Standardisation in colour technology?

Give the average operator, laboratory technician, colourist or production manager training on ISO, standards or quality awareness and boredom sets in... no enthusiasm, no passion, just a “it has to be done”.

Every quality management system in all processes and in every company starts with Standardisation! It is the basis from which you can optimise in all areas: quality, safety, sustainability, costs and human resources. You cannot optimise anything if you are not first familiar, using good data, with the performance of your processes and products, Measuring is Knowing!

It is actually strange that there is so little interest in it and that it is often experienced as a “necessary evil”; standardisation is really the stepchild of all processes.

While we benefit so much from it every day!
A good standard operating procedure ensures that we act quickly and safely, indicates when an extruder needs preventive maintenance, leads to well-defined job requirements and is a requirement when hiring qualified personnel.
The standardisation of work processes is an essential part of the success and efficiency of any company.

And also in our daily lives we apply all kinds of standardisations: the cutlery in the standard drawer, the pots and pans in the right cupboard, baking a delicious cake according to the instructions... And those of us who have to look for the house keys more often than we like turn to standardisation: a fixed place!

Standardisation in colour technology is no exception. The boomers among us may like to pretend that colour is only a visual property, but here too standardisation is essential. Because how else do you define colour? How else do you communicate about colour? How else could you know what the colour performance is in the production of plastic objects?

Colour order and standardisation goes back a long way and ultimately led to the CIE. It has given us the easy-to-use colour parameters L*a*b*... once you have defined these values, every colour expert, anywhere in the world, knows what colour it is.

The creative in me loves nothing more than developing colour formulations and trying to push the boundaries with existing and new pigments and dyes, there is nothing more fun than having to match a challenging colour in a complex Engineering Plastic.
But the analyst in me wants to organise, structure, improve performance, convince customers in numbers of the reproducible and repeatable quality, reduce scrap, make productions smoother and more efficient and ultimately reduce costs.

One does not exclude the other!
Creativity goes very well with Analytical, Innovation goes hand in hand with Standardisation!