Industry Standards Boost Economic Development: the Printing Sector Urgently Needs Strengthening

[ppzhan abstract] Industry standards play an important role in the development of an industry. Although the printing industry has developed rapidly in recent years, China still has no say in industry standards, which has seriously restricted the development of the industry. So how did this situation come about?

The promotion of printing standardization has been carried out in China's printing industry for nearly 20 years. However, because enterprises have different understandings of printing standardization, even though these enterprises have made many efforts in building printing standardization, the ultimate benefits remain only various rules and regulations at the level of enterprise management and ideology, while the economic benefits that enterprises obtain through printing standardization are very small.

Printing enterprises do not attach importance to standards

At present, most printing enterprises in China do not have their own quality standards, let alone implement printing standardization, and such phenomena occur from time to time. Recently, the Quality and Technical Supervision Bureau of a certain city organized a commodity barcode quality supervision and inspection of printing enterprises throughout the city, spot-checking 106 printing enterprises and taking 134 barcode printing samples, of which only 22 passed inspection, a pass rate of only 16.4%. The spot check found that printing enterprises lack awareness of relevant laws and regulations when undertaking the printing of commodity barcodes; most printing enterprises do not know that the state has commodity barcode standards and the "Measures for the Administration of Commodity Barcodes" formulated by the state, and they do not check customers' commodity barcode certificates when undertaking printing, which has led to the printing of counterfeit and forged commodity barcodes. In production, most printing enterprises either focus on output, or on turnaround time, or on cost, but often neglect standards and lack quality control. Developing in this way, these enterprises will eventually lose the market.

Printing enterprises have an insufficient understanding of printing standardization

Printing standardization has a history of about 40 years, while China's research on printing standardization is less than 20 years old. Most printing enterprises still have a very insufficient understanding of printing standardization, and some have even formed a wrong understanding of it. Some printing enterprises increasingly prefer standard-centrism, believing that as long as there is a standard it is good, and they focus on the certification of various standards, believing that as long as a standard is formulated, their enterprise instantly meets the standard. Little do they know that formulating a standard and truly implementing the process control of standardization are two completely different concepts; only formulating a standard without implementing it turns the standard into a mere scrap of paper.

For example, many printing enterprises like to boast that they adopt "a certain printing standard" when carrying out color management, and that their digital prototyping target values are "a certain color standard", but in actual printing they rarely meet the requirements of these standards. This easily causes customers to misunderstand, believing that the products they buy fully meet the standards, which results in disputes between the two parties to the transaction and ultimately causes market chaos, which is not conducive to the healthy development of the printing industry.

The level of printing standardization is not high

The printing industries of developed economies represented by the United States, Europe and Japan are characterized by large scale, advanced printing technology and a high level of standardization. Developed economies also have strong advantages in the standardization of new business forms such as digital printing, network printing and cross-media publishing. Compared with developed economies, the printing industries of emerging economies are characterized by small scale and low output value, and the Asia-Pacific region, which accounts for the majority of the population, contributes only 25% of the printing output value; second, printing technology is backward and the level of standardization is low, and the standardization of new business forms is still at the exploratory stage.

As a member of the emerging economies, China's level of productivity development is still at an underdeveloped stage, and problems such as poor product quality, low management level and non-standard enterprise behavior are still widespread. These objective factors have greatly restricted the improvement of China's standardization level. Although China's economy has developed rapidly since the financial crisis, China's printing industry still lags behind developed countries in the building of printing standardization, and the gap is constantly widening.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-361839.html