Production: Dealing with Out-of-Spec Inserts

by: W. Eric Schult

My favorite image related to this month’s column is of a “little brown cloud” of powdered hot chocolate settling over a carousel inserter in Lancaster, Pa., the result of an attempt to machine-insert a product sample into the daily newspaper.

Bill Birchall, mechanical supervisor for the Intelligencer Journal (now known as LNP), recalled setting up two hoppers on half speed and silencing his 1372 inserter’s double-detector to feed the novelty insert through the machine. It ran surprisingly well, but “every once in a while, one would get punctured by the front lift hook,” dispersing a puff of chocolaty powder into the air.

“It smelled good feeding the hopper,” Birchall said. “Anyone who wanted some hot chocolate that day got a free sample.”

Anecdotes about trying to process out-of-spec inserts are not often as sweet or amusing, and the impact to the newspaper’s bottom line might be an eye-opener for many publishers and controllers.

For example, take a more mundane and all too familiar instance from this March in which a national insert account shipped an FSI (free-standing insert) that was not only under-spec on thickness, but its tissue paper pages also enclosed three, glossy “blow-in cards” that tended to float loosely inside their jacket. The printer hadn’t done us any favors either. The blow-in cards were often inserted between unopened jackets instead of where they belonged, and the cover pages of the insert were just tacky enough to adhere to the loose pieces. They couldn’t easily be jogged out before being fed into the insert hopper, virtually assuring a high incidence of misfeeds and jams.

My packaging team netted a glacial 6,900 pieces per hour on a run that should have achieved closer to 12,000 pieces per hour. That’s 24 extra man-hours I’ll never get back, directly attributable to that one insert.

Just as importantly, however, the customer may not understand how poorly he was served, not just by one paper, but very likely anywhere and everywhere the product was shipped for insertion. How many households in targeted delivery zones didn’t get an insert because machine operators had to turn off miss/double-detection to get the product out? How many got a partial piece—just one or more of the blow-in cards but not the jacket, or just the jacket without the blow-in cards? How many got an insert with the cover ripped off because of how the pieces tended to stick together?

To be sure, this was a self-inflicted wound on the advertiser’s part, but the shot was through and through and ricocheted around the room.

Out-of-spec inserts come in many forms. Some exceed dimensional limits, extending beyond the confines of their enclosing jacket. Those don’t tend to slow down insertion, but they are often wrinkled or torn in the process of being stacked and bundled. To avoid this, FSI’s need to be dimensionally smaller than the paper into which they are being inserted. For a standard broadsheet newspaper, that size is likely to be no more than 11x11, depending on the press that prints it and the Web width of the newsprint being used.

Pieces smaller than 5x7 are also problematic for most inserting equipment. The hoppers are not designed to feed products of this size and sensors are not positioned properly to detect and repair misses.

Oddball inserts—from craft grocery sacks to product samplers to perforated mailers—all present challenges of their own. My packaging manager’s worst insert in memory was a scratch-off ticket glued to a cardboard backer. The two pieces tended to separate upon being fed through the hopper.

But with advertisers intent on minimizing print costs for their FSI’s, it is out-of-spec product thickness that has become a primary inhibitor to packaging productivity and accuracy, with unintended consequences all around. Increasingly, individual sheeters and low page count (four to six pages) tabs are being printed on stock so insubstantial that they tend to roll-up as they settle into the jacket. The result is a product that may be creased or folded accordion-style by the time it delivers. That’s assuming the hopper hasn’t fed multiple copies of the insert into the same jacket.

“You wouldn’t know if you’re feeding two, three or four copies,” said Pete Kowalewski, packaging manager of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, because less than .007 inches—the minimum specs for the thickness of an insert—the sensors on his SLS-2000 inserters can’t accurately detect multiples.

Kowalewski noted that a little more than a third of the FSI’s that are inserted by his packaging team do not meet the machines’ minimum thickness specification. The high percentage is partly attributable to a successful sheeter program in which a glossy product measuring only .00375 inches in thickness is actively sold into the paper.

“That’s what’s happening in our industry,” he said. “You try to capture every dollar you can.”

The paper compensates by specifying under-spec inserts be provided with a 5 percent overrun for waste as opposed to 3 percent for inserts that do meet minimum specs. In that way, shortages due to the inevitable feeding of multiple inserts are less likely to occur. Other measures are undertaken to minimize losses of productivity, such as running backup hoppers so that if a sheeter misfeeds, the hopper immediately behind it will fill in the miss. This prevents the jacket from having to ride all the way around the machine for a second attempt at insertion, thereby reducing net yield. Damage to under-spec FSI’s is minimized by positioning them to feed last into the jacket, which is a common practice. This prevents them from being crumpled by heavier products being dropped upon them by downstream hoppers.

It’s something of a mixed blessing for papers like mine—The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer—and the Journal-Sentinel that their weekday inserts are pre-packaged into an early-run jacket and not inserted live into the main sections on deadline. While out-of-spec inserts can hurt packaging productivity and accuracy earlier in the day, at least they cannot also interfere with the timely delivery of the paper at night. By contrast, LNP and the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, both of which insert live, do not have the luxury of slowing down production to accommodate a problematic insert. The mixed blessing for us is that because we can slow down, we do.

For the Quad-City Times, it’s otherwise: “We just have to run it at the same speed,” said Steve Dye, production manager. “It’s not like we can slow down for (one under-spec advertiser)” when doing so would delay subscriber delivery. “If you’re running live, you can’t afford to slow down.”

“You have an under-spec ad, a late press start, and it’s snowing,” said Birchall. “How much are you going to sacrifice for this one guy?”

According to Dye, what goes a long way is that his counterpart in the advertising department “is super at understanding the production end of it,” explaining to her insert customers what to expect if their FSI is out-of-spec. “Being proactive with it helps a lot,” he said.

The Quad-City Times uses minimum paper grades rather than product thickness for its FSI specs. A sheeter must have a basis weight not less than 60 lbs.— equivalent to card stock— and a multiple-page FSI must have a basis weight not less than 30 lbs.—equivalent to standard newsprint. Aside from dimensional minimums and maximums, there are additional key requirements, including:

Preprints should be flat with edges and folds not curled or bent.

Preprints should be palletized on skids squarely with a maximum skid height of five feet.

Slip-sheet cardboard should be placed between layers.

Only single-sheet preprints are to be boxed.

Preprints should be free from perforations as perforations cause additional spoilage.

The existence of a definitive, clearly communicated document spelling out all these specifications and leaving wiggle room to accommodate exceptions is half the battle. The other half is in achieving a consistent message among the members of the sales team that interact with FSI customers.

“Production has to take a more active role in educating the sales reps,” said Linda Rabagliati, vice president of Alliant Consulting. She added sales reps ought to work at night, elbow-to-elbow with the inserting crew for a minimum of two weeks.

“They need to see what happens and be able to explain it to the customer,” she said, and without that hands-on experience, “…they can’t explain it well enough to make the customer care.”

Birchall said with the advertising reps “grabbing at straws to bring in revenue, they don’t want to say anything for fear of rocking the boat.” Even if they do, a pat rebuttal from a regional or national account might well be a refrain I have heard repeated often: “Nobody else is having a problem.” Whether that’s evidence of self-delusion, ignorance or disingenuousness is a question, but Rabagliati maintained confidence that a sales rep that is informed—and compensated in a way to encourage those conversations—can get traction and make a difference.

“The advertiser will comply if you sit down and talk to (him) like an adult,” she said. “Everything depends on the sales rep selling the value” of the service, not the price. While she acknowledged there would never be 100 percent compliance, there doesn’t have to be. “You can deal with the exceptions if they’re not the rule.”

To combat that misperception that “nobody else is having a problem,” there are several good resources available where newspapers can compare notes on their packaging challenges. One is the Perfect Pallets Post Press Forum at perfectpalletspostpress.com, where it’s not uncommon for packaging and production managers to share tips and tricks to get a particularly challenging insert to run. Posting a YouTube video of a hopper misfeeding an out-of-spec insert would be a great way to get a conversation started, both for commiseration and helpful pointers, if not also to gather voices of others supposedly not having the problem.

The Muller Martini Users Group is also a resource for papers running the company’s SLS-line of inserters or interested in its new Flexliner and Proliner inserters. Contacts include Julius Neto, the production and transportation director at The Hartford (Conn.) Courant, Dan Cropley, product manager for Muller Martini, and Gary Owen, vice president of sales for Muller Martini. The group’s next annual meeting is May 7 to 9 at the vendor’s manufacturing facility in Allentown, Pa., where it also operates a packaging center that produces 650,000 Sunday pre-packs for the New York Daily News.

A lone local newspaper negotiating with regional and national FSI advertisers to upgrade the stock on which their preprints are produced may seem like tilting at windmills. However, networking can help newspapers in gathering a collective voice to persuade those customers it’s in their own best interest. If the argument for improved accuracy of distribution is not persuasive enough, there’s also a case to be made that advertisers may be spending more money for added waste than they are saving by having downgraded the paper on which their inserts are printed. The difference in net cost between 30 lbs and 27.7 lbs. newsprint, for instance, is about 1 percent; if FSI advertisers saved that amount in downgrading their inserts to an out-of-spec product, but have to print two percent more in overruns for insert spoilage, they may well have hurt their bottom line, not helped it.

For newspapers, the remedy for out-of-spec inserts is not turning that work away—since that would truly be shooting oneself in the foot—but rather managing customers’ expectations, assigning an appropriate value to the services being rendered, and then figuring out how to avoid letting packaging center productivity, accuracy and timeliness suffer unnecessarily.

W. Eric Schult is a retired, 35-year veteran of the newspaper business. He most recently served as senior operations and technology executive at The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer. Contact him on LinkedIn.com.