Print Color Quality Control Made Easy

Print Color Quality Programs can be a challenge for global brands or private labels. The process is often very manual and labor intensive, and as such can be a high financial burden for all involved. Existing programs also typically focus primarily on print preparations (pre-press) and leave quality control during the actual production run to the print provider. This creates a major QA/QC gap in many print control programs at a critical step in the workflow.

But color quality control doesn’t need to be expensive, difficult, or an afterthought. Techkon USA has developed a fully digital cloud-based program that ensures color consistency run after run during production, helps the printer achieve and maintain color, and seamlessly reports data from any print location in the world right to the dashboard.

The Importance of Print Color Quality for Brands and Private Labels

Color plays a critical role in allowing consumers to recognize their favorite brands subconsciously, such as in a busy grocery aisle. Moreover, colors evoke emotions and drive consumer expectations. Studies have proven that colors can influence consumer behavior when making purchase decisions, and can even affect how a product’s quality is perceived.

Mismatched or poorly printed color is a (visible) statement about the larger process control effectiveness of a brand. Over time, inconsistent colors can bleed into consumer’s perception of the contents inside the package, as well. In more extreme cases of mismatched or poor color, consumers may wonder if the product is old, or has been handled or stored incorrectly. This might lead to the product being discounted or even discarded, with a negative impact not just financially, but also for sustainability.

Why is great Design and Prepress work not enough?

Solid pre-press work (setting color targets, profiling,proofing, press fingerprints, etc.) is no doubt very important, but what happens after the artwork is handed over for print production? You may have a great design and pre-press team or agency, with breathtaking packaging ideas, but once procurement takes over to assign production, quality sometimes has to take a back seat over cost.

To solve this, modern solutions like Techkon’s Color Quality Control Software ensure consistent color during the print production phase. By equipping printers with the right tools, including Handheld Spectrophotometers and Scanning Spectrophotometers, brands can ensure global consistency regardless of location or printer.

A color QC program that engages during production ensures that even a low-cost print provider on a different continent is capable of delivering on par color and print quality.

The Problem with Manual Sample Checks

High-volume printing, such as flexographic printing or offset printing, is an analog manufacturing process with many variables in need of control, and like any such manufacturing process it is prone to variability from one production run to the next. Colors can shift from day to day between jobs, from one location to the next, or even from one press and press operator to the next.

Sometimes, colors can even shift during the same production run, especially common in flexographic printing. On a flexographic press, many things can go wrong without a skilled operator (and sometimes even with): ink viscosity changes, anilox roll problems, doctor blade issues, plate life wear, ink contamination, substrate variation from roll to roll, and much more. None of these issues can be controlled or relates to how careful the design or pre-press work has been prepared!

Instead, adopting Real-Time Inline Color Control for Printing ensures real-time monitoring, making it possible to fix problems before they escalate.

Sustainability and Color Management

Color can have an unexpected impact on a brand’s sustainability efforts, and vice versa.

For example, environmentally friendly substrates, such as recycled corrugated cardboard, are often a challenge to print color correctly on. Such color challenges increase the time a printer spends setting up a print job and matching colors (so called “Make Ready”), which can lead to substantially more waste prior to the actual production run. Especially because more and more brands are color aware these days and require tighter tolerances for spot colors in their artwork.

An obvious way this has an impact on sustainability is due to higher rejection rates. Higher rejection or rework rates due to poor color matching in turn generates more waste, in substrate, ink and energy. But a less obvious way has to do with leftover ink (so called “Waste Ink”), which, if not managed properly with advanced tools like Techkon’s award-winning AI-driven SmartInk technology, can lead to serious waste; ecologically, and economically.

Why you are overpaying for your color management

As mentioned on the outset, manual checks are the most common form of color QC at the moment, and they are expensive in both labor and shipping (which includes some environmental cost).

Moreover, manual checks are tedious, and the data capture and entry from them is slow and often error prone. This in turn leads to inconsistent or entirely missing data, which makes it very hard to initiate process improvements and increase efficiencies, both due to a lack of actionable insights and due to push back from print providers wanting to see “proof”.

Lastly, prevalent technology, such as spectrophotometer instruments and accompanying software, are often expensive, further hampering attempts to deploy a pro-active color management program due to high capital and maintenance costs.

The result is often an endless cycle of “improvements”, possibly at high cost but without tangible results.

Why your printer secretly hates your Quality Program

Quality management programs can be quite cumbersome, as they typically introduce additional steps to the print workflow, often at significant additional cost to the print provider.

On top of that, many popular color QC software packages were designed many years ago and are not user-friendly as they do not follow modern user guidelines. Often this requires skilled, trained, labor to support the program, but in an industry with serious labor challenges and struggling with training new generations (especially with regards to color matching skills), this can be a serious problem.

Another cost-increasing factor for printers is the fact that stricter color quality requirements often translate to longer press make-ready times, increasing the cost of labor, press downtime, and generating additional waste.

How does a modern print color quality program like Techkon’s “Color for Brands” address these challenges?

Techkon’s “Color For Brands” program has been engineered from the ground up to solve these issues.

Backed by Techkon’s award-winning ChromaQA software, it is cloud-based from the get-go. The robust server-client architecture offers the best of both worlds – fast local access and seamless sharing of data with anyone anywhere.

The fully digital nature of the program also ensures a low annual cost, a tiny fraction of the cost for comparable services using traditional manual sampling methods. Moreover, the cost is distributed across the print providers and does not burden the brand owner.

Because ChromaQA empowers the printer to do better, faster, and save money along the way, it is generally more easily and widely adopted by printers than other QC packages. For example, powerful tools like SmartInk’s AI driven ink toning technology and ChromaStandards for centralized management of color standards, printers embrace the program without the push back usually facing other intrusive QC processes.

An important benefit of the “Color for Brands” program is its workflow, which provides frequent data points during production in near real-time. This delivers valuable data to both brand and printer to allow for future process improvements, or even on-the-fly corrections. Seamless integration with a fully automated inline color measurement system is possible, as well.

Through the web-based ChromaAnalytics, production data is delivered in real-time to your fingertips. Printed and scanned in Vietnam just now, and on your dashboard in seconds! The color quality dashboard can be organized to review trends and performance of print providers by SKU, brand, color, and many other metrics, delivering actionable insights for process improvement.

All these improvements lead to more consistent colors, faster color setup, and this in turn means less waste produced due to long make-ready times, rejections, reworks, and sell-offs, improving the sustainability footprint of both the brand and the printer.

Techkon “Color for Brands”

The Techkon “Color for Brands” program is a modern, digital, global print quality control program for color, backed by some of the largest players in the industry. Brands such as Menards with its extensive private label program managed to go from occasional physical proofs to over 17,000 digital QC checks a year, saving close to $200,000 in the process, and noticeably improving their color consistency on the shelf. Leading packaging print providers such as Berry Global, Smurfit Westrock and GPI, to name just a few, have adopted and are using ChromaQA daily.