L’Oreal adopts Ghent PDF Plus tools

With three main international brands - L’Oreal, Garnier and Maybelline - L’Oreal Consumer Products Europe’s packaging production challenges are multi-lingual and multi-faceted. It produces packaging in 33 languages and manages a complex packaging supply chain involving 50 main suppliers, 30 agencies and nine print centres across Europe using offset, gravure and flexo techniques. A total of 13,000 separate packaging artwork files are processed every year.

Like just about any organisation creating printed materials, its requirements are for streamlined workflows, improved control, cost efficiency and flexibility, reduced time to market, and secure, portable PDF files that it knows will print correctly throughout a complex supply chain.

Philippe van der Schrieck, who is responsible for Consumer Products European Graphical Workflow Management, and his team at L’Oreal in Paris, France, oversee the production workflow working with numerous design agencies, prepress houses and printers.

To ensure critical quality control, L’Oreal handles image retouching and colour management centrally, while creative files with translated text are handled by the regional agencies. The print site drops in high definition visuals and graphics, preflights, makes any last minute corrections and adjustments, and prints to very strict quality guidelines. The printer takes responsibility for the quality of the final product and often has to make several time consuming adjustments to the PDF to ensure consistency.

Until now, standard PDF/Illustrator has been the de facto file exchange format between L’Oreal’s graphics department, its regional offices and numerous third party suppliers around Europe. However, a single hair colour range can involve 2,000 separate packaging data (including marketing and technical content). With such complex packaging files and multiple parties handling multiple elements, the risk of error and inconsistency is high and so additional, often unnecessary, costs can result.

“We needed to simplify the workflow to give us centralized control of the PDF template, secure portability of PDF files between suppliers, achieve better cost efficiency, improve technical control throughout the supply chain and reduce the amount of prepress work each printer needed to undertake,” explains van der Schrieck. “It was clear that we needed a tight PDF file specification that would give us these advantages and ensure the printers received a ‘hands free’ print ready file that printed to the highest quality levels.”

The answer was found in the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG) and its PDF Packaging Specifications (PDF Plus). GWG is an international gathering of graphic arts developers, associations and end users, which work on best practice publishing workflows. As well as packaging, GWG has published specifications and job tickets in areas such as preflighting, soft proofing, advertising metadata, and office document printing. Invariably, these specifications and job tickets (available as free downloads) seek to ensure that a PDF has been created with the right characteristics to meet its intended use across different publishing spheres.

The packaging industry has very precise PDF requirements and the GWG Packaging Specifications are the result of collaboration between leading packaging specialist organizations around the world. The result is a set of best practice guidelines for packaging that ensure reliable and consistent PDF file exchange between all the parties involved in the often complicated workflow from design through to output. All features are embedded and, once defined, provide settings and rules that ensure things such as consistent fonts, colour space and image resolution.

L’Oreal worked with Christian Blaise, co-chairman of the Ghent PDF Workgroup Packaging Subcommittee, along with the bleuprocess consultancy and Square, a prepress member of the Ghent Workgroup, based in Lyon, to define its master PDF packaging template to meet these “PDF Plus” specifications. Square has worked closely with GWG to develop and test the packaging specifications, so was ideally placed to support L’Oreal on this project.

The GWG Packaging Specifications are based on the PDF/X-1a format but allow some exceptions important to packaging applications, such as live transparency and multiple layers. The L’Oreal profile includes two modifications: low res images are possible and external references have been allowed to replace low res images by high res when required. L’Oreal also presets which layers of the packaging file can be viewed, for example a ‘cut’ version of the final box layout for the marketing department; a no image view and a full layer view. “It is very useful to be able to view the embossing layer in position on the layout,” says van der Schrieck. “Non-printed layers such as this are then simply discarded before printing.”


Pilot Project: Garnier HerbaShine
L’Oreal’s new PDF Plus specifications were piloted on a specific project: the launch of the new Garnier HerbaShine hair colour range. The benefits were found to be significant on many levels throughout the production supply chain, the company says. The HerbaShine range features 19 hair shades and was produced in 15 languages, resulting in 285 different boxes.

“The launch of a new haircare product requires a huge amount of work to prepare the packaging, and in this case we were working with a challenging six-month deadline,” he explains. “We developed a dedicated PDF Plus template with tight specifications and provided all the countries and agencies with the same file with low res graphics, to which all they had to do was add translated text.”

Embedded instructions within the file tell the agency what freedom they have to localise and what areas are locked.

Finally, at the print site, the PDF files were automatically integrated with high res images, redundant layers, such as embossing, were removed, and the job was trapped and imposed, ready for printing.

Packaging design is never straightforward though, and the HerbaShine box changed several times in terms of dimensions, content formula and logos. “By using PDF Plus we were able to make these changes once, centrally and quickly, without affecting the schedule,” says van der Schrieck. “The final files were ready on time and ready for the launch date.”

L’Oreal’s marketing department was quickly convinced that the new procedure brought important benefits. The project was completed on time and quality levels were consistent across all ranges, in all languages produced.

“We are now looking at integrating high res image elements within packaging files earlier on in the process, and investigating the benefits of applying the new specifications to our label production needs,” says van der Schrieck.

Ultimately, a complex workflow was streamlined; duplication was avoided, errors minimised and time to market was reduced. Van der Schrieck adds: “Plus, because we split prepress away from printers, we now have the freedom to change printers quickly if we need to, or appoint a new printer quickly in a new region. It means we can work more easily with a greater number of suppliers which gives our buying department, which was very involved in this project, more choice and flexibility.

“Square and the Ghent Workgroup provided us with the PDF file specification expertise, advice and guidance we needed, and the results have had an impact across many aspects of the business, not just in production.”

Square CEO Roland Donzelle says: “GWG Packaging Specifications benefit everyone in the supply chain. As prepress suppliers it gives us a safe standard to work with, while L’Oreal can depend on a secure and streamlined workflow that brings quality products to market swiftly and efficiently.”

The Ghent Workgroup Packaging Specifications are downloadable for free from: www.gwg.org