Printing information

[ZooCity]

Tablets have been getting it done here.  I used a drilled in mount to the top of the control units that can be adjusted and then they can pop the ipads out of the holder.  Stylus' tethered into the headphone jack. I got some big silicone protective/anti-shock things for them so they won't get beat up by the press vibrations and will literally bounce if dropped and also put replacement plans on them.  I'm seeing a much lower rate of press sheets not being updated which was starting to be the bane of my existence.  Also, you can snap pics and upload to the sheet right from a tablet and I'm trying to find something like skitch so you can even annotate the pic for tricky/odd location references. 

Also starting to put the ipads in other locations, it's been real real good having it at the back of the dryer and for check in/out. 

I like the idea of having what's on press on a big screen.  You could hang it over the press, facing the ops and do the webcam thing too maybe.  Or, just have the ops keep the proof of what they are printing up on the tablet screen and on at all times.   I think just having a visual of the print, even in your periphery, could help prevent those random errors in film output where a date is missing or a vector element and nobody catches it. 

[ebscreen]

How does your press sheets link back to your jobs? IE how is it all managed? I like the picture idea, I think I'll integrate that.

TV's right at the press makes perfect sense in terms of having webcams for ink monitoring. Man, and I was leaning towards
a projector just for the huge size and glaring "oh chit it says 2012 on it" factor.

[ZooCity]

I put the art#'s and link to the google doc inside the production notes field in Printavo, it looks like this on a browser (cropped to not show client info).  What I really like about this whole setup is that the job as it is approved by the client is the only thing everyone works off, save for having to link that press info.  Also, all our press data is on our servers, not a mgmt programs so if Printavo were to go under we wouldn't have to export everything out of there which always leads to some sort of formatting headache. 

We're migrating to a local server setup, OSX Server, this month so instead of link it will just be the art#'s and you'll have to search that art# form the ipad in the database and pull it up.  One more step but worth it as the drop down menus in my job sheets will be usable from the tablets now (google somehow decided to not enable data validation on it's sheets on android...).

None of this is ideal, your FM database is superior since it can do things like aggregate all the screens needed in a week, etc.  We do OK just typing this into a third app that we hold checklist type of data in for each job.

[Maxie]

Thanks for all the feed back, there are some really detailed forms.    I see that some are computer based.
I am interested to know how many of you fill all the information in, all the time, some of the time, rarely?
Do you fill it in for complicated jobs or for everything?
Does the information really help when setting up a job a second time?       Do the angles, speed etc stay the same?
I will be filling in the forms by hand and filing them with the graphics.