Search results

AI is a Bit Like Having Kids (part 2) Coming soon to a print plant near you By Noel Ward, Editor@Large You stroll into the warehouse. Robots are pulling stock from the shelves and taking it out to the printers and presses on the shop floor. You have to be careful. The mobile bots “know” you’re...

Why AI is a Bit Like Having Kids (part 1) What matters is the training By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Artificial Intelligence is getting a lot of headlines but that doesn’t mean much. Blah, blah, blah. Yadda, yadda, yadda. What matters is how you can use it as a printer. You are probably already...

The dollars are there. But like most things, you have to know your market and work at it. But any printing pro can do this.

The Profitability of Living Large By Noel Ward, Editor@Large How wide can you go? Some commercial print shops I’ve visited have inkjet printers that print sheets up to 72-inches wide. Such wide or large format machines are one of the easiest ways for print providers to increase their offerings...

Just When you Least Expect It By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Meetings of print providers have one thing in common: that there’s stuff missing. While many print providers talk about the equipment they have, the good and bad of various software, relate anecdotes about customers, and complain about...

Be All You Can Be Is Diversifying a Strategy for You? By Noel Ward, Editor@Large All you can do is all you can do. After all, working hard and using a sharp pencil on quotes both work fine. Until they don’t. Some shops are in that moment right now. I’ve been in and out of print shops for...

Do Vendors Know Anything? Get smarter by asking questions By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Long story short, the CEO of a company I know (not a client) related how a customer was costing him serious dollars. He ran the problem past one of his vendors who suggested a solution that required playing...

Why Would Anyone Want to Work in Printing? Maybe it’s time to pull a Gretzky By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Raise your hand if any of the following situations sound familiar. You have placed ads, endured career fairs, talked with placement people at high schools and community colleges and still...

Thanks! Good tip! I've done that too. I usually ask, "so what are you thinking?" And let them solve their own problem. Still, over 35 years in various businesses/companies it's amazing--scary, actually--how few people I've worked with seem to be adults.

Are You a Grown Up? By Noel Ward, Editor@Large You’re out of the office on a Friday morning sales call when your production manager learns that the guy running your Baltindicoh 8600 XL is moving to another state and the Baltindicoh is having major problems. Downtime is about to occur. The...

Got Endpoints? Cyber-threats are coming to get you By Noel Ward, Editor@Large A few months back I was talking with the CTO of a company that prints and mails a couple billion bills, statements and direct mail pieces every year. I called him because I was writing a story on cyber-attacks and...

Because Listening Matters An exclusive interview with Canon EVP Francis McMahon By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Interviews are a great way to hear how people in our industry think because listening matters. I managed to catch up with Francis McMahon, EVP at Canon Solutions America in Boca Raton...

A 30-day Fix for Managed Chaos By Noel Ward, Editor@Large The only thing I would have done differently was doing it sooner,” said Chuck Frymark, looking back over the recent installation of PressWise software from SmartSoft USA at Heritage Printing in Brookfield, Wisconsin. The installation...

The Direct Mail Opportunity By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Direct mail gets a bad rap. Sometimes it’s deserved, like those generic monthly mailings from cable companies, cell phone novelists, banks, utilities, and more. Same offer every time. If I did this back when I was a marketing director I’d...

Turning Sustainability into Cash Your press may be costing you money By Noel Ward, Editor@Large It is always interesting to talk with people who do different things for a living. Builders, fishermen and ski patrollers, for example, spend most of their time outdoors and have different...

It’s Still About Making Money by Noel Ward,Editor@Large Back in the days of film and plates, mechanicals and Rubyliths, my assistant Diane and I were having lunch with Hal, sales guy for the printer where we spent nearly a million bucks a year. Hal was talking about an employee in his shop, a...

Cutting Costs with a Smart Workflow By Noel Ward, Editor@Large We print everything from business cards to flyers to stickers to banners to signage,” relates Chad Sims, CEO and co-founder of Prima Printing in Atlanta, Georgia, a shop that runs about 250 jobs each day. “We print most jobs the...

Always Follow the Money. Always. Digitalization leads to Profitability By Noel Ward, Editor@Large You could not help noticing that the press operator was a little tense. “It sure would be useful,” he remarked, making sure you heard him, “to know ahead of time about the jobs in the queue so I...

Unfortunately, the experiences you site are not uncommon! Transactional mail, which is all first-class, is really tricky. Standard Mail (aka Junk Mail) is easier, but list quality can be an unending problem. I do work with a group of both types of service bureaus. The moving parts of mail and...

Against Gravity Adding Print and Mail? Good idea. But be careful! By Noel Ward, Editor@Large I’ll begin this new column with a question: Is the address of the 11,517th person in the mailing you have going out on Thursday correct? How do you know? This is not an idle question, because if the...