I am not a purchasing expert of any sort but, I feel over the last 15 years I've been involved in a lot of equipment purchases, digital, offset, bindery etc. I feel that we've developed a system that is easily adaptable to any one in the industry. Since this is the digital forum I'll use that as an example.
1. Wishlist/Criteria
If you are replacing a piece of equipment this will be easier than buying something completely new but now is the time to make and rate you list.
Here are a few of our criteria - we ended up with 17 for our new digital press
1. Improved Image quality - we defined this to mean closer to offset than our bizhub 6500 with improved grayscale and better spot color matching.
2. Must be able to run 13x19 out of 1 drawer
3. Duplex 300 GSM
4. Improved deskewing
5. better color controls
etc.
2.rate your critera
Assign them value from 1 down. In our case #1 was improvement in quality. #17 was inline finishing because of our offline capabilities. Also Inline finishing is quite expensive and Inline stitcher can easily go for between 20-40K US$. That's a nice upgrade to your offline/nearline capabilities.
3. Find Machines that fit into your criteria. Your top 5 criteria are going to help you eliminate machines very quickly. Our #2 Criteria of duplexing 300GSM with our #1 of improving image quality got us down to 3 machines from 5 vendors. 3 Vendors proposed to Bizhub 8000.
4. Test 1.
We gave each company the files with offset printed samples and a carton of paper. They were told to match there output as closely as possible to the offset. We specified which controller and then let them have at it.
5. Double Blind Review
I've been doing this for 15 years. I and everyone I work with have some bias regarding vendors. Maybe we didn't like a tech or had really great experience with a machine. I sought to eliminate this from the first round reviews.
I took all of the outputs and assigned them a number. I then gave key employees a questionnaire and asked them to review the outputs. These employees including the production manager, the designer, the digital key op and the owner.
The questionnaire had both objective and subjective questions for each of the 3 sample files ie.
Which output most closely matches offset
Which output looks the best.
I then tallied the results and we were down to two machines.
6. Stress Test.
I went to see the vendors and brought a carton of 100# coated cover and a test file that I built. This file was brutal It has multiple different skin tones, RGB B&W images. Both blacks and whites with fine details and solid swatches. I then printed the file head to tail to check that the entire image are was consistent.
I ran an entire carton at each site. I timed the job and pulled and marked regular samples for consistency.
7. Haggling.
Ask for the world.
Go back a re asses ask about component prices. We saved several thousand dollars by getting a finisher with a staple unit instead a just a stacker.
Remember that most of your bill is going to be clicks.
So that's the system we used for both our last major purchases. The interesting this about this system is that both times the winner was not whom we expected.
When we bought our last B&W generation we bought Xerox 4112's a machine we had no interest in
This time we decided on a Canon solution. This was even more surprising since both the owner and I haven't looked at Canon color since the CLC 1000/5000 generations we were so badly burned.
Sorry for the long post and I hope this helps some of you.
1. Wishlist/Criteria
If you are replacing a piece of equipment this will be easier than buying something completely new but now is the time to make and rate you list.
Here are a few of our criteria - we ended up with 17 for our new digital press
1. Improved Image quality - we defined this to mean closer to offset than our bizhub 6500 with improved grayscale and better spot color matching.
2. Must be able to run 13x19 out of 1 drawer
3. Duplex 300 GSM
4. Improved deskewing
5. better color controls
etc.
2.rate your critera
Assign them value from 1 down. In our case #1 was improvement in quality. #17 was inline finishing because of our offline capabilities. Also Inline finishing is quite expensive and Inline stitcher can easily go for between 20-40K US$. That's a nice upgrade to your offline/nearline capabilities.
3. Find Machines that fit into your criteria. Your top 5 criteria are going to help you eliminate machines very quickly. Our #2 Criteria of duplexing 300GSM with our #1 of improving image quality got us down to 3 machines from 5 vendors. 3 Vendors proposed to Bizhub 8000.
4. Test 1.
We gave each company the files with offset printed samples and a carton of paper. They were told to match there output as closely as possible to the offset. We specified which controller and then let them have at it.
5. Double Blind Review
I've been doing this for 15 years. I and everyone I work with have some bias regarding vendors. Maybe we didn't like a tech or had really great experience with a machine. I sought to eliminate this from the first round reviews.
I took all of the outputs and assigned them a number. I then gave key employees a questionnaire and asked them to review the outputs. These employees including the production manager, the designer, the digital key op and the owner.
The questionnaire had both objective and subjective questions for each of the 3 sample files ie.
Which output most closely matches offset
Which output looks the best.
I then tallied the results and we were down to two machines.
6. Stress Test.
I went to see the vendors and brought a carton of 100# coated cover and a test file that I built. This file was brutal It has multiple different skin tones, RGB B&W images. Both blacks and whites with fine details and solid swatches. I then printed the file head to tail to check that the entire image are was consistent.
I ran an entire carton at each site. I timed the job and pulled and marked regular samples for consistency.
7. Haggling.
Ask for the world.
Go back a re asses ask about component prices. We saved several thousand dollars by getting a finisher with a staple unit instead a just a stacker.
Remember that most of your bill is going to be clicks.
So that's the system we used for both our last major purchases. The interesting this about this system is that both times the winner was not whom we expected.
When we bought our last B&W generation we bought Xerox 4112's a machine we had no interest in
This time we decided on a Canon solution. This was even more surprising since both the owner and I haven't looked at Canon color since the CLC 1000/5000 generations we were so badly burned.
Sorry for the long post and I hope this helps some of you.
It's getting installed next week.
