Despites the pandemic, the printing industry in Poland is prospering. Based on a study by KPMG and The Polish Guild of Gutenberg Knights and Department of Journalism, Information and Bibliology of the University of Warsaw, the Polish printing market is the biggest of its type in the Central and Eastern European region. With print runs decreasing, digital printing quickly became the preferred print technology to remain viable in this market.
Short runs imply to print faster and get a better margin on each print job. This can be achieved by, but not solely, ganged runs. Let’s review 10 things to know about ganging if you’re evolving in the polish printing market.
1.Multiple Terms, One Technique
Gang run printing is a technique used by many print service providers under different names: ganged jobs, ganged runs, nested layout, collate layout, combination run, combo run, etc. Apart from these vocabulary variances, the common definition is: ‘’a printing method in which multiple printing projects are placed on a common paper sheet in an effort to reduce printing costs and paper waste’’ (Wikipedia).
2.Popular for Commercial Printing
Commercial printing is a term that refers to printing for businesses. As their printing needs depend on the industry they evolved in, commercial printers receive a large variety of orders everyday: newsletter, brochures, flyers, business cards, postcards, direct mail, menus, posters, and much more. They often combine multiple jobs in one run to increase throughput and reduce paper waste.
3.Reduce Waste of Resources
Ink and paper are generally at the top of the expenses when running a printing business. Company owners are constantly looking for ways to cut these costs. With digital printing, they can now print the exact quantity for every incoming job as opposed to traditional offset printing that frequently involved extras and need for warehousing. And with job ganging, they can easily maximize the coverage on every sheet of paper by combining jobs of multiple sizes and quantities.
4.Increase Throughput
Nowadays, customers are used to Amazon 1 day delivery standards and expect the same whenever they order a product. Printers must offer fast turnaround times to remain competitive. By ganging multiple jobs together, they can maximize efficiencies on the production floor and literally do more with less.
5.No Planning with Automated Ganging
When thinking about ganging, many printers picture themselves spending precious time calculating and planning the layout. This is accurate for most imposition software solutions available on the market today, especially for the basic and plugin PDF imposition solutions.
For the past years, Ultimate TechnoGraphics has truly reinvented the way of creating gang runs by offering a completely automated solution. Ultimate Impostrip® AutoFlow has the intelligence to create dynamic impositions for ganged runs by understanding the size and quantities of each order and creating the most optimal layout for the selected press on the fly! At this point, the user only needs to drop the incoming orders to gang in an AutoFlow Hot Folder, and the rest is done behind-the-scenes by Ultimate Impostrip®.
Discover Ultimate Impostrip® AutoFlow and its many capabilities by watching the webinar recording here. Read a review on AutoFlow by a printer here.
6.Full Control with Template-Based Ganging
Ganging is not specific to flat work. Bound and flat work can be placed in the same imposition for resources optimization purpose. Usually, this requires a template-based ganging solution that gives users full control over page positioning. With Ultimate Impostrip® Ganged Pages tool, unused space on a book or booklet imposition can be filled up by adding another order with smaller page size such as business cards.
7.From MIS or Web2Print to Printer
Streaming PDF jobs from MIS or web2print into production is key to reach high levels of productivity. Fortunately, different prepress software solutions seamlessly connect together to automatically transfer data on customers and jobs from ordering all the way to printing (and even finishing!). For example, Enfocus Switch easily integrates with Ultimate Impostrip® to build an automated workflow for gang run printing or any types of print production.
To learn about e-commerce workflow, click here, and about Enfocus Switch – Ultimate Impostrip® integration, ask for the webinar recording here.
8.Gang Run Results Back to MIS
A particularity of gang run printing resides in the multitude of possibilities. For each print run, many scenarios can be considered with different costs associated. In some cases, imposition solutions can communicate true accurate gang run results back to the MIS or production planning system. Printers can then make smart decisions for every gang run to print. Ultimate Impostrip® offers this with AutoFlow Estimator.
9.Layout for Finishing
Optimizing the layout for gang run printing should take finishing into consideration. If a stack of paper cannot be finished in-house, then we need to go back to step 1. With Ultimate Impostrip® AutoFlow, the cut orientation and direction of the finishing devices are respected when creating the imposition.
10.Finishing Automation
Cutting a ganged run can be challenging. The cuts may not align and be in different orientations. Multiple manipulations are needed by the operator and can lead to human errors and reprint. To remove the bottleneck in postpress, many printers doing gang run printing have implemented Ultimate Bindery® to automate finishing automation. Operators simply need to reproduce the steps shown on the screen to make the right cut, every time.
For more information about ganged run, and how Ultimate Impostrip® and Ultimate Bindery® can help, contact Ultimate TechnoGraphics official representative in Poland, Optimus Polska.