Finishing? It’s all in hand

Karen Charlesworth, PrintWeek, 31 January 2008
Before machines, there were people. Until the 1950s, most UK printers’ finishing departments or binderies consisted not of folding machines, saddlestitching lines and gatherers, but of big wooden benches where staff would hand-collate, fold and insert. They would work their way through thousands of sheets, using wooden templates or acetate overlays to make their work accurate.

Come the 1980s, and its focus on the efficiency of manufacturing, the ‘people approach’ to finishing, became not only slow and prone to inaccuracy, but also expensive. Coupled with a rise in automation and production efficiency of post-press machinery, it spelled the death of hand finishing. Now, popular estimates put the number of hand finishing facilities throughout the UK at less than 50.

But with scarcity comes a certain cachet. As the number of hand finishers has dwindled, their value to the market has increased. In these days where every direct mailer and brand owner searches frantically to get their printed document to stand out from the crowd, the resulting range of sizes, shapes and stocks can be difficult to finish by machine. As a result, there has been a resurgence – small and cautious, but distinct – in hand finishing.

Devon-based Ailec Mailing Services went into receivership in 2005, driven in part by a rise in the minimum wage that made its hand-enclosing facility unviable. The company was acquired by Peppercom. The new owner’s commercial director, Jude Whitford, initially wanted to ditch the hand finishing side of things. “It was a drain on the books,” he says. But Whitford quickly realised there was a demand for hand finishing, and that the department could be an asset rather than a liability, if it was run in the right way.

Target driven

“We made some wholesale changes,” adds Whitford. “One of the biggest was to set targets for the benchworkers, with whiteboards above the benches to tell them what they were expected to turn out in a day.” Another big change was Peppercom moving their employment to a zero-hours basis. “We pay the staff’s tax and NI, but they work anywhere from 40 to zero hours a week,” explains Whitford. “It’s more flexible that way, and we can vary it according to workload.”

Birmingham-based WML’s hand finishing service is done entirely by a network of self-employed women who work from home. In this way, managing director Martin Smith avoids the overheads of employment and keeps his workforce flexible. “We have a central point of contact who we send the work out to. She sends it out to her women, then collects it back in and gets it back to us,” he says.

Hand finishers tend, by and large, to be female. Peppercom’s 25 benchworkers are all women, many of whom have school-age children, and the flexible nature of the work suits them. Whitford says: “We do run a flexi-hours scheme, so they get the best deal as regards their kids too.”

And while Whitford maintains that this approach has a positive effect on staff retention, he does admit that employing staff in this more casual way affects their skill t levels. “It’s not the most skilled work in the world, but obviously it needs a certain attention to detail to keep quality levels up,” he says. Peppercom gets around this by employing two shift supervisors who have an established background in hand finishing and mailing. “They work out the most efficient way to do each job and they show the benchworkers how to do it, then they walk around, keeping an eye on how it’s being done to make sure it’s as efficient as it can be,” adds Whitford.

Even when it’s run in this efficient way, hand finishing is an expensive business. It can cost a lot in overheads, wages and HR resource to maintain a hand finishing facility, but it can be (and by virtue of the former point, needs to be) charged at a premium. For these reasons, plenty of trade finishers veer away from offering hand finishing. In today’s margin-starved marketplace, it’s too costly both to maintain and to offer.

The relative expense of the service has shaped the marketing policy of hand finishing specialist Whitney Woods. “We promote our hand finishing services only to printers, but we simply turn away work if the printer won’t pay the asking price,” says owner Paul Whitney. “The ones who can pay the asking price are those fortunate enough to have a client who is prepared to pay a proper price for a proper job.”

Maintaining value

Whitney’s is an interesting strategy and one that throws down the gauntlet to many trade finishers: take the king’s shilling at your peril. “Printers have been so ground down by print management companies that their margins just don’t allow them to offer decent margins, in their turn, to trade finishers,” Whitney says. “They ask us to produce perfect work for peanuts. Well, we don’t touch that sort of work. We want to be paid at a rate that matches the service we offer. Trade finishers who do take on that kind of work are fools – they’re filling up their machinery in exchange for no profit and sometimes even for loss. How do you survive, doing that? Well, you don’t. You go to the wall.”

Hand finishing also offers a challenge to machine-based finishing in that it requires a certain timescale. Whitney explains: “It’s laughable, the time that some printers give you to turn a job around. They expect in two days what they used to get in a week. We’ve taken the line of saying that we need a week to do a week’s work. Hand finishing takes a certain amount of time and it can’t be rushed. We can’t just push a button to make the machine go faster.”

Wages can be an issue for those printers who want to set up a hand finishing department. Peppercom’s benchworkers are paid a little more than minimum wage levels, but the issue is not what they’re paid, but the fact the company’s commitment to them is to raise their wages using minimum wage as a base rate, “which basically means they get an increase every couple of years, which is more often than the rest of the workforce, and it can cause some complaints,” Whitford says.

Benefits of variety

Perhaps surprisingly, health and safety is less of an occupational hazard for hand finishing operations than might be expected. Beyond keeping a first aid kit on hand for paper cuts and training benchworkers in how to lift heavy sheaves of paper, there seems to be almost no problem with occupational injury, or even progressive debilitative conditions, such as repetitive strain injury or carpal tunnel syndrome.

Paul Whitney puts it down to the variety of the different jobs that come in. “A machine carries out the same processes, day in day out, but the beauty of hand finishing is its variety – a human being is flexible and that’s why we employ them,” he says. “Our girls are always moving around. Today they’re making up folders, whereas tomorrow they’ll be eyeletting and the day after that they’ll be collating stuff for a direct mail job. They like collating,” he adds, “it gives them chance to stretch their legs, walking around the bench.”

Employing a bevy of people, however, can be an expensive drain on HR resources, particularly when overseas workers are taken on and visas and work permits must be checked. Jude Whitford says this isn’t a solution that Peppercom will ever consider: “Sure, you can cut some wage corners by going that route, but there’s a whole can of worms with the paperwork – we don’t want to get caught out,” he says. “And even if that wasn’t the case, we have a policy of only employing English speakers because it’s hard to explain to someone what to do if they don’t speak English. We believe it shows in the quality of our work.”

http://www.printweek.com/postpress/news/780188/Finishing-Its-hand/