Editor’s note: Newspapers & Technology, in conjunction with Perfect Pallets Inc., each month publishes a question-and-answer column aimed at postproduction issues. Topics and associated responses originate from Perfect Pallets Post Press Users Group, a free online user group forum. Membership information and other details about this postpress community, sponsored and managed by Perfect Pallets, can be found at www.perfectpalletspostpress.com.

Topic: Monitoring misses

Q: Does anyone have a set standard to help monitor employee performance on inserters? We have five (Goss) inserters and sometimes have issues with people and their performance.

Reply: I am getting ready to do a Six Sigma (process improvement) project and one of the issues is the one you mentioned. One of the tools we will use will be to hire college students and have them watch the machines for a week and track all downtime. We will take that information, glean out the biggest causes of our downtime and create a plan for increasing production based on the results.

Another aspect we will be looking at is the operators themselves. If operators aren’t cooperating or performing as expected, we want to make sure managers can deal with it.

Follow-up: Are you going to evaluate your set-up people as well? I’m thinking that if you look at the first hour of production, you would get an idea of how well the machine is set up and ready for production.
 

Follow-up: The accountability of an insert machine lies with the operators. When you hold them accountable, they in turn will hold the feeders accountable. I give our operators as much time as they feel they need to set up the machine prior to run time. They are much cheaper than a machine full of feeders. If the operators are held accountable for ruining a certain amount within a certain time they will address feeder problems. They will ask the feeders to feed a certain height or direction or whatever, but if there is resistance, they notify the duty supervisor. The duty supervisor will address the situation. You must be able to back your supervisors in this endeavor.

After all that, do you have a certain production goal in mind? We use total run time. Our plan is to average 9,000 packages per hour, per side, running the daily work. If a machine is scheduled to run 81,000, then their plan would be 4.5 hours. If the crew finishes in four hours, we pay them the 4.5 hours. You must give the feeders a reason to work faster and smarter. The money saved depends on what you are currently producing (packages per hour) and what reasonable goals you can set and accomplish.

 

Topic: Newspaper laps

Q: We work without a lap on our home jackets, TMC jacket and our newspaper and when the pressroom can give us a lap, it’s usually crooked. I was just wondering if anyone else deals with this and if they had any ideas to get the product to open better.

Reply: We pretty much have the same issue with the fold from our press. I call it a “snowflake folder” because no two papers are alike. I am told that our folder isn’t designed to do consistent close work. If we ask for a lap, we need about 1/2-inch in order to open well. What we get is much different from what we are told to expect. The lap will vary by as much as 1/4-inch in either direction and will most likely be skewed. We now open everything except our comics (they are printed by someone else) without a lap. Unless it is a single sheet (4-page tab), I don’t know how it can be opened efficiently without the use of air lines.

The number and placement of these air lines is basically determined by what the jacket is doing while trying to be opened. You might need some air to blow the back section off of the front wall sucker of the pocket; this might be typical of a very small page count piece.

If you have some time and are creative, you might be able to make a system that has what I call “timed air.” You need to come up with a way to turn the air blast on and off as each paper opens. Turning off the air at the right time will prevent the back sections from blowing up and getting clipped shut.