Prepress
Leading UK Commercial Printer, PCP, Going Live with First Fully Integrated EFI Management Information System in Europe
Thursday 05. June 2008 - PCP on Track to Achieving Lean Manufacturing Goal by Early 2009
EFI (Nasdaq: EFII), the world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, announces that Precision Colour Printing (PCP Ltd), one of the UKs top print service providers, will go live week commencing 22nd June with EFIs dynamic scheduling tool, PrintFlow. In doing so, PCP will add PrintFlow to its existing management information system (MIS), comprising EFI Hagen MIS, Prograph production planning and EFI Auto-Count shop floor data collection, to become the first printer in Europe to roll out a fully integrated EFI MIS. Founded in 1980, PCP is one of the leading magazine printing companies in the UK, and is part of The Claverley Group, the proprietors of the Express & Star and the Shropshire Star newspapers.
With PrintFlows real-time calculations, enterprise-wide scope and unique what-if capabilities, PCP hopes to realise savings by optimising the interaction of all the activities in its Telford-based plant. An intelligent, rules-based scheduling system, PrintFlow will manage PCPs production not as islands of automation but as a complete operation, and will provide real-time reporting to better identify areas of inefficiency and downtime.
Alex Evans, managing director of PCP, comments: “Were delighted to be going live next month with PrintFlow, the last piece of our EFI MIS, which we hope will drive a new phase in the continued development of PCP as a premier print service provider in the UK. While the physical installation of PrintFlow has gone as smoothly as planned, the cultural change required by us in the transition to a comprehensive MIS has been slightly more protracted than originally anticipated. Once we get through this transition, Im confident that our EFI MIS will provide PCPs executive team with daily reports of accurate real-time data of what the plant has produced and will highlight areas for improvement.”
The Hagen, Prograph and Auto-Count segments of PCPs MIS were installed over three months and have been running since October last year. Evans admits that he was at first concerned about what level of support EFI would provide, but says that his concern then turned to satisfaction: “We were initially concerned that, as Europe is a rather newer market for EFI, the level of support they were going to provide us might not be up to the level of that received by one of their US customers. In reality, though, we need not have worried as the support weve received from EFI has been excellent. EFI worked closely with us to overcome the issues that were bound to arise in such a major transition and have been very proactive in their support of us, both from a European and US perspective.”
The Prograph system reflects the manufacturing capabilities of individual printing plants and responds to the product definition and the clients production needs by mapping products to equipment and resources. When integrated with Hagen, it provides a market leading MIS package with a level of production planning that no other solution on the market can match. Hagen Prograph also features estimating, inventory management and accurate, detailed invoicing and is particularly adept at handling customers complex versioning requirements. Together with PrintFlow, Prograph opens the door to new capabilities, savings and efficiencies that are not possible in traditional MIS systems.
Evans continues: “Before the MIS was installed, we had plenty of information to help us run the company, but the process was very intensive insofar as it required a lot of manual intervention – we had to send people out to track down and compile the information for us. We anticipate that the new EFI system will automatically deliver data on press utilisation and downtime and on wastage factors, such as make ready and running waste, and will give us a far quicker and more accurate view of what the plant is producing on a daily or weekly basis. We can then drive the system to scrutinise aspects of the business such as overheads, stock usage, stock turnaround and the utilisation of staff resources to identify where changes that will positively impact the organisation need to be made.”
Marc Olin, senior vice president/general manager, EFI Advanced Professional Print Software (APPS), says, “Although we are the dominant provider of fully integrated MIS solutions to the printing market in the US, to date we have not enjoyed the same success in Europe. However, in PCP we now have our first completely integrated European success to go along with a number of standalone MIS deployments we have in the UK, France, Poland, Slovenia and Germany, and the first of what we hope will be many more complete MIS installations in Europe. As PCP have acknowledged themselves, we have worked closely with them to ensure as pain-free a transition as possible towards achieving the multiple and significant benefits of a fully integrated MIS and I believe that this is a shining example of how EFI really is helping our customers to print to win.”
PCP still sees lean manufacturing as crucial to the long-term growth of the company and EFIs integrated MIS as crucial to facilitating the lean manufacturing process, as Evans explains: “Theres no doubt that for any printing organisation to move ahead and remain financially viable for the long-term, a fully integrated MIS is needed to drive a lean manufacturing business model. Were convinced that that is the right approach and that our decision, as an executive team, to go with EFI last year has not only proven to date to be the right one, but that, certainly by this time next year, the benefits of the system will also have confirmed that
we made the right choice in working with EFI.”