One on One — Ulrik Nygaard on Finishing

Ulrik Nygaard became CEO of Baumfolder Corporation in 2002, capping a graphic arts industry career that began at Danish East Asiatic Company, some three decades ago. In that time, he has had responsibilities in Asia, Germany, Britain and the United States for an evolving series of organizations, including Heidelberg Eastern, AM Graphics and Harris Graphics. During the NPES INDUSTRY SUMMIT in Chicago, he shared his insights on finishing today.

What have been the most striking changes in finishing? How much has the automation revolution affected the postpress department?

I think there has been a very significant change toward more operator friendly machines, in the direction of semi-automatic and to fully automated machines, and of course JDF is the next step. I think that is driven, in large part, by the fact that it has become more and more difficult for our customers and users of the equipment to find skilled labor. They are looking for machines that are more operator friendly, easier to set up and more productive.

How closely integrated is finishing with pressroom and prepress now. Is JDF workflow a reality?

It is, but it is moving very slowly into the finishing department. There is a lot of talk about it, and a lot of companies that offer it, (us included) but I think there are a lot fewer printers that actually use it. Part of the problem is a legacy issue. There is a tremendous amount of equipment out there in the marketplace that doesn’t have that compatibility. So the printer can’t just say, “As of next month we want to do total JDF workflow integration,” because the equipment can’t do it. And he can’t just say, “Well then, I’m going to change the whole fleet of equipment out.” It’s going to be a gradual process in the finishing department and in the whole printing company.

Do you ever envision being able to run a finishing department with nobody on the shop floor?

I know they have automated some areas of finishing from one process to another, but today there is not an off-the-shelf product you can buy that will do all of it in a “lights-out” manner. The problem is that there are so many different processes that take place in the finishing department. But I think that eventually, we will get there, or close.

What’s the minimal operator necessity?

The use of finishing equipment involves moving paper, folding it, cutting it, stitching it, putting glue on it, or drilling holes in it, etc. You have more opportunities for jams in the machine, and an operator has to be there to make sure that doesn’t happen. The machine has jam detectors, so it will stop it if you have a jam, but then somebody has to be there to get started again. You also have the inherent problems with paper, in that it behaves differently from day to day. There are a lot of factors, such as humidity, temperature or just sitting an extra day. So often, we have heard an operator say, “I ran that job perfectly last night, turned the machine off, then came back this morning and it won’t run, and I have to tweak the machine again.” The challenge from our side is to make the machine more forgiving.

It is getting harder to find trained and skilled operators in bindery and finishing. We get hundreds and hundreds of calls every month from operators with questions. We have recorded and addressed all of those questions. We have tried to address all of the most common ones in our tutorials and on our website at www.baumfolder.com. We also provide factory training schools for the end users to attend to build the skill levels to today’s requirements.

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.

What is the actual labor reduction that’s possible? Three people to one?

It depends on what kind of product you are talking about. In a larger operation where they have several folders, they may have one skilled operator in charge of multiple folders and supplement the labor requirements with unskilled or semi-skilled labor to handle the output. The addition of automatic pressing, stacking and banding devices on the exit end, and adding some degree of automation to the folder, can help reduce the labor to one person per folder for some applications.

For presses, at least, it is often said that the marketing life of the machine is a lot shorter than its mechanical life. Is that also true in the finishing department?

The comment is not quite as relevant for the finishing side of the business. It is probably more relevant to the more sophisticated presses and on the prepress side. Because at the end of the day, what we do in finishing is we fold, we cut, we glue, we drill and we stitch.

On the other hand, there’s also a lot of value added that goes on in the finishing side, with inkjet, co-mailing and the like. That is what we’re seeing. You hear all the time that printers are trying to find ways and means to add more value to the product they offer their customers. For example, in some direct mail applications, the finishing side is hooked up directly to either a digital printer or a preprinted roll, so you can take the job off an unwind stand, cut it and fold it, and the next step is that you automatically transfer it into an envelope inserter.

How involved should vendors be in training the end user?

It’s a given. Every printer expects that when he gets a new piece of equipment, there is some degree of training provided. We maintain a strong factory authorized network of factory-trained dealers to provide local service and training to the end users. We also offer end users the chance to send their operators to the training courses we have on a regular schedule in our factory. In very specific cases, we will go out to the end user and help with the training.

We can see a commonality in all of the questions we are getting, and we thought we might as well try and answer some of those common questions on our website. Questions like, how to resolve quality issues in folding, and so on. This has been fairly successful, but it takes a long time before people realize they can go there and get this information.

In addition to user friendliness, how much more improvement is possible in terms of the actual mechanics of folding a print job?

With some of the higher speed machines, there are improvements being made to increase productivity and deal with different types of paper, but in terms of the actual folding process, we have been in business for 90 years, and the basic concept of how you fold is still the same. We are working on faster and on more accurate folding, to reduce the setup time so you can change from one fold to another in a matter of seconds. These are all things that are very valuable to the end user so they can improve the productivity of the finishing department significantly.

Does the creative community give enough thought to folding as a creative process?

They probably haven’t because they may not know what is possible. In some cases, it’s a fairly inexperienced person in terms of printing processes who is going to make the decision about what medium is to be used and he may not know what is possible on a press or a post-press piece of equipment. But we do often get questions where the customer says, “How the heck do I do this?” They have a job come in, and they say, “I’ve never seen this before, how do I do this? How do they come up with this stuff?” Often, the designers have no real idea what the equipment can do and cannot do.

Do you think it’s possible any longer for a vendor to “go it alone” in the marketplace, or is it really necessary to be part of a more comprehensive solution?

Even the largest manufacturers on the finishing side have partnerships with other manufacturers to offer total solutions. That’s a good shortcut, to be able to offer those solutions to the end user. I think everybody needs to have, and probably already does have, some strategic alliances and partnerships where they combine their products with others and offer a total solution to the customer. Of course, on the distribution side, you have that going on all the time. A lot of our dealers sell presses, they sell cutters, sometimes from us and sometimes from another company. They sell folders, they sell binders, and not all of it comes from one vendor. So they go to the end user and say, here’s a total solution.

If you could project yourself five years into the future, what would you say were the biggest developments of the previous five years?

I would say there will be more and more workflow integration in the printing company, integration that goes all the way through from prepress to press and postpress, but I think that will take time because of the legacy issues of the installed base. We are all dealing with the consolidation that is going on both on the printer side and the manufacturer side. To me, one of the key issues is training, training, training. When we get a call and an end user has a problem with one of our products, nine out of ten times it’s a training issue. I don’t think that’s going to get any better, it’s only going to get worse. In five years I hope I can say we have done a good job of providing better training to our dealers and our end users, either through direct training or through training aids that come with the equipment.