You are operating highly automated printing technology, getting work out the door, and (hopefully) making a profit.

But is this evidence of a successful label manufacturing business?

To many the answer is yes. “Customers are getting their orders, we’re futureproofed with the latest and greatest equipment, and we’re making money,” you might reply.

But what if we told you there’s such a thing as “bad success”? If you look at success in broad terms, it’s easy to misconstrue positive performance for business success. What you don’t see is the challenges that arise, issues which persist, and the constraints holding you back.

Bad success is exactly that. When you deem something to have been a success based on limited factors without fully appreciating the wider impact and holistic failures.

Take the hackneyed metric of Overall Equipment Effectiveness or ‘OEE’. This is used to measure the effectiveness and performance of manufacturing processes or any individual piece of equipment. It provides an idea of how well equipment is being utilised and how efficiently it operates in producing goods or delivering services. The OEE calculation can be realised as availability x performance x quality.

Sounds good so far, right? If you’re spending upwards of £1 million on a highly automated, cutting-edge flexo press that is bigger, wider, and faster, those are sensible data points upon which to measure performance.

But what it doesn’t tell you is the impact on the rest of the business. What exactly does a 26in-wide flexo press running at 200m/min (or an inkjet engine printing at 100m/min for that matter) mean for your business? How is the order book being maintained? Are backlogs being juggled? Have you enough stock to keep presses running at that speed? Is finishing keeping up? What is the state of an order from receipt to delivery?

Even Total Effective Equipment Performance or ‘TEEP’ doesn’t reveal the true picture. TEEP is another metric used in manufacturing and production environments to measure the overall efficiency and effectiveness of equipment or a production line. It includes all the potential production time, including planned and unplanned downtime. TEEP is calculated by multiplying availability x performance x quality x utilisation.

It’s important not to view production in silos, rather have vision of the whole process as an ecosystem that ebbs and flows. Each part of your manufacturing environment is symbiotic, living and breathing off one another. Each must be fed and nurtured to ensure system-wide efficiency and success.

Focusing on one area – as OEE will inevitably lead you to do – takes your eye off the overall picture and skews the perception of success. Ergo, bad success. Your OEE score can be as high as 100%, but if you’re printing defective work, creating waste, and not getting jobs completed and despatched on time, how is that a measure of success?

Far better is to prioritise metrics that matter to truly successful label printing businesses – Right First Time (RFT) and On Time, In Full (OTIF). The ultimate goal of all label printers should be to ensure every job is completed right the first time, and every order is delivered on time, in full. That way we’re measuring production efficiency and effectiveness – not just utilisation – and ensuring our customers come back for more.

Both RFT and OTIF are self-explanatory. While RFT aims to ensure that activities or processes are performed correctly the first time, so minimising errors and rework and ultimately improving efficiency and quality, OTIF is a supply chain management metric that tracks the ability to meet delivery promises in their entirety and within agreed timeframes. Both are strict metrics for performance, but this makes them highly valuable to any manufacturing business seeking a genuine measurement of success.

When RFT and OTIF are excelling in your business, maybe this is the time to focus on run speed to improve overall throughput.

An area where label printers can make immediate improvements to their RFT and OTIF scores is by removing complexity and bottlenecks from make-readies and simplifying changeovers. A system such as the Monolox fixed anilox printing technology delivers exactly that.

By standardising anilox selection around a single low volume cell and utilising high-strength, mono-pigment PureTone® inks, you are able to immediately remove the most well-known and visible bottleneck in flexo printing, as well as ensuring consistency, increasing quality, and minimising the risk of errors.

When you adopt the Monolox system, you take a giant leap towards getting work off your press that Is right first time and delivered on time and in full.

These are the metrics that truly count and that should be used to measure a label printing company’s real success.

Find out more about our PureTone® inks and the Monolox fixed anilox printing system and discover how they can revolutionise your work and the expectations of your customers.