A solid maintenance program is key to the long life of your printing presses. Having someone assigned the role of planning this maintenance insures efficiency optimizes costs, and insures maximum uptime. This person can become the “heart” of your program, click here and read how the best companies in the world make this work and keep their “heart” healthy.
“Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a hierarchy of metrics which evaluates and indicates how effectively a manufacturing operation is utilized.”
-from Wikipedia
It is never more important than in difficult economic times to take a hard look in the mirror and judge how effectively and efficiently you are utilizing your investments in capital equipment. This is true for all industries and now printers have tools at their disposal to better understand their production and to discover where they can become more efficient. This is especially true if you own a Heidelberg Speedmaster press with a Prinect Press Center control console.
Owners of Heidelberg Speedmaster models can now participate in Prinect Performance Benchmarking, a new subscription based service offered by Heidelberg that empowers owners and managers to visualize the performance of their connected presses, and compare them, with complete anonymity to the performance of similarly configured presses regionally, globally, or both. Once activated, the shop is provided access to a highly secured server hosted by Heidelberg that can be accessed at any time without restriction. Prinect Performance Benchmarking shows the Speed Index, Time Index, and Quality Index - the essential factors in determining your OEE. You can also graphically see how the press in question is performing compared to the best in class and the average performance of all connected presses.
Rest assured that the data that is collected is completely anonymous and no job, company, or operator data will be submitted. The only data that is collected is that which is related to the operating time and performance of the press(es). We will collect information which includes...
· The time that the machine is powered up compared to the time that it is in production
· Number of plate changes
· Running speeds in production and in makeready
· Good sheet counter vs. waste sheet counter
Performance can be filtered by machine configuration, average number of plate changes, working time (shifts), and market segment (commercial, folding carton, book, label, etc.). All that is required is that the operator properly uses the good sheet counter.
Naturally, the viability of this offering depends completely on having a good population of machines connected, so we are offering the first 12 months of the subscription at no charge. There are only three prerequisites:
1. a signed agreement (the legal stuff)
2. the press must have a Prinect Press Center with Speedmaster version S10A or newer
3. the press must be connected to the Heidelberg HEI-Res server (used for remote service/diagnostics)
If you are interested in analyzing your performance and using that valuable information for continuous improvement leading to higher efficiency and profitability, then Prinect Performance Benchmarking is the tool that you have been waiting for - and best of all it's free for the first year!
Please contact James Mauro at James.Mauro@Heidelberg.com for additional information and sign on to Prinect Performance Benchmarking.
Start taking the steps to higher performance today!
-jjm
It's a wonderful day at Heidelberg USA! Today, fifty of our progeny are here for a full day as part of the Take Our Sons and Daughters To Work Day initative. Broken into two groups, ages 8-11 and Ages 12-18, the children of our employees are exploring their goals and talents and learning about the print industry. This afternoon, for example, they will see a demonstration in our North American Printing and Packaging Technology Center on how a cereal box is created from beginning to end. We will post pictures at the end of the day, but just looking at their faces and seeing their interest and attentiveness is inspirational. Our HR and Activities team are happy to answer any questions or work with you to arrange such an event in your shop! Email Cyrille Cardona for more information.
In light of the challenging economy and the uncertainty of the future that all businesses share, Printers are keeping their presses longer. With the right maintenance you can keep your press in peak condition. The questions that printers need to ask themselves are these: “Is my operator conducting the appropriate maintenance? Are they doing it well? Does the press’s performance reflect this?” Autonomous Maintenance is a holistic approach that incorporates activities outside of “recommended” maintenance to insure long equipment life. For a detailed explanation on this, click here and read the article “Operator Maintenance or Autonomous Maintenance” by Malcom Jones.
Print production efficiency. It’s the talk of most of our conferences and industry articles. The production process is only as good as it’s weakest link where work in process (WIP) builds up. Remember the I Love Lucy show where Ethel and Lucy are working in the chocolate factory? They were good when the belt conveyor was running slow! What happened when the boss turned it up? Well, they were throwing the chocolate in their hats, eating as much as they could.
Driving your overall manufacturing cost down by increasing net production and reducing labor is essential in today’s competitive environment. Take a look at your folding and stitching areas. Many shops have invested in automated folders and stitchers, only to realize the speed and productivity gains are limited by a bottle neck at the delivery. So, you add labor at the delivery, but that goes in the face of efficiency gains. The question remains, how to we get the most from these machines? If we all look at the results coming off shops’ equipment, the average runs speed are probably between 5-7k an hour, due to this unloading limitation.
For a solution with 1 up, 2 up or even 3 up jobs is to consider automating your deliveries too with high capacity. With the right solution it is possible to stack and band for instance a 3 up letter fold job at 45k and hour! In the end, look at your overall process and match the right solution with automated deliveries.
In many cases, unloading and packing can be reduced to one person! The operator can load the continuous feeder on the folder and the delivery has enough buffering space for them to package the bander products onto a skid or cartons. One person can handle the entire process!
For a closer look at Heidelberg’s offerings of the palamides automatic bander and TSH+SPA delivery, please click on folder or stitcher.
See the CO2 footprint of manufacturing a press in comparison to running the press – that and more information was part of a presentation I gave this week to the winners of What They Think.com Environmental Innovations Award. My presentation was titled “What on Earth are we doing?” Here is my presentation. Find more details about the footprint of a press in our annual sustainability report – you can download it from our eco-site: http://www.us.heidelberg.com/www/html/en/content/articles/about/environment/green_resources
If you have any questions feel free to email me at Joerg<dot>daehnhardt<at>Heidelberg<dot>com.
Yes? How do you know?
What are your metrics in production, sales and administration?
How often do you review data?
What are your actions when you over-/underperform?
We have seen in the past that a lot of printers measure their success by the end of the month and see if they made money or not. Isn’t that too late? Too late to react?
Let’s get the discussion started! How do you measure your success?
MRO (Maintenance Repair Operations) Inventory are those spare parts you keep around to insure your press stays up and running. Do you think you should keep any at all? Do you know if it makes sense for your shop? It’s true that the bigger the operation, the more this is necessary, but even smaller operations benefit from a solid MRO program and inventory. Here is an article that will help you determine whether or not this is important to your shop. Click here to read.
With bigger, faster printing presses able to do the work of 3 older model machines, machine uptime is more critical than ever. Maintenance and reliability are keys to success in this area and the best publication I know for this subject is Uptime magazine (www.uptimemagazine.com). This month’s edition includes an article on maintaining data integrity as well as equipment, which definitely applies to the high tech printers of today. Click here for this month’s issue.
In our consulting work, we often see waste that is simply a result of “that’s how we’ve always done it”. For example, consider how you calculate waste for a print job. The old “habit” is to calculate it based on the number of colors. Is that the best way to do this? Shouldn’t makeready today be in a range of 300-500 sheets?
For example:
Let’s consider a 2-sided job, with CMYK on both sides. The format size is irrelevant.
If we calculate waste based on our habit of “100 sheets per color”, we end up with 800 sheets makeready.
|
Old “Habit” |
800 sheets makeready |
|
Assume paper cost of $150 per 1,000 sheets |
$120 per makeready |
|
New “Habit” |
500 sheets makeready |
|
Assume paper cost of $150 per 1,000 sheets |
$75 per makeready |
We save $45 in paper on every single makeready. While that may not seem like a lot, consider how it compounds daily, weekly and in a year.
How much could you save in a year if you cut your makeready to 300-500 sheets and only 2-3 pulls?
The US sales & service unit of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG. www.us.heidelberg.com
