Printing Secrets from Print Acumen
The Tricks to Successfully Manage
Your Company Printing
Managing company printing can be a significant cost centre.
For larger organisations it can literally mean an employee spending up to 100% of their time on this time consuming problem that just won’t go away.
For smaller businesses it means that an existing employee, who’s usually working in an area that’s nothing whatsoever to do with printing, knows nothing printing and doesn’t want to know anything about printing. And all the while maintain existing workloads.
A big ask in any language.
The printing industry is extremely complex and trying to understand it to a level where an educated buying decision can be made is a long, arduous task. This level of understanding is critical as your employee needs to be able to present information to the printers so they can clearly understand what is required.
Knowing which printer to call is also a complex decision in itself as some printers are much better at printing some products than they are at others.
For example, the printer you call to print the full colour annual report may well be much too expensive for printing business cards and/or letterheads.
You really do need to know which portion of the market your printing company is best at servicing otherwise you’ll be paying far too much for your company printing without ever knowing.
Remember, one small error or omission when requesting a quote or when placing a printing order can result in a very expensive reprint or at best, an embarrassing moment.
Just some of the issues that need to be addressed include ink colour, the number of ink colours, paper type & grammage, the type of document, binding options, embellishments, etc, etc.
And there are no universities or educational institutions where the management of company printing can be learnt. It all has to be learnt on the job in a company is to manage its own company printing.
In recent years technology has had an enormous impact on both prepress & production in terms of efficiency & output.
The PDF format has become the industry standard worldwide for moving large & small artwork files. PDF stands for portable document file and these files can be used for compressing & transporting text or graphics from any platform.
Many businesses now employee desktop publishers who create the artwork for all their company printing and supply it to their printing company in PDF format.
In the area of production, it’s not running speeds that have been affected by technology, rather it’s the set-up time where the biggest gains have occurred. For example, the outputting of negatives is on the decline. The image is now output directly onto the printing plate.
Makeready times are becoming shorter with each new generation of presses and ink consistency has much improves with computerised ink setting & recording.
Then there’s storage.
I know of many businesses that, due to lack of storage and/or expensive rents, store their company printing in very unusual places such as the ladies toilets, under desks and on top of the fridge.
I know of many businesses that order company printing in very small quantities because they have no room to store it. This results in paying very high unit costs for company printing.
For example 5,000 letterheads may only cost around 50% more than 2,500 letterheads… double the quantity for 50% more.
So, managing your own company printing has very few benefits but many headaches unless you or an employee has a working understanding of the printing industry.
If you want to learn more on saving money, time & stress on your company printing, have a look at our
FREE Printing Perth Guide.
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