Big Picture - October 2016 - 28

Print shops talk finishing as a bottleneck, laser versus knife, and automated versus manual. B Y A D R I E N N E PA L M E R 28 step in a printed project for your client. Depending on dry time, there's an almost immediate jump to stacking, routing, cutting, trimming, and laminating. And in today's one-stop business environment, the majority of print shops are offering these services in house. According to the 2016 SGIA Specialty Graphics Industry Survey Benchmarking Report, 92 percent of companies report they provide post-print/finishing services. Of those who do, they are most likely to utilize lamination, grommeting, mounting, and installation. In the Q1 survey's report of the graphics and sign community specifically, the top fi nishing/post-production services offered by PSPs include lamination (86.6 percent) and grommeting (81.3 percent). Eighty percent of those surveyed currently have lamination/mounting equipment in house; 11.5 percent planned to buy more this year. And 70 percent have cutting, trimming, routing, and die-cutting equipment, while 13.8 percent planned to purchase more this year - both increases from 2015. Even a white paper compiled by ISA, InfoTrends, and MCT Technologies, "Wide-Format Cutting Devices: An Overview for Sign & Graphics Companies," stresses the importance of print shops devoting the same resources to their postpress capabilities as they do to the rest of their workflow, saying "Finishing is not an option, but a must for digital printing to march forward." The report goes as far as saying, "Without continuous, significant increases in cutting capacity, material versatility, speed, and material handling automation, continued investments in faster and wider printers may prove fruitless, eventually eroding growth and profits," emphasizing that innovations in substrates and print speeds will not solve printers' workflow challenges unless they invest equally in finishing. So, with the necessity of in-house finishing, what equipment does your shop currently utilize on a day-to-day basis? Is postpress work your bottleneck? Are you finding automation is your go-to for saving time and laser cutting is a better fit for your media-cutting needs? Here, two print shops reflect on what works best for their digital finishing projects. Breaking the Bottleneck There's always one bottleneck in a print shop, and with increasingly faster print speeds and a myriad of different types of printable media, this tends to fall in the finishing department. "We are seeing more and more of our customers wanting retail advertising that has more dimension to it," says Kevin Ortiz, partner, Laurel Graphics (laurelgraphics.com). "We've added more digital finishing equipment to try and keep up with our printing capabilities, also working with outside finishing vendors that have equipment that complements what we do, i.e., die cutting, embossing, etc." Laurel Graphics offers guillotine cutting, laminating, routing, mounting, back slitting, and scoring in-house with two guillotine cutters, two digital cutting and routing tables, two laminators, and a slitting machine, for materials such as PVC, Ultraboard, Foamboard, corrugated cardboard, acrylic, wood, and styrene products. David Leavey, VP, Creative Printing (cpckc.com) agrees. "The first thing we look at is 'How are we going to plan the finishing?' In today's world, the printing is the easiest part of the process. Quantity and complexity of die cut also play a huge role," he says. "For example, say you have a back panel project and the order is for 100 panels. Each panel is 48 x 70 inches and has 3000 holes in it. If we ran this on our digital cutter it would take 40 minutes a sheet, for a total of roughly 67 hours of work. Last year, we put in a flatbed die cutter that is 54 x 78 inches and now we can do that same job in one hour." Creative Printing focuses on in-store signage, displays, and cartons. They use two laminators, two cutter/router tables, and IM AGE S COUR T E S Y OF CRE AT I V E PRIN T ING BIG PICTURE October 2016 Printing a piece of media is far from the last http://www.laurelgraphics.com http://www.cpckc.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Big Picture - October 2016