About the Customer
Galloways is an established printing company known for producing exceptional print for a wide client base across many sectors since 1870. They offer both litho, digital and wide format printing services, carrying out in excess of 500 printing jobs per month.
Challenges Faced
Until 2019, Galloways had two Heidelberg Speedmaster presses and a Linoprint digital device. Although the machines themselves were producing quality print, the overall operations of the print shop didn’t offer the same levels of efficiencies of today’s technologies. The main problem for this was that their Management Information System (MIS) functioned as a completely different entity from their machines. As Matt Galloway, Managing Director at Galloways, puts it, “Each of the three areas were their own islands, meaning that information was rekeyed multiple times throughout the life of a job.”
This, predictably, caused a disconnect between departments within the business. And, as every operator had his/her own way of planning and executing jobs, the team ran into a number of problems. “As there was no integration, feedback was also manual; so it took a lot of work to distinguish which jobs were most profitable within the business”, Matt elucidates.
With processes taking longer than they should and teams facing issues internally, it was becoming a challenge to keep up with demanding client timelines. The need of the hour was to improve the overall efficiency of the workflow with a fully integrated system for a smooth process from job booking to approval and delivery.
The Heidelberg Solution
Galloways opted for Heidelberg’s Prinect scalable workflow solution, which is available for all aspects of a print factory. Prinect is the backbone of a SMART Print Shop’s information flow and provides solutions for direct customer contact, allowing our customers to focus on completing more jobs – leading to future successes. With the direct feedback from Prinect into our MIS system, we are able to analyse all jobs within the factory, adjust quoting parameters to attract the right levels of work and automate certain processes. Prinect eliminates the need for multiple management platforms, saving time and resources while making processes more efficient and streamlined from start to finish.
According to Matt Galloway, Prinect became “a vital cog in the engine” for Galloways.
Benefits Experienced with Prinect
Choosing Prinect meant that there was no longer a need to rekey data for every single job. Even if this historically only took three minutes per job, Matt notes, “Over the course of a week, a month and a year, this time adds up; meaning, we can concentrate on more added value tasks rather than admin tasks.” Moreover, this reduced the otherwise inevitable probabilities of human error.
Integrating the pre-press to send information directly to the press also saved a lot of time. Live feedback from the press had multiple benefits - from being able to see how well a job has been executed to making provisions for scheduling and assessing costs in real-time.
Exceptions could be easily managed, without the need to repeatedly check every job at the end of the cycle. A production cycle, usually inundated with phone/email requests, was completely streamlined to be accessed through a single MIS platform.
“However, it wasn’t just an administrative save”, adds Matt, “we then added JDF - pushing the imposition and approved artwork, resulting in more saved time whilst improving accuracies.”
Impact & Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).
If Galloways had not opted for the Smart Print Shop in 2019, Matt feels that the company would not have been able to increase their workload on a number of levels. In his own words, “the print world is ever changing; today, we produce significantly more jobs than we did five years ago, but the average litho run length is 3200 sheets - which cannot be done without an efficient method.”
With the Smart Print Shop also delivering regular production data updates, the OEE of the company has more than doubled since making the investment. What’s more, Galloways Speedmaster CX102 now stands among the top 15 printers globally!
“We are slicker, more efficient and faster to market for our customer base, which was critical for this investment”, says Matt Galloway. He adds that he is “delighted to have seen a positive growth in sales since the investment.”
Beyond Prinect - Push to Stop & Heidelberg Assistant
Matt Galloway explains that Heidelberg’s ‘Push to Stop’ concept enables autonomous printing, the vision is that processes will no longer be started actively (Push to Start) in the future in an industrialised operation, but rather that they will do this autonomously, monitor themselves, and only be actively interrupted if this is necessary (Push to Stop). Assistance systems will actively guide operators through processes. Using Prinect as the key integration component that ties multiple production processes together. Push to Stop redefines what can be expected of a press and levels of production output across each shift by automating the makeready process — eliminating delays, operator mistakes, and other barriers to full production efficiency. Using the Push to Stop philosophy has been a game changer for their business, particularly while working on multi-sectional brochures requiring slick plate changes. “We are now able to change plates, run a job and put a new set of plates on the press within a four-minute window – which is staggering, when compared to the technology we were previously working with.”
Galloways is also one of the first subscribers of the new Heidelberg Assistant in the UK. Heidelberg Assistant is the digital interface to Heidelberg, it gives customers access to a range of products and services from Heidelberg. As Matt puts it, “It's really easy to use...the improved visibility of calls and their outcomes is a massive help; we can use this to be more proactive rather than reactive...I know what I’m potentially walking into if we’ve had any issues, and forewarned is forearmed!”
Integration and automation have been key to all their investments in the recent years, notes Matt. Investing in Heidelberg solutions, including Prinect and Heidelberg Assistant, “has offered efficiency days and crucial business support and partnership” to Galloways and helped them grow as a business.
When asked if he would recommend Heidelberg Assistant and other solutions to other print shops, he says, “Definitely! Especially in an integrated workflow, trying to explain technical issues over the phone can be difficult. Have you ever seen a JDF file? If you have, you will know what I mean!”
Matt Galloway, Managing Director Galloways
