I spent nearly two years embedded one day a week in a family‑run printing company – great people, great culture, and a perfect environment for Lean transformation.
Their flagship product ran on a five‑colour offset press, and we discovered the changeovers were dragging out far longer than they should. Classic Quick Changeover territory. So I grabbed a clipboard, stopwatch, and parked myself beside the machine.
At a high level, the process was simple: Strip the old job → Clean the press → Load new plates → Mix inks → Test run → QA tweaks → Full speed.
But something wasn’t adding up.
After watching the machinist burn through 20 pairs of disposable gloves cleaning just three of the five ink units, I had to stop the clock.
“What’s going on?”
He showed me. A splash of acetone, a bit of stretch… and the glove disintegrated in under 30 seconds.
They were PVC vinyl gloves – $9 a box. 100 gloves / 50 pairs. 18¢ per use. Nitrile was $15 for the same quantity – 30¢ per use.
Five ink units that didn’t all need a fresh set, but let’s build it in. A plan for a 60 cent saving per changeover… that was actually costing them 5 x the quantity of gloves required, plus a heap of wasted motion, operator frustration, and eventually he no longer bothered using them. His hands were soaked with acetone and his demotivation was obvious. I promised him that we’ll fix it.
It wasn’t a one‑off. It happened 10 times a week. It was a decision made on a financial figure with little regard for expert input.
Add in broken digital readouts, uncalibrated settings, plates and inks fetched after shutdown, and a “baseline” changeover time of 4 hours suddenly made sense. Roughly one kilometre of paper used in the registration quality adjustments…. Into the scrap bin.
The revised process? 2 hours 20 minutes. No solvent soaked hands. Less paper waste. Better registration.
And 1,000 minutes of productive time captured every week.
Sometimes the biggest losses hide behind the smallest “savings.”
Quick Changeover is a Lean tool and it works.
If you want to unlock time, safety, and throughput in your operation, visit Growth Improvements.