Standard bearers face uphill battle: Print21 magazine article

After some quick wins by local printers following the introduction of the AS/ISO 12647-2 colour standard, now comes the long, hard campaign to consolidate these gains and win the hearts and minds of all printers as to the benefits of standards-based printing. Simon Enticknap surveys the battle that lies ahead.

Nearly two years after its adoption as the Australian standard for offset print, the AS/ISO 12647-2 colour standard continues to be a key topic of interest among local printers. Along with environmental accreditation and how to survive the GFC, ISO compliance is near the top of the agenda for most forward-thinking print companies.

But while the arrival of ISO standards-based printing has certainly attracted a lot of interest, its implementation across the industry has been decidedly patchy. Led initially by the larger print groups – the likes of Geon, Blue Star and IPMG – the use of standards-based production methods has now spread to many second-tier players, companies that are already well-known for the quality of their output and which regularly win awards in various competitions. That’s still a long way off from being an industry-wide standard however, and the number of print companies which are not ISO-compliant still rank in the majority.

While interest in ISO standards is high, the barriers to its implementation remain formidable for many printers, not the least of which is a certain amount of confusion as to what constitutes ISO certification, what’s involved in achieving it and what the end result really means for printers and their customers.

Keep it in the family
The benefits of printing to a known standard are now well-documented. They include greater control over the print process, more repeatable, consistent colour results, reduced waste, faster make-readies, higher productivity, increased customer satisfaction and fewer re-prints due to errors. As a result, although intended primarily as a technical standard, ISO 12647 is increasingly being promoted as a business tool, one which will improve a company’s performance both internally and in its dealings with customers.

Andreas Johansson, (pictured) sales director with colour specialists Kayell Australia, believes that by being a part of the ISO family, so to speak, Australian printers are better placed to benefit from international print contracts. Large corporates with headquarters overseas who are looking to market locally will seek out printers who are ISO compliant because they know that by using such suppliers they can provide the same artwork and same proofs and get exactly the same printed result as anywhere else in the world. The demand for ISO standards is simply a fact of globalisation.

The consequence is that printers need to think about ISO compliance as more than just a colour management issue, says Johansson.

“The guys who have embraced it have got more benefits out of it than they expected,” he comments.

Similarly, says Johansson, large corporates are under pressure to be good environmental citizens by reducing waste, and one of the ways in which they can do that is to look at their print suppliers; ISO 12647-2 compliance is acknowledged as being instrumental in helping to reduce waste and material consumption so, apart from the reassurance it brings from a colour perspective, its implementation also indicates that such printers are efficient and focused on cutting waste.

ISO not for all
On the other hand, not all printers want to do work for companies with head offices in Europe or the US. Indeed, Soeren Lange, (pictured) colour management specialist at Heidelberg Australia & New Zealand, says printers should think very carefully about going for ISO certification if there’s no benefit to be had from marketing it to their customers. Certainly they should aim to print to a standard – for all the benefits outlined above – but, according to Lange, the current fascination with ISO has tended to obscure the fact that the most important element is being able to print to a standard in the first place. Lange says he has even been approached by printers who want the certificate in order to show that they can print to ISO but without doing anything to implement colour management or a standards-based approach. Such thinking is topsy-turvy.

“The market is listening, the market is aware but the general level of knowledge is way behind what it should be,” he comments.

Heidelberg offers a number of different colour management options under its Print Colour Management (PCM) scheme, including press optimisation, and Loren says that in some cases printers have sought to become ISO-compliant without taking the final step of becoming certified with an external assessor such as Fogra. The key objective for many printers, he says, is just being able to print consistent, repeatable colour.

“Everyone with a four colour press should be able to do that,” says Lange. “They are printing colour work so it should be reliable.”

In the end, it may just be a few print companies which seek out full ISO certification, says Lange, those which perceive there is some value with their customers in doing so. Based on what has happened in Germany where ISO certification has the strongest following, Lange says there may be only about 50-60 companies locally who go all the way to certification, the majority being content simply to use the standard as an internal quality measurement tool. Indeed, he says, there may be no advantage in every printer becoming ISO certified as one of the main benefits of having it is to use it as a market differentiator, a value-add to sell to customers. It’s much harder to stand out from the crowd when everybody looks the same.

Size is no barrier
While the bigger print groups have been quick to opt for independent assessment, usually via Fogra, Russell Cavenagh (pictured) at DES believes there is no reason while smaller companies shouldn’t follow in their wake. He points out that any small print business which wants to grow must eventually seek to take customers off larger rivals and one of the ways in which it can do that is by showing that it can print to the same standard. He dismisses suggestions that ISO is ‘too hard’ for smaller printers, pointing out that, for companies looking to expand, ISO implementation is a far more cost-effective way to increase press capacity than buying another press.

“You implement ISO for one reason only – and that’s to make your business more efficient,” he comments. “So if you’re a small business trying to grow, you do that in order to become more efficient.”

While printers cite cost and time as the main hurdles to ISO compliance, in the end it all comes down to the management mindset; business owners have to believe that this is something worth doing for the sake of their company. Speaking at the recent Pathways to Profit seminars organised by DES, Ulrich Schmitt, head of quality management at Fogra, highlighted how ISO marks a shift from the craft-based traditions of the printing industry to one of industrial production where process takes precedence over individuals. As such, ISO and standard-based printing can be a real challenge to the culture of a print business and one with far-reaching implications.

Whenever entrenched attitudes and work habits are confronted, the natural response is resistance. It requires a commitment from all staff to change and can be particularly threatening to those workers and managers whose positions rely on their ownership of a specific knowledge and expertise. ISO printing is a silo-buster, forcing co-operation between prepress and pressroom and introducing a culture of transparency where everybody’s faults and failures are brought out into the open. The numbers don’t lie.

Room to be creative
Equally though, Ulrich Schmitt is keen to point out that standards do not kill creativity but rather give it room in which to flourish.

“What we are trying to do with standardisation is to release a lot of energy,” he says. “The ISO standard doesn’t limit printers to do a better quality. It says this is the average, the baseline that every company can achieve under normal conditions.”

By fixing on a standard goal, the print process itself becomes more regulated and predictable, freeing up resources to focus on more than simply ‘getting the job done’.

“When you do standardised print where resources are efficiently used, you have a lot of time left in the creative process which can be used to make the job better – these resources are released which you can use to focus more on the customer’s interests and on special jobs. The plain jobs with plain requirements get done faster,” says Schmitt.

“I’ve seen companies that say ‘Now we can do things which are not covered by standardised production’. They release these creative people in the print process to create new ideas.”

So will standards set you free? The battle may be long and hard but the spoils of victory await those prepared to take on the challenge.