpoint: you learn how to make the most of what little you have. So with BackOffice you are no longer forced to support legacy printers and systems simply to maintain compatibility with your customers’ legacy applications. You can transform output streams into an output format that gives you the most flexibility, throughput capacity, and service capability. Merge what were disparate jobs into a single output stream, render paperbound documents for online viewing, and output in any format on the fly.

Here’s another little gem: When you handle applications for a number of different customers, automation can be difficult because customer applications often have antiquated OMR markings (or lack any control marks at all). Upgrading to state of the art barcodes is essential if you hope to raise the level of automation and integrity, take better advantage of your technology, and eliminate the need to manually process mail.

BackOffice can read existing production control marks such as OMR marks and then reapply the inserting logic in any 1D, 2D or 3D barcode format. BackOffice can also assess the boundaries of a page and or mail piece within a print stream and apply inserting control logic on the fly for applications processed without any. For compliance with postal presort regulations, BackOffice makes your transition from Postnet barcodes to the Intelligent Mail Barcode(IMB) simple.

The ability to reformat a document on the fly is a capability that many print/mail providers have desired for some time. All too often shops must devise workarounds for broken applications that do not align within the address window, have content in the margins where inserting control marks must reside, or are designed with inefficiencies that hamper production processes and run up costs. Since reformatting customer documents in the source application is unlikely, most shops struggle to do the best with what they have. And when mandates force a program change – suppressing an SSN or masking a remittance address, for example – the effort is costly, complex and time consuming for everyone involved.

BackOffice modifies your documents post-composition; giving you the ability to make adjustments and remove or add content dynamically. Since BackOffice can service multiple applications you can implement global changes within your enterprise in a fraction of the time. Swap logos to support an acquisition or divestiture effort, update addresses blocks across the board to support new IMB requirements, or standardize on the most efficient workflow regardless of what applications you run or what equipment you use.

I’ve seen great products introduced at Print shows but these two by Sefas are so elemental to the success of the operation that they should be Must See items. And you’ll learn something -- after a long summer, it’s like going back to school. And there is coffee.

Click here for a brochure from Sefas Innovation >>>.