Pressroom Performance Metrics

When you're talking about Pressroom or Inserting production - do you know how well your operation is performing? For many newspapers, Production's performance is evaluated only on delivering the newspaper on-time - also known as the press off-time, last truck out time or stop time. Independent of what you call it, making the newspaper delivery time will likely keep the Publisher satisfied until next year's budget cycle, but isn't a guarantee that the production process is efficient.

There are many times that the operation is not under deadline pressure or has a longer than necessary production window. If you're not careful, the production performance can shift into "cruise" to fill the production window, but this also reduces efficiency. Running the equipment at a slower than rated speed isn't giving the press a 'rest' or is any easier on the machinery - it's simply less efficient and increases production costs.

In today's newspaper industry environment, getting the most out of your operation is critical and tracking operating performance is essential to maximizing efficiency.

The basic benchmarks for any production operation is make-ready time, overall waste percentage, start-up waste count, running speed, and net speed. All of these variables can be measured and tracked to determine the efficiency of the pressroom.

A key evaluation point in a high performance pressroom is core waste - how much paper is on the core after a paster. Obviously core breaks and running off the core is not acceptable, but so is having 1" of newsprint on the core. The reel and paster adjustments should be fine-tuned to have approx. 1/4" of newsprint remaining on the core; otherwise it's like leaving dollar bills wrapped on every core.

Another important evaluation of your pressroom is start-up waste; the number of papers it takes to get a sellable copy off the press. If that number is 500 or 2500; start-up waste should be a continuous improvement initiative. The first question is to ask why was the first copy acceptable and the previous copy wasn't. Having the press-crew evaluate the last bad copy will enlighten them, and management, to issues and opportunities for improvement. Was the last bad copy rejected because of ink density - then investment in ink levelers or CIP4 ink presets might be easy ROI, or was the problem registration - then finding the root cause of the variation and upgrading reel stands or nips/trolleys might bring color into register faster and reduce start-up waste.

Not all jobs are created equal. If it's the press configuration or the number/size of inserts running in the packaging center; all jobs should have a difficulty factor. This is job specific performance targets based on history. If you're running all full-rolls on press, without angle bars or other special web moves, that the press should be able to run faster than if you have 1/4 rolls and angle-bars moving the web. So to maximize efficiency, establish performance targets for specific types of jobs.

So even if the newspaper is delivered on-time; the challenge in today's newspaper market is to establish detailed production performance metrics to find additional efficiency and reduce costs.