Fair printing price or another nail in the coffin

[gordo]

Print Buyers Online is promoting Westnoble Consulting Group’s FairPrice service as the smarter, faster way for print buyers to price print. This web-based print specifying and pricing service instantly gives the "fair market price" of a print campaign. It apparently uses real-time industry pricing for all print components to develop the fair market price -- a price both the print buyer and the printer can agree is the fair price when neither is under pressure to buy or sell.

FairPrice is NOT an online auction tool, NOR does it provide quotes from specific printers. Rather, it is a decision making tool that allows designers and Print Professionals to understand the “fair market price” of any set of specs, or the impact of changes to specs, based on thorough pricing knowledge from market leaders.

Complete details and free trial signup is here: Sign In

What are your thoughts on this service? I'd love to hear about your experience testing its pricing compared with your estimating. Maybe if they quote higher than you then you could up your quote to match? What happens if your customer shows you the price they got from this group.

best, gordon p

 

[Coolio]

Hi Gordo,

I'm glad you mentioned this. I zipped right past the announcement in their newsletter. I have requested the tool and will do some comparisons. I am curious how this will play out considering differences in print pricing by region.

Greg

 

[oxburger]

I'll be more that happy to use that tool. However, I will no longer fix the print buyers client files to get them to run properly. I will simply call the buyer and tell them that their client needs to provide corrected files......wonder how long of a time going back and forth between a client and the printer the buyer is willing to put up with.

 

[Coolio]

I must say this has been an interesting test. After perusing the Westnoble website I believe this organization has an impressive list people with an even more impressive list of credentials. After using the "calculator" I believe a tremendous amount of work has gone into this. That being said let's get to the nitty gritty.

I compared three projects in quantities that crossed from digital to sheetfed for pricing targets.
- Postcards without mailing
- Flat and Trifold brochure
- 24pp + Cover stitched booklet (I priced this one as sheetfed only)

Pros
- There are a great number of predefined projects to choose from.
- Navigation was menu driven. Select a project and associated options appear.
- The whole process to arrive at a price was fairly painless.

Cons
- Almost too many projects to choose from. I initially selected "Flyers/Broadside" but wasn't given a folding option to select, hence the flat brochure. My second attempt with "Pamphlets" brought out the fold option.
- No intelligence. You get what you ask for. I purposely selected a 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 postcard printing on 80# Gloss Cover (at .007-.008, not allowed by USPS) The system gave me a price without warning.
- From the results it appears this only calculates sheetfed pricing. Of little help with the digital age we are living in.

Results
On the smaller pieces my pricing was 50% less, digital or sheetfed.
On the booklet it was too close to call. A print buyer would need to evaluate who was awarded the job on something other than price. (If price only, I would have been awarded the project)

Conclusion
As I stated there was a tremendous amount of work put into this project by Westnoble. I think for larger projects it could offer a fair comparison. Not really suitable for digital or smaller sheetfed projects. Also doesn't take into account web press pricing for higher quantity projects. Their website claims the pricing is not regionalized and is valid for the North American continent. I struggle with that statement as I believe there are differences in print pricing by region.

I believe it could become a valid tool that is, as of now, in the early stages of development. It certainly doesn't replace a thinking human that looks at a project from all angles. Not yet anyway.

Greg

 

[afeefkhan]

FairPrice applies currently to sheetfed only

FairPrice applies currently to sheetfed only

From the WestNoble FairPrice Team (response to Coolio)

First of all, thank you so much for trying out our service; your feedback mean so much to us, it will only help us improve our offering. As we mentioned earlier, our system does not give a low price, nor a very high price; it gives prices to enable print buyers to create reasonable budgets long before they actually engage printing companies. So if the prices come out a little high compared to what printers are offering, that will be OK – on both ends.

You are right on a couple of things. The system currently only deals with sheetfed jobs. No specs are pre-entered; you have to build your campaign with various project items and then describe each item. The project items are given names that most of the industry will understand; so the only reactive intelligence that has been built in so far is to anticipate what bindery operations certain of the project operations will or will not require. However the system will not tell you what you should or should not enter based on what you might be thinking of doing at a future step (that is such as mailing, postage, etc.). Once you have entered in all the specs, the system will give you a set of prices; should you have missed an essential step, like not specifying paper, the system will give you a notice. Or if you think of throwing out an entire project item after describing it, the system will ask you if your are certain before it eliminates any data you have already entered.

Finally, for small or shortrun project items, the system will automatically make a decision to go to digital pricing, if and only if all the other specs allow for a digital price (i.e. size, number of colors, quantity not too large, etc.). That is, the user is not given a choice whether to choose digital or regular sheetfed pricing. We expected this to be fine for budgeting purposes.

When you get a chance please give us more feedback. Thank you again for your help.

 

[Coolio]

Thank you for the response afeeekhan,

I understand and respect your stance that it is a budgeting tool. From that regard I think it could work very well. I would however, like to make a few comments.

"...the system will not tell you what you should or should not enter based on what you might be thinking of doing at a future step (that is such as mailing, postage, etc.)."

I would counter that if a user is selecting "Postcards" (thereby implying that they mail), a simple rule could be used to warn the user that the material doesn't meet spec for mailing.

"...The system currently only deals with sheetfed jobs." "...for small or shortrun project items, the system will automatically make a decision to go to digital pricing..."

These statements confuse me. Either it only looks at sheetfed ... or ... it looks at sheetfed and digital and displays competitve pricing appropriately. In my tests I selected quantities that should have run on a digital device, with a range that would transition to sheetfed. The pricing I received was indicative of sheetfed only.

These are just my opinions, with intentions of providing feedback and improving the product.

Greg

 

[afeefkhan]

Mailing and postage

Mailing and postage

Thank you. We will look into these concerns in our next conversation with the rest of the team.