Careers in Print: Production

[00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, welcome to introduction to production printing careers in print. This is the production edition, and we hope that you had a chance to see the previous edition where we talked about the pre press area. We talked about the roles and the superpowers but Ryan McAbee my partner and myself, Pat McGrew, we’re here this time to share some of the wisdom that we have picked up over decades.

That really talks to the roles of the people in the print shop. We talk about it as having superpowers, Ryan, because frankly, every single person, every single day, in every single print shop, everywhere in the world, becomes a hero at some point during the day.

[00:00:46] Ryan McAbee: It’s heroic that, a print shop can do and get the work out that it does in a day and that’s across the board, right?

 There’s demands from clients the clients. They come in with all kind of changes at the last minute. You have to figure out how to shuffle it around how to move other jobs out of the way so that you can get this rush order through so it definitely is a very hero driven kind of business in many aspects. What you’re looking at here though is a org chart for kind of a typical business So you have that kind of C level suite with all the C acronyms up top.

 If you’re a small printer that might be compressed into a couple of roles and the owner might do a lot of those kinds of functions. What we’re really talking about and focusing in on here is under that column where it says the chief operating officer or operations director and inside of that, you’ll see production managers and then pre press and equipment operators and warehouse operator.

That is the production. These are the people that are literally on the shop. Inside of your print shop where you see all the equipment and the warehouse and all of this kind of stuff. So we’re going to start off with our first superhero here, which is the print operations managers. So what superpowers do we see there, Pat?,

[00:01:52] Pat McGrew: This is combination air traffic controller, agency traffic manager, shepard, conductor that they are the people who are watching every aspect of print jobs as they come in, and as they move through the process. When we say that they keep the train moving like a conductor, we’re not kidding, because.

There are so many moving parts to a print job not just the substrates and the consumables that go into the actual printing piece, but getting the files prepped. Getting them imposed the way they need to be. Making sure that presses are available, finishing equipment is available, coordinating with schedulers and planners, coordinating with sales and estimators.

 These are the people who have the most responsibility sitting on their shoulders. They have to be able to inspire their teams because, as I said to start, on any given day of the week, something’s going to go wrong. They will be asked to be heroes because things happen. Customers change their mind after the print job has already started. Substrate. It turns out the substrate you plan to print on, nobody checked to see to learn that it was damaged when it was delivered. And all of a sudden you don’t have the right substrates. A delivery of your consumables is missing. You don’t have enough ink or you don’t have enough toner.

All these things are in their purview to get solved. And they do that not only by working with their team to find ways forward, but also by leveraging their network of printing friends. Very often print operations managers are very friendly with the print operations managers in other printing shops in, in the local area or in the region. If they are lacking some anchor, lacking some toner, or they’re missing a cutting blade or some other disaster has befallen the shop, they have people they can go to that might be willing to lend lend the ink, lend the toner, lend the blade. That’s all around personality and being able to develop that persona of someone people look to not only inspire them, but to help grease the wheels.

These are the people who keep an eye out for interdepartmental rivalries. I know it’s shocking, but it does happen. This department and that department, for some reason, don’t get along. This is the person who’s going to be charged with getting those things resolved and not allowing it to blow up.

These are the people who are backstopping the project management plans. Sometimes this person has enough expertise to look at the project plan developed by the planner and the scheduler and say. That’s not going to happen that way because this is going to happen and it’s going to take longer or you left too much time. We can actually do it faster. When we say they fuss over resources like Scrooge McDuck.

It’s because they don’t want to be without them. It’s not just stuff. It’s not just consumables. It’s also the staff. These are the people who are watching to see who’s doing their job, who’s learning, who’s not learning, who might need some help and who might be a candidate for moving into a new role, right?

They’re really the overseers looking at everything. They’ve got to be equally emotionally available and data aware because they use all of those talents. Very often, you’ll find that print operations managers grow up in a print shop. They go through a lot of different jobs before they achieve the print operations manager role, because it takes knowledge of all the work to understand how to really do the job well.

[00:05:19] Ryan McAbee: I think two key components to their role, and it goes to that resources and the Gantt chart and the data and the dashboard aspect is that they want to make sure that they have the resources that are needed that you mentioned, that the materials are there, that if they need extra blades or consumables for the equipment, that it’s all there. The flip side of that is they really want to make sure that costs are controlled because, you estimated a job to have This amount of labor, this amount of cost that would protect your profitability that you have in the job.

But if you need that overruns or you can’t achieve that’s going to affect how you may lose money on that job in the end. They really are the overseers to make sure that your operations can meet that brief. The other aspect is that they should be highly focused on waste. You don’t want to have a waste cause because they, the printing or the finish equipment is not maintained correctly. You don’t want to have hickeys on the print out, so to speak, or some other kind of print defect. You don’t want to have it get finishing and the operator set, have a setting on the machine, correct so that it eats through half of the print run, and then you have to go back on press to get more quantity.

 All of that managing of the jobs as they come through. That’s definitely a superpower for the print operations manager.

[00:06:28] Pat McGrew: They set the culture, right? To a very large extent, you find that every print shop you go into has a culture and some of them are laughy fun places, but they’re still, they’re very accurate.

Others are very taciturn and just the facts. But this is the person who’s responsible for setting the tone of the shop, how how much coordination is going to happen between departments? How friendly are people? How willing are people to go ask for help when they need it?

How willing is someone to say I made a mistake? This person sets the culture that makes everything work.

[00:07:00] Ryan McAbee: That’s a very good point. Let’s talk about some actual operational level roles that are also have superpowers. The first step in the production chain is typically in the pre press operator realm.

This is an area where it’s changed a lot over the years. We went from basically a very artisan based role to it’s much more of a technology based role these days, but you still have to know what you’re doing. Customers will submit their data and files and you’ve got to figure out if they gave you everything that you intended to get. That the file structurally is usable or the data is structurally usable. If it’s not, you pro you have to figure out either a, are they going to fix it? Or more than likely, how am I going to fix it? With the tool set that I have. So there really are black belt ninjas when it comes to software and all the tools they use from creative design programs to color management, to imposition programs, so that you can lay out the artwork to optimize your material usage when it gets to the printing.

 They really should also have kind of that sixth sense understanding of the interplay between color and the paper and lighting conditions and how all that kind of plays together when it’s going to be produced in the end.

 In printing, we’re really in a 2D format, but a two dimensional format, but they really probably see things more in 3D because at the end of the day, especially now that we’re getting into more kind of signage wide format, we’re getting the packaging. That’s all structural as well. It’s not just a flat

[00:08:26] Pat McGrew: And embellishment is the other place where you really need to be able to see that way. I think they actually deserve two capes, not just one, because if you think about shops that are producing direct mail, also producing wide format, maybe role fit and flatbed printing of large format or grand format pieces, they might be doing label printing as well.

There are general commercial shops that have grown to be able to print on just about every substrate, whether it’s a bolt of fabric to vinyl to glass to wood. The prepress operators have to understand how color, how ink, how toner, whatever their methods are, how those colors are going to lay down on those substrates to meet the customer’s vision of what they’re buying.

 It’s very special set of skills that gets them there. Imagine the order comes in where we’re printing stickers that are going to go on the floor. We’re printing banners that are going to go in a trade show booth. We’re printing business cards, and we’re printing trifold brochures, but that logo better look identical on every one of them.

[00:09:29] Pat McGrew: This is the person responsible for understanding color profiling and how ink will lay or anchor toner will lay on the substrate to be able to achieve that color requirement.

[00:09:41] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely true. That’s usually the first step in kind of the production floor. Then it usually moves on to people that we would typically say are attached to the equipment in some way, shape or form.

They’re interacting with pieces, usually not one piece of equipment anymore these days. Usually they’re doing several pieces of equipment, especially if it’s in the digital printing side. We have printing equipment operators. So how do they bend the laws of physics and what makes them tick?

[00:10:06] Pat McGrew: The interesting thing about a modern printing equipment operator, and it’s true, whether it’s an offset press, a gravure press , or it’s one of the many digital presses that are in the market, the operator has a lot of responsibilities for the way the jobs get queued in the way they release the jobs to the presses or to the CTPs to build the plates.

They have a lot of responsibilities. In a lot of ways, they’re also responsible for making sure that once a job begins, it actually looks the way it’s supposed to look. They’re the first arbiter of whether this print job is actually going to be acceptable to the customer or not. If you start seeing reds that look more orange, or you start to see that blacks seem to look blue, normally the operator is the first one to raise the red flag and stop the job and say, wait a minute, we’ve got a problem here.

 What I think of in terms of bending the laws of physics is very often they can adjust moisturizers, adjust dryers, and change the way the ink or the toner is behaving on the substrate without having to go to someone else today without actually repairing a file. They do it on the machine by being magicians. It’s hard to know if they’re bending the law of physics or they’re just magicians. I think the jury’s out on that one.

These people have to be mechanically minded as well, because usually the operators are also responsible for machine maintenance. The thing that we know is that shops that do not pay attention to machine maintenance wind up with more problems and poor print quality than those that are actually religious about it.

[00:11:41] Ryan McAbee: The other thing that we should have added to the list here was x ray vision. So much of an operator’s responsibility, or should be, is a checklist for quality control. As things are coming off the piece of equipment, in this case, a printer of some sort. What does the print quality look like? What does the color quality look like? How is the ink actually, is the ink actually sitting on the substrate how we expected it to, or is something changed to where we now have to let it dry before it goes into a finishing process. These are all things that the printing operator is going to be doing.

It’s like second nature. You don’t see them doing this in many cases, but they’re doing it, right? It’s definitely this. mechanical mindset that they need because it is a physical piece of equipment that you have to nurture.

You have to get it to do things. Sometimes it doesn’t naturally want it to do.

[00:12:28] Pat McGrew: They have eyes in the back of their head too. I’m convinced of it.

[00:12:32] Ryan McAbee: They have to these days because, like we mentioned, if it’s a digital printing environment they’re probably tending to two, three pieces of equipment.

[00:12:40] Pat McGrew: Press equipment and finishing equipment. If you look at a typical book line it’s not one long line. It’s looping back on itself in order to get the books produced. They have to be aware of all the modules that are there in addition to the printing that’s going on.

If they have presses that are attached in line to finishing, they have to be the master of that entire line from roll into or pallette in to finish product out. It’s a big job. Very often these people don’t get lots of training when they first get assigned to the job. The people who are successful in these roles are the people who are mechanically minded. They’re kinetically focused. They understand the requirement of print quality. It’s in their DNA for whatever reason, and they just embrace it.

Some of the fun things that are happening in this space, are More and more of the equipment vendors are providing virtual reality help for the maintenance on the machines. We’re seeing more use of the virtual reality headsets. You’re seeing into the machine but sometimes attached to a support person who can see what through the glasses so that they can help you make the best maintenance decisions or to diagnose a problem or to identify something that you can do to make the print quality better. That means that these people not only have to be mechanically minded, they need to be gamers too. I think that some of the best operators I know are gamers.

[00:14:08] Ryan McAbee: You’re right. The equipment manufacturers have really computerized and digitized everything. You’ve got to understand software and how to interact with the equipment in that way. That goes to your training aspect. You really do need to make sure that the equipment operators get proper training on the interfaces, the software component of that mechanical device, because that’s where a lot of the automation and efficiencies really are going to be.

And speaking of that, we have after it gets printed…

[00:14:35] Pat McGrew: Everything that we just said. Yeah, everything we just said applies to this person too. In some shops, it’s the same operator doing both jobs. In some shops, there are actually finishing equipment operators and press operators. They need the same skill sets, but we often find that finishing equipment lags behind printing equipment in terms of being installed. The newest version being installed in shops. Finishing equipment has a history of long amortization tables and long life, right? I’ve walked into shops with 30 and 40 year old finishing equipment that’s still running every day and everybody’s happy.

Those finishing operators that don’t have the advantage of automated consoles that are telling them if a blades out of alignment, they have to be able to determine that. They need the ability to understand what to do to adjust things to get things back the way they need to be. I think of finishing operators as having their hands in the machines a lot more than maybe the press operators.

So the press operators, it’s usually when it’s maintenance time, but finishing it’s set up for every job. And on the older equipment where that’s not done automatically, or it’s not reading a JDF file for the setup information. That finishing operator has to be able to read the specification and know what to do to that finishing device to make sure that the right stuff is being done. The cuts are in the right place. The folds and creases are in the right places and die cuts are in the right places.

[00:15:57] Ryan McAbee: I 100 percent agree that we see more mechanically driven things at this point in finishing because of that long life of the equipment. The other thing is that they need to be more critical of a quality control aspect because they’re really the last mile, so to speak, in production before it gets boxed or palletized and shipped. If they don’t catch something. It’s going to end up as a defect and it may turn around and be kicked back by the customer.

At this point in the production cycle, they’re creating the finished product. It’s going even more so from that 2D kind of flat sheet or material to some finished product in the end, whether that’s a book, whether that’s a flyer, poster whatever the thing is. They probably have an even more critical role in some aspects than for the operation than even the printing operators.

Last but not least in the production area, we have warehouse operators. They’re shipping technicians. There’s a lot of different names that these folks can go by, but they’re really responsible at the end of the day to know. That product exists either in a warehouse shelf or it’s coming off of the production line. They have to always have a running list in their head of not only the time, but they have to coordinate with the cutoff times of the shippers that they may be contracting with whether that’s UPS, Fedex, whoever it is. They might even courier the products themselves going locally or the town over. They have this constantly running clock along with their work in progress list where they know things are coming in and then they really are the ones that figure out how to optimize the shipping cost based on the timing that the customer needs. Does it have to go to a priority?

[00:17:32] Pat McGrew: Or the mail drop that you’re trying to hit.

[00:17:33] Ryan McAbee: Or the mail drop you’re trying to hit if you’re a mailer. Any other superpowers stand out for this group that’s at the end of the process here?

[00:17:39] Pat McGrew: More and more, again, I put the gamer aspect into this. The reason I say that is because it’s not just that GUIs on software are getting friendlier. The other thing that’s happening in warehouses is that we’re watching more robotics enter the table, right?

What’s happened over the last 15 years that I’ve been, Looking and really paying attention to it is I’m seeing more and more warehouse robots, and they do a lot of different jobs. They might be co bots that are helping to pack boxes and position them on pallets. They might be material transport robots that are actually going to a shelf, reading a barcode, grabbing what they need, setting it on their They’re transport and then moving it to the end of a press. There’s a lot of that going on too.

And warehouse operators who are working in a robotically enabled environment, whether it’s just cobot, robot arms for packing or mail tray building, or actually moving pallets around. They need another set of skills to be able to work with that program software that drives those robots and co bots and it’s a gamer skill.

It’s the ability to know how this thing is going to move and how it’s, some of the robots require lines painted on the floor for them to travel. But more and more, we’re seeing GPS enabled robots that are able to move around freely and they have to be smart enough to know where people are. It’s no fair tripping over people. And it’s no fair running into machines and it’s no fair dropping things, right? Those things aren’t acceptable. The warehouse operator has to be aware of what resources they have in that respect too, and make sure that they’re working as efficiently as possible to deliver the right things to the right place at the right time.

[00:19:26] Ryan McAbee: Even if you haven’t gotten to the robotics, there’s still more technology that’s crept into this area because if you’re doing any kind of inventory management, you’re probably using barcode with either a tablet or other kind of scanner so that you can tag in, tag out things. Even when you receive materials, all that kind of activities happening as well.

There’s also software that will help you optimize the shipping across those carriers that we mentioned before. So that’s another kind of interaction point where gamer type personality would find it easier to learn those types of solutions as well.

Across the board, there’s a lot of superhero and heroic efforts that go into production on a daily basis.

And we hope this gave you a little bit of guidance on maybe where you can fit in a printing world. If you’re not an employee and inside of a print shop now. Or maybe understand a little bit about what your coworker does before you get it, or after it moves on from where you’re at and just a good general education here on everything that happens in the print shop.

We hope that you join us for a future episode here at the print university. And until then, don’t

[00:20:26] Pat McGrew: forget to wash your cape.