What It Takes to Win at the Excellence in Flexography Awards

We read and hear regularly from professional sports coaches and athletes claiming the key to their team’s or individual success is tied to a constant and ongoing “focus on the fundamentals.” More specifically, University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban has famously tied together a long and successful career on the gridiron through a philosophy that is termed as “The Process”—an organizational commitment to doing the right thing, the right way, all the time.

“There are two pains in life,” Coach Saban has been quoted as saying. “The pain of discipline and the pain of disappointment. If you can handle the pain of discipline, you’ll never have to deal with the pain of disappointment.”

So what do these sports analogies have to do with achieving success in a flexo print reproduction? I refer to the above examples because it’s hard to argue against the idea that, regardless of profession or situation, an ongoing focus on the fundamentals and commitment to doing things the “right” way can only lead to consistent success. This especially holds true when we turn the focus to submission of print samples for the FTA Excellence in Flexography Awards competition.

It remains a common misconception the awards judges anoint the highest scores to only the “pretty” designs—or to those entries that have the latest technological “bells and whistles” applied. We hear often from printers who fail to submit entries because “the right job just didn’t come along.” An ongoing concern among the Awards Committee is there remain a lot of really good flexo print jobs that are not submitted to the competition each year because the printer feels it doesn’t stand a chance of competing against the “big boys,” or the notion that “The same printers win every year, so why bother?”

The reality is the Excellence in Flexography Awards judging criteria was established and is maintained to recognize and reward outstanding flexo print—period. While we often see some of the same company names appearing when the winners are announced each year, the primary reason for this is most often these companies have recognized and embraced the criteria the judging teams really look for when evaluating and scoring the submissions.

Also consider: This criteria is really nothing different than what should be applied in your operation on a day to day basis in producing both quality and profitable results.

Two Halves of a Whole

So, let’s break that point down a little further. What do the judging teams really look at? Or, more to the point, what should a printer really be looking at when deciding whether a job should be considered for submission to the awards competition?

The awards judging guidelines and scoring criteria are divided into two categories: Degree of Difficulty and Level of Execution. The Degree of Difficulty category basically covers print conditions like substrate printability/ink compatibility, registration tolerances, plate/printing complexity, fineness of screen, tonal range and defect detectability. A good number of these conditions are product required and “fixed”—there’s really not a whole lot a printer can do related to gaining a higher score for its entry in the category.

One item that can contribute to making a major difference, however, is the completeness of the Technical Data Form. More information will assist the judges in better understanding how the job was produced and any particular challenges that may have been faced because of the job conditions. It never hurts to emphasize what at first may seem as obvious.