PRODPP120 – Plan work to meet production requirements

Overview

Planning work to make sure it is completed correctly and on time is vitally important in a production environment.

Pre-press, digital printing and creative artwork departments invariably deal with jobs (orders) that are made up of several operations.

This standard is about making sure that for each job there is a plan setting out what work is required, the sequence of the work and the time it is expected to take.

The essence of this standard is that job planning and task review should be routine practice in day-to-day work at all levels.

Performance criteria

You must be able to:

Interpret production requirements

1. check that you have all the job details
2. identify finished products required by customers
3. identify what your department or area of work is required to produce
4. list the tasks for jobs that are needed to be completed within your area of work, and the order in which the tasks should be carried out
5. check your interpretation and understanding of tasks required in accordance with organisational requirements
6. check whether the content of jobs may lawfully be reproduced
7. communicate any tasks required for jobs that were not originally planned or expected

Plan production tasks to meet customer requirements

8. confirm that you have sufficient resources to complete identified tasks
9. produce realistic estimates of the time needed to complete tasks
10. organise your work so that you will complete it within the time expected, avoid unnecessary repetition and re-working and meet your company's quality standards
11. work in a productive and co-operative manner when working as part of a team
12. obtain approval for the way you have planned to organise work
13. identify any problems with resources, including insufficient time
14. take instructions about what to do when there are problems with resources

Knowledge and understanding

You need to know and understand

1. the law as it affects printing: copyright and ownership of images, obscenity, incitement, forgery, data protection
2. ethical and employment issues relevant to printing: confidentiality, the safe handling of customer material
3. security and storage: computer system security and virus protection, the print with time-sensitive or restricted release date, the high value products or print with a high risk of theft
4. how to communicate with colleagues and customers
5. workplace standards and procedures
6. the range of work carried out in the workplace
7. the working practices existing in the workplace
8. the key job roles within the printing and graphic communications industry and their main purposes
9. the identification and assessment of printing options
10. the reasons for selecting one process over another
11. the choice of processes for any particular product
12. the stages in the printing process from pre-press to printed product
13. the different types of resource, including labour, materials, machinery and equipment
14. the relationship between resource usage and profitability
15. how to maximise productivity
16. the relationship between productivity and competitiveness
17. the range of methods, equipment, material and software appropriate to the imaging requirements
18. the relative merits of the methods, equipment, material and software
19. digital files: file management procedures and file conversion techniques
20. administration procedures: planning and scheduling, recording and reporting
21. the main features of quality assurance and quality control systems
22. techniques for controlling quality
23. the equipment for controlling quality in digital artwork, pre-press and printing areas
24. the light standards for viewing and assessing colour print
25. how to maintain the quality of materials during storage & handling
26. the principal types of proof and their role in the printing process

Keywords: digital, print, pre-press, planning, production