Sold is not produced

The step that was in no process chart

A business manufactures to measure. Every piece has its own dimensions, its own material, often cut-outs and finished edges. For this there is a configurator. The customer assembles, sees what is being made, gets a price and orders.

What came after was in no process chart. A designer opened every order, looked at the generated data, corrected what the machine would not have accepted, and only then released it to production.

From the outside the process looked automated. It was, up to the order.

This is the most common breaking point in configurators, and it is invisible from the outside because it sits behind the order confirmation. Sales is automated, production is not, and in between someone sits and reworks.

What a machine reads differently from an eye

A person sees a line around a surface and knows that is where the cut goes. A raster processor sees a colour and a definition. If the definition is not the expected one, the line is a printed stroke and not a cut.

The cutting contour therefore sits in a spot colour whose alternate colour space uses an embedded CMYK profile. Without that, the processor does not recognise it as a cutting path. The machine file contains contours as strokes only. No image, no fill, no clipping mask, because every additional element is a source of error in a file nobody looks at any more.

Millimetres are converted to PDF points without intermediate rounding. That sounds petty, until rounding accumulates on four edges and a cut is half a millimetre too large. Trim size and bleed are set separately, not calculated into each other. Whether crop marks are generated is decided by a rule and not by an operator. The rule looks at the material and at the distance to the material maximum, among other things.

In parallel a second file is produced for people, with dimensions and guide lines. It does not go to the machine. It exists so that someone can check in case of doubt without opening the machine file and changing it in the process.

Eight versions

Every version was a run through the real chain. Not through a preview, not through a viewer on a desk. Through the raster processor on the printing system and the CAM software at the mill. Fiery and PentaNC were the arbiters. An opinion on whether a file looked good was not.

Most of the eight versions did not fail on big things. It was colour definitions that looked right in the preview and were rejected in the workflow. Rounding that only showed at certain material thicknesses. An order of elements in the document that one of the two machines coped with and the other did not.

Eight is not a particularly pretty number. It is the honest account of how many runs it took. It stands in the documentation also because the next material group will need runs again.

The result is a process, not a file

After the eighth version the output had not become prettier. It had become acceptable.

That is the difference that matters. The goal was never a better file. The goal was that nobody sits in between any more. The checking step disappears, on every order, not just the simple ones.

One checking step fewer sounds like little. Counted per order, it is the difference between a configurator that creates work and one that takes work away. The time that used to go into correction now goes into design.

Three questions that transfer

Where does the automation really end? Not where the order comes in. Where nobody reworks any more. Between those two points there is often a whole job.

Who quietly checks today? These steps are in no process description, because they crept in. They are found by asking what someone does before passing something on.

How is done measured? Not by the output looking plausible. By the downstream system accepting it without intervention. Everything else is a guess.

The technical details are in the case study.