Printing Capability Evalution Plan

Do you know who is printing your packaging?

    Do you really know who is printing your packaging?

We understand most of the time brand owners only deal with product vendor and information of the packaging supplier is not told to the brand owners. Are you confortable with this? Most of the time the packaging is purchased as part of the product. The quality of the packaging has a direct effect on the product when it gets on the shelves. Isn’t this consideration of brand owners?

In China alone, there are over 100,000 packaging suppliers. They have different level of capability and skill. Often price of the packaging does not represent the quality. If the packaging printed by a supplier has a bluish tone on the first lot, and the current lot is reddish. Is this acceptable to the brand owners?  How do we find packaging suppliers that could produce packaging consistently that are also cost competitive? Do we know which packaging suppliers we need?  How can we know if we can work with this packaging supplier? These answers are available if they have go through a Print Capability Evaluation.

Print Capability Evaluation

We can develop packaging supplier capability evaluation that based on the quality and requirements of the brand owners. With the evaluation, we can quickly know the capability of the packaging supplier to produce the packaging to brand’s requirement and their  capacity. During the evaluation process, we will focus on the production procedures that are critical to the packaging quality. We want to know if the packaging supplier can produce the packaging consistently. We do not want the packaging supplier to produce to 100% on this job and 80% on the re-runs. We rather have them to 90% this time and on the next job is still 90%. Packaging is not like commercial printing, consistency is the most important matter. We prefer packaging that are consistent.

Therefore, our evaluation will start from the prepress to finishing process like die cutting and folding and gluing. All process that can affect packaging will be included in the evaluation to ensure the packaging supplier has the consistency in the production process.

Not just evaluation

Based on our evaluation, packaging suppliers get a chance to explore new production controls. The evaluation allows them to find out areas of improvement and the solutions that needed.

Our methods

PSA develops a systematic approach to evaluate the packaging suppliers:

• Print Capability Test
• Production Process Control Capability

Print Capability Test is to evaluate the printing press’s conditions. Some presses may be too old and may not have the proper maintenance to print to specifications. For instance, the colo evenness from left to right. Our test will show if the printing press has any issues like this.  The evaluation will also tell us if the suppliers have the right knowledge to print it right.

As for Production Process Control Capabiity, we will evaluate the process from the moment the supplier receives the artwork to the data filling, plate making, paper quality assessment, printing and finishing. We will carry out the evaluation on all process that are critical to the packaging.