Making the future perfect

To deliberate about the problems faced by printers viz pricing, manpower and day-to-day technical, The Printing Technologists Forum, Chennai recently organized a one-day seminar on offset printing. With the sessions focused on ‘pricing strategy, talent management and root cause analysis, a success story’ by a renowned printer was also presented highlighting how success becomes reality.

On the occasion, K Vipinendran, associate professor – printing, Anna University, gave ample practical ideas on “Significance of Value Added Pricing Strategy”. He insisted on a meeting with the customer to do PMI, i.e. informing all the Plus, Minus and Interesting points. Vipinendran also emphasised on educating customers regarding the current technology telling him about the benefits he would get from it and how some value addition would enhance the product at a reasonable price.

Presenting the basic principles of a root cause analysis, NR Kumar, MD, MWN Press, demonstrated with practical examples of four different jobs how the running problems encountered while printing, were solved finding out the root cause. In all the cases he discussed, printing was not an issue but unexpected related areas like CorelDraw file, cutting margins, coating or laminating machines, etc. In fact, these were detected while printing was on or completed, reprinting resulting in additional cost for the press. Just to take one typical case: while printing was on, colour variation was detected, especially black gave poor reproduction. The machine was stopped and the normal areas like ink flow, platemaking, processing, etc were checked. Nothing wrong. Finally, the CorelDraw file was checked. Presto! CMYK converted to RGB. CorelDraw was re-installed, no problem, printing became perfect. Loss for the press involving 24 plates and makeready time. From then on, preflighting is resorted to. Kumar advises debate with the operators, in situ and multifunctional reasons to be looked into. The scope for root cause analysis would be less rejection, quality improvement, avoidance of delay and wastage control.

KB Shanmugasundaram, senior associate director, SPS, told the methods to pick up a talented person, nurture him/her and retain. Through case studies, he explained how the talent was identified and developed in the organization and how it was retained. Talent should not only be picked up but also managed appropriately. Opportunities were given with step-by-step promotion, and for keeping abreast with technology the persons were trained adequately. Responsibility and authority with close monitoring were given to them stagewise.

Karthik Ravi, vice president-operations, MultiVista Global Ltd, a third generation executive from the family, traced the history from his grandfather’s time, how his uncle R Jayaraman started a press with a treadle machine, in 1974. His father R Ravi joined to look after the production, stagewise developments with other brothers of Jayaraman joining as managing director and another one started a trading operation. Now MultiVista is housed in a 5-acre in suburbs, the company is growing to such an extent, becoming an ISO-certified using SAP and ERP platforms for integration of various businesses. It is now EOU organization.

-D Ramalingam