How do you stay in business with down time

[ondemandbindery]

So I have been talking to Xerox. I am looking at some markets pertaining to Packaging and a Digital Box may be the solution. I have been reading threads for the last year and at the end of the day I would like to get a question answered if anyone wants to discuss it.

How are you guys having all these problems with these Digitial Boxes still surviving? At the end of the day and after reading these horror stories, how do you manage to not get the work done for your Clients and retain the business? Is there that much margin in your work that you can continually take hits on down time and still turn the lights on? I know from the Bindery side of the business, it isn't tolerated. Maybe a snag here or there but much more than that and Vendors are looking at other options. And I do not blame the box manufacturers on this topic whether they are guilty or not. In fact, my hat is off to the Printers that make this massive delima work. Just trying to understand how you can have all this down time, lost production wages, and wasted time from a management level and still keep forging ahead. After reading some of these post, it sometimes makes me want to carve type in stone Caveman style. LOL

John Weaver

 

[che.c]

Although these copiers produce an unrelenting deluge of problems in every area - feeding, image quality, output - you can usually work around them.

For nearly every problem there's a workaround - maybe a different way to impose the job to avoid a bad area of colour on the sheet, perhaps taking off the finisher (or fancy feeder) so that the printer can output a tricky stock, running pieces through at custom settings to overcome transfer or fusing issues and so on.

To make money from digital printing you gotta be resourceful and the jobs will keep going out (albeit at a bit of a reduced pace compared to a 'perfect' machine). The better you know the ins and outs of your machine, the more effective uptime there'll be.

Words like 'reliable', 'well built', 'consistent' and 'a pleasure to operate' do NOT come to mind when I describe the two machines I run, however it's a rare occasion when even one of the machines is so f*cked it can't produce ANY work.

 

[Amer]

It isn't that bad. I've been battling these recalticrant digital presses for 10 years now (remember DC12, anyone?) and I always manage to squeeze the job out somehow.
When the machine dies completely (but this happened only once up to now), I scream for the tech and then serenely sit back and wait because there's nothing I can do. Karma.
But rest of the time (95%) the machine earns enough to justify its existence.

 

[dabob]

Sometimes I have to agree with you ondemandbindery, but in the long run the problems are worth it. We have been and Indigo shop since 2001 starting with a turbostream and now with an HP1000R (the same model but a rebuilt version installed in 2006) and while both presses had serious issues when installed HP stepped up to the plate and made them work. They even flew a guy in from Israel and he basically rebuilt it again on our floor. We had to run some work during that time on our Heidelbergs (a major pain in the a#%) but we kept track of down time, jobs turned away, jobs run conventionally, and other costs, missed lease payments etc. I will say we threw everything we could in the way of costs and HP came through and we got at least 90% of what we claimed. If we were a digital only shop . . . well we wouldn't have come out so well but since we are first a conventional shop we had a fall back and a cash flow that enabled us to get over the bad parts and keep the business that we would have otherwise lost.

These days I get to thinking, why don't we drop the service contract (its just over a couple of grand a month) and then a problem occurs and I remember why we pay that . .. usually we are back up in less than a day and if its longer than that its a parts availability issue.

If you are looking at diving into the deep end you might want to talk to other local digital printers and see if they would be willing and able to be your back up if you have problems and you could do the same for them . .. the odds of you both being down wouldn't be that high in my opinion.

good luck!!!!

 

[easiprint]

It isn't that bad. I've been battling these recalticrant digital presses for 10 years now (remember DC12, anyone?).

Remember the DC12??? We've still got one!!!!! It's more of a backup machine these days, but it still gets used a few times a week.

Digital machines are a pain sometimes, but then I've also had many 'moments' with our AB Dick. I really don't think I could operate with only one digital machine due to the downtime issues. We currently have three machines (DC12, DC250 & DC5252). This gives us the capacity to cope with any downtime issues when they arrive.

 

[ondemandbindery]

The majority of the shops I have been doing digital work for have more than one machine. I just try to understand it from a Standard business practice that a machine constantly giviing trouble is just killing the bottom line of the company. If I pursue this (deep end of the pool, it must an industry quote now HAHA), I will definitely put some resources in motion for backup. If I was going after commercial work, that would be tough. But I want no parts of that fight so finding someone to pony up with should not be a problem.

John Weaver

 

[JayDA]

As one of the above posters said, it would be hard without more then one machine. It's also a matter of planning for growth, and buying a machine that will accommodate that growth. I've learned the hard way, that when you push machines to far outside of their comfort zone when it comes to duty cycle/intended use, you will pay for it in the end.