The one unchangeable fact about print finishing is that there is always a need to find ways to be more productive with what you have on hand. Deadlines can change, workloads can overwhelm without notice, and new equipment can force changes to old operating habits. Whether your equipment is old or new, here are six areas for study that can yield some surprising improvements in productivity.
Mention ‘friction feeder’ to someone with bindery experience and you just might see them curl their lip in disgust. It’s in the same category as ‘static’, something to be avoided. But like static, friction has its uses and benefits when understood and applied correctly, especially with regard to friction feeders.
One frustrating aspect of a bindery supervisor’s job is that you often get a lot of responsibility yet have limited authority. You might be tasked each day with finishing dozens of jobs worth many thousands of dollars. Yet you have little or no say over how much time will be given your department to produce the work. Your bindery staff is probably limited, overtime spending or extra hiring requires painful authorizations, and buying additional equipment is nearly impossible.
Have you ever spent all night or all weekend working on a job because of a bindery equipment breakdown? If you’re like me, that’s probably the moment you took a keener interest in maintaining your equipment. It’s been my experience that a large number of printing companies have this type of ‘reactive maintenance’ program. When something breaks you fix it.
Have you ever said “yes” to a folding job only to find out the piece was a miniature fold which was too small for your equipment? I have, even though I had been specifically asked if any of our folding machines could do a job that small. After it arrived in the bindery and once I got over the initial panic, I remembered there was a simple technique for folding below the minimum published size.
Aside from the usual variety of scoring, perforating and cutting tools that you can add to your folding machine, there are other productivity add-ons you might not have heard about. Or maybe your post-press operation has grown, and that long-forgotten accessory you didn’t need five years ago is exactly what you need today.
Imagine this: your customer comes to you with a special bookbinding project. There is only one copy, it’s 800 pages long, it’s entirely hand illustrated and hand written on hand-made paper. Your binding method must be very sturdy in order to withstand repeated heavy handling. It must be artistically pleasing to some of the most famous and demanding artists in the world. And oh yes, it took the author untold years to complete to his perfectionist satisfaction.
Soon after we started the Bindery Success Blog, I was discussing this new ‘blog’ stuff with a colleague of ours who owns a sizable trade bindery operation. He asked, “So, what are you going to do when you run out of stuff to talk about?” Well, nearly 200 Bindery Success Blog articles later there are still plenty of ideas in the pipeline.
As a kid I loved escaping into science fiction books and magazines, blissfully wandering off to a future filled with incredible technologies. The stories made it easy to imagine myself in the cockpit of a 21st century spacecraft or a scientist in a cutting-edge lab. Whatever the story line happened to be I would get lost in the future fantasy.
There is a funny tendency in human beings to undermine their very own efforts at succeeding. Maybe it’s nature or nurture or a combination of both. Most of us at one time or another (me included) are guilty of occasional ‘self-sabotage.’ Here are five signs that you might be dooming yourself to falling short of your potential and harming your career.