No end in sight for trade finishing – Print21 magazine feature

Shoptalk about the demise of the trade finisher holds but a granule of truth, as the industry will always have need of trade finishers to handle project overflow and specialist work. Cameron Boggs talks with those in the know about the beginning and the end of finishing.

Finishing is where print becomes product, the transformation of sheets of paper covered in marks into saleable items… books, magazines, catalogues, reports and brochures. It is where the client becomes interested and where the industry makes much of its money. Cutting, folding, gluing, inserting, embossing, stitching; the list of finishing procedures goes on and every one has the potential to add value to the print.

Professional trade finishing companies are a solid and valued sector of the industry. Heavily capitalised in equipment and deeply invested in complex skill sets, finishing companies provide a necessary service to commercial printers, accepting work from all quarters, enabling busy shops to keep up with demand for printed products.

In recent times, a drive by commercial printers to take some finishing activities in-house has raised the spectre of the death of the professional finishing sector. If printers continue to do more of their own work, will there be enough left to maintain a vibrant and dedicated finishing industry? For some in the industry, the challenges have instigated serious concerns.

According to Peter Johnston, president of the Australian Print Finishers Association (APFA), trade finishers can no longer rely on high volume work to survive as the industry moves to more, and smaller, job runs, and with a lot of large volume work heading overseas because of current exchange rates.

As the managing director of trade finishing company, Lorimier, Johnston believes that finishers that are too specialised can become irrelevant. As a result, he has seen specialist finishing houses expand their offering to remain competitive. Since its founding in 1876, Lorimier has expanded from a specialist foil stamping/embossing company into the complementary services of laminating and spot UV (see page 59). It is part of a strategy to retain the customers’ business by offering a complete solution.

“If a person can get more than one service from a trade house, he won’t want to get it done from four places at a time,” says Johnston.

Specialised and automated

Industry professionals predict that finishing for offset print will remain largely unchanged, as the overheads of machinery to handle large format and capacity finishing at high speed remain out of reach for the average print house. Finishing for digital copy on the other hand is migrating in-house as basic creasing, folding and cutting can be achieved in short runs on small machines with low overheads and investment.

Despite the increase in the number of in-house investments, most commercial printers do not have a lot of finishing equipment. They nearly always have a guillotine and may invest in a folder or even a stitcher, but for specialist work such as PUR binding and die-cutting they look to the specialist finisher. Only large trade finishers can handle work such as case-bound books.

Even if they have joined the growing number of printers with in-house finishing, there are still plenty of jobs that are simply not suitable.

Heidelberg ANZ post press product manager, Brian Evans, points out that when printers receive a large-run print job they tend to not want to tie up their own finishing equipment and will outsource that work to trade finishers.

GBC Australia managing director, Stuart Macdonald, likewise feels trade finishers are safe, at least in the short-term. “But they will have to change their business models so they are no longer reliant on just high volume jobs. They will have to specialise in the tricky jobs, projects that require specialist skills,” he said.

Ferag Australia managing director, Thomas Klumpp, sees the future of finishing worldwide as one of more automation and easy operation.

“These are the two directions it has to go, because you can only reach a more competitive position in the market if you are more automated. On one hand, automation reduces the cost, on the other, make-ready times are quicker and the throughput is higher.

“This is not the death of finishing houses, because if your business model specialises in one particular area better than anyone else, you can still be successful,” he comments.

Skills are an issue
That print finishing is often seen as an afterthought is a cause of distress for teachers and trainers. They claim that, in many cases, due to a lack of skilled personnel the final product is not reaching the highest possible standard. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) teacher of finishing, Phil Barnes, says the emphasis on finishing at ICGT (International Centre of Graphic Technology) is on quality, “whether we are finishing one copy or a million, the principles and processes remain the same.”

“As well as running our normal Certificate III Program for apprentices, we design tailor-made programs for groups such as small offset and digital print shops. Our apprenticeships can also be customised to suit the enterprise,” he adds.

Barnes believes finishing is a seriously skilled job and that increased automation will only increase the demands placed on the operator.

According to Livio Barbagallo (pictured), Müller Martini Australia managing director, so long as the trade finisher is an important service provider within the market, such skills will still be needed.

“There is a trend towards printed products becoming more and more sophisticated. Trade finishers are the experts. They do all the complicated work on products that the big printing houses can’t or don’t want to do,” he says. “Of course, this only applies to the innovative trade finisher who has the necessary finishing skills to fulfil the extraordinary requests by the market. The finisher is focused only on the finishing work while printing houses that take it in-house have to master the entire manufacturing chain.”

Barbagallo recognises the danger of trade houses simply relying on the long runs that commercial printers do not want to do themselves. Such jobs are a straight­forward production process with limited possibilities for providing specialist value.

“Trade finishers focusing on standard finishing without any added value still have to heavily invest in large machinery and infrastructure, which is a risk most won’t take. There are a few excellent cases of companies around the globe producing long-run standard products. However, all of them have unique business models and had to take a risk in relation to capital investment at one point,” he says.

It’s not that easy

Finishing is not simple and, importantly, it is not cheap. Comprising mostly of sophisticated mechanical technology controlled by servomotors and computerised operating panels, it is becoming increasingly complicated. The high cost of investment in both machines and labour makes Wayne Eastaugh (pictured), director of Marvel Bookbinding & Print Finishing, convinced that the larger commercial printers are not going to invest as heavily in high-end finishing as they have in the past.

“There is generally less of a trend for them to do so because of a very competitive marketplace and limited amounts of work,” he says.

Eastaugh concedes that there will be a lot more investment in the low-end digital finishing market, but the high-end finishing will remain stable until the market sorts itself out and understands where it is moving. If the stakes are high for printers, these are equally decisive times for trade finishers who need to evaluate how and where to invest in high-end, high-capacity finishing equipment. This is especially true for the growing amount of digital print work.

“We need to evaluate how printers will present digital work in the future, on reels or are they going to sheet them on the end of their web presses, as in the short-run digital printing side. Printers will be investing in digital finishing themselves,” he adds.

To survive in this market, trade finishers need to be cost-effective and 100 per cent relevant to clients. Shift work and the ability to provide customer service when required at a competitive price are likely to be the critical factors in the survival of the traditional professional print finishing sector.

Wishing on a Polar

Although Heidelberg mostly concentrates on commercial printers, it is dealing with a growing number of small digital shops too. Now that it is also selling Konica Minolta digital printers and is affiliated with GBC Australia, it has focused on selling finishing equipment like the small Polar 66 and 80 guillotines.

“We have made great headway in selling these machines to digital shops, copy shops and small commercial printers in the last 12 months,” said Brian Evans. “It’s like it’s on their wish list to have a Polar guillotine.”


Inline or offline – which is best?

Stuart Macdonald at GBC views the future of finishing as being near-line rather than inline. While off-line processes are typical with larger offset presses, even with digital presses inline can limit the amount of finishing options available. Off-line equipment can service more than one press and allows them to perform at top-rated speed, he says.

On the other hand, Kathy Wilson, Ricoh Australia’s general manager of business solutions and production, believes the integration of finishing inline is a major selling point. She says inline finishing customers benefit greatly from the fact that there are fewer people touching the job.

“You can deploy those people who would otherwise do manual finishing into other aspects of the business. Because other people are not touching the job as much there are less errors and wastage.” Equally though, Wilson says offline finishing has its place.

“We are not completely replacing offline or near-line finishing, and a lot of our customers will still be attracted to those as they can use it with both digital and offset work,” she says.