Anybody have experience in large scale multi-vendor production?

[lfelton]

I'm seriously thinking of adding a different manufacturer's colour production kit (we already have a different manufacturer for the B&W production kit). Anyone have any experience to share of this type of environment? "Real life" pitfalls to watch out for?

I guess what I'm worried about is customer perception / expectations. For example if they have a job run on one type of machine one day, then another job the next day on a different type of machine - are they going to notice and complain about differences in gloss levels? There are lots of other examples I can think of, but really what I need to understand is whether it would be a minor or a major headache.