Print Runs- whats done cannot be undone

Many a times, one believes that certain issues would be resolved during the print approvals on the bulk machine. I am reasonably sure that you would be mostly disappointed. Whatever needs to be done to get your Brand design right has to be done before hand or at the pre- press stage. Thus a lot of stringent preparation and detailing leads to success on the press. To begin with the mandatory text, get every word, punctuation etc all perfect, as changing at the time of the press run is costly and time consuming, plus also there is a chance of just missing out and you may be saddled with incorrect text packaging. The artwork and the ability to think through is critical, one needs to have the experience to predict as to what are the likely results due to a particular level of screens or the colour sequence. This has to be got right at the time of the pre-press or else whats done cannot be undone at the time of the bulk run.
It is a healthy practise to do a semi bulk proofing on a separate press to analyse the likely results and build in corrective actions. I have had several incidents when the lack of this understanding has resulted in costly print run failures and above all huge loss of time.
Plan to treat the bulk printing as a final and commercial run rather than an opportunity to do creative iterations or subjective value additions.
Very often by a stroke of good luck one hits upon something interesting during the print run and can feel reasonably elated about the outcome. It is always advisable to doubly check if that will sustain,very often what looks good may have scuffing problems or may have odour or may not glue well or may not run well on your packing lines etc. You will be surprised as to how many unimaginable issues crop up and become serious problems and bottlenecks.
The critical role is for each and every element to get the print run successful - the printing machine, the inks, the people running the machine and the knowledge they have and above all the printing plates and the printing cylinders. Each of them needs to work in unison and in perfection to ultimately get things right. Try to have a colour swatch approved and a colour matching be done offline, thus ensuring that the inks are in total readiness. Check the cylinder prints or the pulls as they are fairly indicative of the likely on the machine results. Rarely can we correct things, if the inks of the printing plates / cylinders are not just right.
Yes , I have seen rare examples of extraordinary wisdom ,when the knowledge of the People on the machine has helped to overcome the blemishes and get things undone. Yes it happens but rare !