Multi plant color management.

[UbarW]

Lets say I own a printing company with 5 plants. all over the place....

Lets also say I have a customer that wants all 5 of my plants to print their stuff...

Seems to me I need to have color consistency from plant to plant. There's got to be a way to do this... ICC? G7? Both? Monitor calibrations?

Is there a "unified" approach?

[Nicolas]

Basically two ways are possible.
First is to standardize all presses to a certain standard i.e. G7 with lowest tolerances. Best results will be achieved if you use an absolute equal process on all presses (screening, inks, paper, blankets...) This sounds short, but is usually a big effort.

Second possibility is to standardize the individual processes of the different printers (presses). Then you fingerprint each press, which means creating a profile for each press(or process), and use a device link ColorServer to convert the PDF data before going on press. (Can be done with i.e. GMG ColorServer) In this case all PDFs made i.e. according to G7 standard and color converted according to the press color space, to get visually the same G7 result on each press. By doing so you can print to one standard on all plants without standardize them to the same level. (But standardization in a certain way is required in any case!)
Second possibility might get you more flexibility - depending how deep your "influence" on the different printers is.

[stargate]

GMG ColorServer is a great product for what you are asking. Not only it can do what you need but it will do it automatically once setup using HotFolders that can integrate with pretty much any workflow. I have few presses and let me tell you that using ColorServer is much easier to implement than making all presses to be G7 or whatever standard you want to match. Some presses may never conform to G7 not matter what you do and no matter how many days color consultants spend on the those presses.
Check the details here:
Welcome to GMG GmbH & Co. KG : ColorServer

[UbarW]

I wish all the eggheads that research colorspace theory would learn to write in a way that someone without a phd could easily absorb...

I was coming to the conclusion that a unified approach like colorserver makes the most sense...