Weekly report: week 2 of the internship

This week was a very busy week, because I have learned a lot of different things. First I finished my research of the companies in the United Kingdom. I printed the report and bond it. In the end it looked pretty business like and my supervisor and Guy, the person in the company that gave me the task, were very happy with it.
The next task I got was to do the same research, but then for the companies in the Netherlands and Belgium. I really liked this task, because it is very interesting that they want to expand to the Netherlands and that I can help with this.
I learned a lot about the processes in the company, like customers orders and the logistic process. This is very similar to the processes I have seen in Holland. The only difference is that Jeffrey, the guy that is in charge of the shipping, needed to develop his own program, because they did not have anything to work with inside the company.
From the beginning this week I try to spend some time in the factory everyday to understand the process better. So this week I have spend a lot of time in the factory asking questions, making photos and videos and just talking with the guys in the factory. They are all very helpful when I ask questions about the machine they are working with or ask them if they can explain what they are doing. On Tuesday I went to the printing department of the hard case books and they explained the whole process the machine goes through to make the cover of the book. They also told me when to come back to see the other machines that were not working then.
I also went to the pre-press department to see what they actually do. There they showed me the whole process that goes on before the books can be printed. When the customers send their documents, mostly in PDF-Files, they check everything from the colour quality till if everything is neatly on one line where it is supposed to be. If everything is all right and the customer has agreed with the costs of producing the product then they make the print sheet. On one sheet you print mostly eight pages on one side and eight on the other when it is a book. When they have made this sheet they send it to another computer that is linked to the machine that makes the print plates for the presses. This machine prints the plates with a laser and for every colour you get one plate, so for black you have another plate as for yellow. On the plates is also printed for which colour it is, because if you put the yellow plate in the black ink press then everything that needed to be yellow is black. If this would happened it would not be handy, because they presses go pretty fast so that is a waste of paper.