Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 31

Dan Kimmerly, operations manager at retail graphics provider KDM
P.O.P. (kdmpop.com), says the timing
wasn't right to adopt CTS until recently.
The company plans to implement the
technology by summer 2018. Drivers
included end-of-life liability with their
camera and imagesetting equipment,
plus the availability of faster, more
affordable machines.
Greg Kitson, president of Mind's
Eye Graphics (mindseyeg.com), waited
until 2006 to adopt CTS technology.
He compares its history to that of the
steam engine during the Industrial
Revolution: Steam engine technology
flourished as early as the 1780s, but,
because of a lack of support technology
- namely, iron and steel - railroads and
trains weren't practical until some 75
years later.
"The ScreenJet was a great idea," he
explains, "but the computer technology
didn't exist to really take advantage of it."
In the decade following the launch
of the ScreenJet, computers evolved
rapidly - and the public began understanding them better. New providers
began to take an interest in CTS,
including Kiwo, which hired McCue
to manage the development of the
technology. (He worked at Kiwo until
his retirement in 2016.) He'd bump into
Kitson throughout the early 2000s and
say, "Are you ready yet? Are you ready
yet? Are you ready yet?"
Kitson jokes that he was stubborn; he was stuck on the numbers
in his ROI spreadsheet. "I had tunnel
vision," he says, "in that I was trying
to make the justification simply based
on the film that I wouldn't be using."
But what he found when he bought a
Kiwo I-Jet, at long last, was a complete transformation of his workflow.
"I was thinking I'd be saving $2 per
screen in film; the reality is, I was saving 15 minutes per screen." At 90 to
120 screens a day, that's a lot of time
- and as we all know, time is money.
Would he have bought the ScreenJet
if he had known? No, he says, but he
adds he would've jumped into CTS
three years sooner.

Could've, should've - what would
McCue have done if he could go
back and do it all again? "I probably
would've sat on the patent for a while
and waited till the market was more
ready." But the question is worth asking: Doesn't someone have to simply
be the first? Would the innovations of

today have been made if not for those
early failures? McCue went on to file
a number of other patents, including
the first direct-exposure CTS system
and, most recently, a simultaneous
screen registration system. This is
a business where invention never
quits.

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december 2017 / january 2018

31
http://www.kdmpop.com http://www.mindseyeg.com http://www.anajet.com/screenprinting
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018
