Page 26 - PWM2025_February Ebook

TECHNOLOGY REPORT

Keeping the wheels turning

ut putting aside the matter of business genera- ers on recommended operator cleaning tasks. For
tion, there are a number of causes of break- Precious, such training “ensures that customers are
down and failure. And as specialists in the equipped with the right skills to both operate the equip-
It’s hard to know sector explain, prevention is invariably better ment correctly and perform routine preventative mainte-
which is worse – a than cure. Printweek spoke with four manu- nance and cleaning tasks”. Getting this right is
print company with B facturers to find out what those in the indus- fundamental as it should lead to a notable reduction in
downtime and quality issues; also, when done in house
try should consider when thinking about maximising
not enough business, uptime. this may offer a cost saving.
or a firm with enough
work but plant that Digital printing Failures happen
The natural question is to ask what tends to cause
Samantha Precious, strategy and services development
has broken down. manager at Ricoh, says that there is a general acceptance equipment failures? In answer Precious points out that
Neither are ideal and that while certain maintenance work will always be nec- they can be caused by any one of a number of causes, such
both are worrying. essary, it is likely to have service-level agreements and as environment, general wear and tear, operator error,
time penalties attached to it. media use and the like. “Some outages,” she says, “can be
It’s for this reason that she says that “effective service paper related, which are mainly due to the quality and
Words by and intervention is critical, so production processes are storage of the paper; where moisture in the paper causes
Adam Bernstein not compromised”. She remarks that the majority of problems.” She’s of the view that regular preventative
Ricoh’s customers “opt for the full maintenance pack- maintenance can “minimise the chances of disruption
ages, to ensure smooth and efficient maintenance of and downtime... at Ricoh, we offer regular advice and
devices”. But that’s not to say that all go down this route. training and provide real-time data to encourage opti-
Indeed, this is why the company offers different options mised uptime”.
that include full maintenance, a hybrid (shared) One thing that the company does offer is what Precious
approach, or a customer self-service approach. terms an ‘Operator Removable Unit’ for Ricoh’s higher
As a consequence, Ricoh provides training to custom- end cutsheet presses. “These,” she says, “are whole units

26 PrintWeek MENA February 2025 www.printweekmena.com