Rajesh Dora

I identify where jobs wait, why work gets repeated, and where material is lost.

A stack of amber photopolymer printing plates seen edge on, lit from one side.

  1. Remakes

    Remaking plates becomes normal. But who checks the reason?

  2. Make-ready

    Plates that are not consistent make mounting and setup slower at the customer’s press.

  3. Files

    Files go through the same routine, day after day.

  4. Material

    How much of the material goes into the bin over a year?

  5. Returns

    A plate that comes back after delivery costs the most of all.

Prepress · Plate room · Flexo & labels

Waste is not hidden. It is seen so often that nobody notices it.

The surface of a flexographic printing plate at close range, its raised dot relief catching the light.

You know your own plate room better than I do. I have been inside many of them.

What I keep seeing

01 A process built years ago for one customer

In most of the shops I have visited, the process was made complicated years ago to satisfy one customer. It is still done that way. The customer does not want to change, so nobody changes it.

02 Usually it is not the machines

It is the admin around prepress — the same small tasks, repeated by hand, for every job.

03 The worst delay is waiting for approval

And it is not in the plate room at all. Customers take their own time, and then the moment they approve, the plates are needed at once.

04 More jobs makes the shop slower

More jobs to output means more admin. More admin means files wait longer before anyone checks them. A shop can be busier and slower at the same time.

05 What is not counted is not looked at

Value gets counted in plates and equipment. Prepress and admin sit outside that count — and what is not counted is rarely looked at.

Printed CMYK halftone dots at high magnification, the rosette pattern visible.

None of this is hidden. It is seen every day, and that is why it stops being noticed.

What you get

The written review sets out what I found, the evidence behind it, and which improvements I recommend doing first. Where the records allow, I estimate the cost of the loss and suggest how to measure progress.

  • Where the work waits

    The points where a job sits and nobody is looking at it, and who is waiting for what.

  • What is done by hand

    Which steps still need a person, and which of those do not.

  • What the bin holds

    What is being thrown away, and what that comes to over a year if it stays the same.

  • What your records can tell you

    What today's records will support, and what has to be written down before they will support more.

None of it depends on you buying anything from me.

Where I start

  1. Files

    I start at the files, not at the floor. How the work arrives, what happens to it next, where someone still touches it by hand, and which tools are actually being used.

  2. Prepress

    I follow at least two jobs the whole way: one that is nearly ready to output, and one that needs a lot of work before it can go. That alone takes more than half a day.

  3. The floor

    The bin comes first — what is being thrown away tells you more in five minutes than a report does. Then imaging and exposure — uneven light is one of the things that shows up later as an inconsistent plate. Then the operators, and what they have been trained to do.

  4. Records

    Three months of data says nothing on its own. It only helps if someone has been writing down what the errors were, how many remakes the customer asked for, how many rejects QA found, and how the jobs were handled.

  5. Equipment

    Maintenance records come last, and they are read against what the rest of the day showed.

It rarely looks like a bottleneck. It looks like not enough staff.

So another person is hired. Now there is one more person touching the file, at a different skill level, and one more place where quality can change.

Background

Rajesh Dora, who has worked in printing since 1994 — prepress, plate rooms, flexo and labels across Southeast Asia.
1994
Chennai. I joined the printing and packaging industry as a student. Not by choice — and I have not left it since.
1997
Finished printing technology. My training was technical, but I began on the design side.
2000—09
Singapore. Singapore Press Holdings — publishing, graphic design and digital print.
2010—12
Digital and security printing.
2012—21
Ten years with Esko. Prepress software to flexo trade shops and label converters across Southeast Asia. Inside many plate rooms, watching how each shop prepared files, made plates and handled remakes.
2020
MBA, Murdoch University. Into sales and operations management, and the commercial side of the same business.
2020
Two years as 2nd Vice President, Institute of Printing Association, Asia Pacific Branch.
Today
Thailand. Working in the label segment.

When this does not work

  • You are looking for a software or equipment pitch. I do not sell either.
  • The QA log and the waste bin are not open to me. Those two tell me more than anything else I will be shown.
  • You want the answer on a phone call. A call can decide whether we should meet. The answer itself is on your floor.

What is worth measuring

Before anyone can say anything useful about a plate room, these need to be on the table.

Tick the ones you could put your hands on in ten minutes.

Many shops already have most of this. Very few have it in one place.

Contact

Remakes, make-ready, files, material, returns. Does any of this sound like your plate room?

If these problems sound familiar, write to me with what is happening in your shop. We can start with a short conversation and agree whether a visit would be useful. You do not need complete records to begin.

What I see in your shop stays in your shop.

Thailand · Southeast Asia