One on One — Ulrik Nygaard on Finishing

It used to be said that finishing was the bottleneck in print production. Is that still true?

The smart printers have invested in finishing equipment so that there is no bottleneck there any longer for them. This was an issue before and a lot of that was because they would spend the majority of their investment on the press or prepress and there wouldn’t be enough left to spend on the finishing side. That has changed in the last five years or so. Printers are realizing the finishing side is the area of their total process where they have the biggest opportunity to reduce labor. They have to do this, first, to reduce costs, but also because they have to. They can’t find the labor they need.