Capturing time with Cober: building confidence with everything from proofing to search engines

Print Action, Feb 2003 by Robinson, Jon

Over the next few months, Kitchener-based Cober Printing will be installing Printcafe's Hagen management information system. President Peter Cober does not hesitate to say its implementation will effect virtually everybody and everything in the company, which is not a statement to be taken lightly considering the incredible amount of investment he has made in the last year.

"Say a guy is sitting at his Mac working on a job and a client phones in to make a price change in a catalogue from $8 to $7.50, and so he slips over to the other Mac to make the correction and it takes him 20 minutes," explains Cober. "Right now I'm not going to capture that time. With the integration of the MIS system I will capture that activity on the servers, so I will not lose that time."

For Cober time literally comes before price. In his strategy to position the company as unique, Cober makes a concerted effort to ensure pricing remains at the number-four or number-five position on his list of importance. He doesn't want to compete on price, and as a result very few printers can compete with him on time, which holds the number two spot on the list of importance, behind only quality.

Under Cober's strategy even quality helps to capture more time. In June of last year the company installed a 10-colour Heidelberg press with an online spectrometer, called Image Control, that measures ink densities. During the interview for this story, Cober Printing was producing a job that had been on a run for two-and-a-half days. The benefits of having a calibrated machine regularly pull off a sheet to check colour are obvious when compared to the variability that would come from a manual check by the day shift and later by the night shift. Cober was also excited about the ability to set a colour curve up for a particular client that puts a lot of ink on the sheet. Pressmen are now able to use the same ink curve for him everytime.

This quality control allows Cober to build a level of trust with clients, so that the company's prepress department can utilize the advantage of remote proofing, which of course is an ultimate form of hurrying jobs through estimating to production. A few weeks back, a job came from General Motors to print a perfect-bound book that was 500-plus pages. Because of the client's need for a fast turnaround, GM proofed the PDFs online and placed their trust with Cober. Within 24 hours, Cober's team made a low-resolution plotter proof for internal use, created 250 plates and sent the job to press.

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"It's an education process with us and the client to give them a level of comfort with our ability to print good colour," says Cober. He concedes that some clients will always ask for hard proofs, but that many others will accept soft proofs when informed that an ICC profile has been done and how it was done. "Once a customer flew all the way up from Connecticut to see his first job run. He hasn't been back to see us since."

Remote proofing has also allowed Cober to more easily go after the United States market. Twenty per cent of the company's work comes from this market and Cober is enthusiastic that this share will continue to grow. A lot of that growth will come with last April's integration of Creo's InSite platform.

"I don't charge for the service it's there for my clients to use," he says. "Agencies will post their jobs on my server and let their clients come in and look at it because this works well for them. So it's a win for their side of the business and it's a win for me because I'm in the printing business and it brings me print." Around 25 of Cober's clients are already using the InSite package, mostly as a means to check for such things as price changes or other text and components that need to be agreed upon.

Cober is currently beta-testing another time-capturing technology, called Trimna. Being developed by Creo, this production data management solution is basically an enterprise-level search engine for a company and, more importantly, for a company's client to view past business dealings. In other words, the technology will allow for Cober's clients to search online for historical job information they will use in the near future.

"A client could say we printed this job or that job six months ago and now I'm looking for an image I used with it," says Cober. "Or they can look for the PO number of a job. There is a particular insurance company that currently holds 35 or 40 jobs with us. So they can find the job a number of ways and go in and check it through thumbnail previews to varify or to download and correct it."

Obviously, Cober Printing is continually moving to integrate all of its systems, which explains Cober's excitement in deploying a management information system that will truly track time. Currently, however, all of these systems, including Timna and InSite, are running on their own servers. At the current pace, it should not be long before everything is networked.

Also operating on a standalone system is Cober Printing's new fulfillment focus which is another factor placed before price on the list of importance. "When a job gets down to certain levels, we phone them and ask if they want to reprint it or make changes," says Cober. "To integrate this into our MIS system, more people will be able to monitor that."