Prepress operator Geoffrey Verhoef is a seasoned player in the business. In the nineties, at his first employer, he still experienced the change from computer-to-film to computer-to-plate. “At the time, I was brought out of the print shop to implement the entire digital computer-to-plate story.” But Geoffrey is now mainly looking ahead.
As a prepress operator, Geoffrey ensures that files are made ready for printing, so that the end result meets the customer's needs and all technical and legal requirements. This includes not only the visual aspect of the print, but also the content of nutritional tables and lists of ingredients.
Over the years, Geoffrey has specialized in tinplate. “Inks behave very differently on tin than on cardboard or flexible materials such as foil. So you have to take that into account.” But he is not only involved in tinning. “When a tin, a box and a bag are on the shelf side by side, it must of course look the same in terms of brand identity. For example, the colors must be correct, whether it is printed on tin or cardboard. That kind of brand management is also part of the repro work that I do.”
Together with a number of other colleagues, Geoffrey made the switch to Volkers last year, after the company where they worked went bankrupt. They also took a number of customers with them in their wake. Friesland Campina, for example, a customer with whom Geoffrey had been working for years. “Partly because Volkers now has a core team that worked for Campina for years, we have also received other customers for tinkering. That and the customer relationship that we have built are things that I am proud of.”
Geoffrey now feels at home at Volkers, although it took some getting used to at first, of course. “I was mostly used to working with offset sheets and here we work a lot with flexo. That is different material. So that was fairly new to me, and Volkers also gave me the opportunity to work with a new software package, which took some getting used to. I worked with a different program for years. But I wouldn't want to work with that old package now.”
The mutual exchange of knowledge with colleagues helped Geoffrey to quickly find his way. “When I want to know exactly how something works, I ask my colleagues and they always make time. And if I think that something can be done in a different way, I'll also just make a proposal. Knowledge transfer takes place over and over again. We interact here in an informal way. I like that. And there is a not-dick-but-cleaning mentality.”
And what, according to Geoffrey, is the secret of a long-term company like Volkers? “Over the past few years, we've seen a lot of big names fall in our business. So, as a company, you certainly cannot rest on your laurels. I think trust plays an important role in Volkers' success. There is mutual trust between management and employees here. In addition, customers also trust us as a supplier. What we say, we live up to.”
Geoffrey says that he happy is with the work he does now. “But I think it would be interesting to further develop myself at Volkers as a print quality manager in the coming years, in order to be even more involved in print coordination with customers and printers.”
