February score shows full point improvement

February's overall score improved by more than a point over January, with better showings almost across the board.

The month finished with an overall score of 92.23 compared to 91.13 in January.

Better calibrated plates, press times closer to 12:30, tighter registration, fewer defects, and a perfect score in Post-Press finish times all helped the cause. There was also improvement scored in photo quality and inserter accuracy.

In terms of trends, ad quality dropped vs. January by almost 5 points, largely because of recurring problems with ads that rastorized or had issues with separating black. Interestingly, many of these ads were our own -- house ads to promote Restaurant Week, for example, which came from a contractor hired by Maribeth.

I talked to Maribeth about the issues the quality team was seeing, and Maribeth talked to Ken Soucy in Creative Services who re-worked some of the ads in an effort to get them to reproduce better. The hope is that as a result of the discussion among Ken, Maribeth and her contractor we'll see an improvement in the quality of house ads and an improvement in March in the Ad Quality score.

Our quality efforts are being recognized in the region. Don and I will participate in a May workshop on color management and process control sponsored by the New England Newspaper Association. More to come on that.

To see the complete February results, check out the link to the right or click here.

Paul

Welcome

My hope is that this blog becomes a one-stop shop for those of you who seek information and/or data from our daily and nightly operations. If you want to know how last night's runs went, it's in the production data to the right. Interested in daily plate calibrations results? It's over there. If you want to know how the quality is, our scorecard information is there too.

In addition, I've provided some links to web sites that contain technical information related to newspaper printing operations. And there's a slide show at the bottom of the building project.

I hope it's useful; comments are welcome. Enjoy.

Paul Briand
Director of Operations
Seacoast Media Group

January Scorecard results

Here are the scorecard results for January 2008.

Among the highlights:

Much improved overall scores for black density and graybars, owing to some very good press work;
A drop in score in plate calibrations, something Sharon is working on to even out;
Press start score improved, as did mailroom finish time score;
Registration, press defects, photo, ad and run time scores stayed about the same.

Another highlight is how I believe the scorecard work is translating on the monthly credit analysis. Among the three areas where we’ve instilled some process analysis – mailroom, graphics and press/camera – we only had one credit in the January report and that was for $57.18 for an ad that was out of registration.

Very good work by everyone concerned.

December scorecard results

Here are the scorecard results for December 2007.

We’ve been at this now since mid-September, and I want to give credit to the scorers – Alan Laskey, Therese SanSoucie, Alana Sullivan and Don Clark – who’ve made the commitment to look at each day’s paper with a critical eye and meet with me each day at 11 a.m. to review and score the paper. Schedules don’t always allow 100 percent attendance but we’ve always had enough information and commentary to score an edition, put the results on-line on our Google Doc, and post the results on the bulletin board in the pressroom.

December was a particularly good month in Post-Press in terms of run times (97.8), finish times (98.9) and overall insertion accuracy (99.6) – congratulations to Martha and her crew.

The daily meetings help us identify quality defects and concerns before they bloom into full-blown problems. Blanket smashes, for example, can affect an image on the page and smashes are identified, scored as a defect, but then corrected by Alan and the press crew. We’ve seen cases where the black type for an ad comes in as process color black; there’s no need for this since the only color you need for black type is black. In these cases Therese has tried to work with an ad rep and his/her client to send black type as black.

Don has been great working with folks in the Editorial department on photo toning when images are flat or have too much of one color or another. He’s also trying to help out on cut-outs on C1 that can look ragged on some days. We’ve seen improvements as we’ve been going through this quality scoring process.