noelward
Well-known member
Is Your Press Earning its Keep?
By Noel Ward, Editor@Large
Digital press makers seem to think the 60-month (or so )lease makes the it feel more like buying a high-end car than investing in a critical piece of business equipment. Sorry, but as one who buys high-end cars used and keeps them for a decade, the story offered up by many equipment vendors does not play well with me.
A month or so back I wrote about building resilience into a business by taking on portions of service and support internally (https://printplanet.com/threads/how-resilient-are-you.295536/). This can be a good approach but depending on your needs, so can a couple other moves, especially in our present turbulent economy.
One is buying equipment as it comes off lease. If you make sure it has been thoroughly serviced by the vendor and has warranties that line up with your expected needs this can be a viable way to gain production capacity at less than budget-breaking levels. Know your needs, how they are likely to change over time, and what makes sense for your business. Be sure you don’t find yourself in the position of a small printer in LA who had bought from an office technology dealer who thought the work week ended at 5 PM on Friday. The printer called an OEM vendor and had new equipment installed. The offending boxes awaited pick up on his loading dock. When I visited he told me his “new”: machinery was used and had more capacity than he needed. But it could be fixed on a weekend.
Another approach—if the money works—is buying beyond your present volume needs. Getting more machine than you need often helps minimize the chance of unexpected failures while helping position your company for offering more than you do presently. This could be better color, a wider sheet size, longer print runs, and more. You may need to change your sales and marketing pitch to spread word about your new capabilities. It can be a leap but if your business is reasonably solid you may be able to do this.
Done right, both can be parts of a sustainable approach to business.
Sustainability not limited to Digital Presses
Digital presses get a lot of media coverage about efficiency and sustainability but printer shops running offset presses can make money while using environmentally sustainable practices—and talking about it. In the context of offset printing, sustainability is a host of practices that can also help make a printing business more competitive and profitable. Yes, you have to educate your customers via marketing and your sales pitch.
In doing that, talk about how a ] operational practices such as managing CO2, wash up, plate changes, and automated printing can be advantages fro customers. Internally, the advantages can include head count. For example, some newer offset presses require only a couple of people while also providing shorter make-ready times and providing fast output. This decreases substrate waste and energy consumption while reducing the resources required. This can be worth talking about inside and outside the print plant. The advantage for business owners is improved environmental management over the entire printing process that can translate into dollars saved per job—the part customers (and your bottom line) usually care about.
Just the facts
I pay attention to the relationship between scientific data and policy decisions. I find that’s some companies use science-based targets in formulating their environmental policies. What I find is that fact-based practices are being set at the corporate level. This matters because sustainable practices can be of rising importance for print shops and their customers. Some printers already integrate the environmentally related policies promoted by OEMs into their operations.
Why it all matters
Sustainability is an ongoing challenge that is up to everyone. It’s also a business issue that can generate revenue now and in the future. People—as in some of your customers—ask about it. As a print provider you can make smart use of the digital and offset printing technologies available and adopt new ones when they make sense. Start with small steps. From my quick dive into the issue, technologies and sustainable practices like those used by several vendors are part of a solution. They can be essential partners by offering ways of making your operation more efficient, sustainable, and profitable.
I’ve been in enough shops and talked with enough business owners to know that if you don’t take advantage of the changes and opportunities that arise a competitor will. They may even attract some of the millennial, Gen-Y and Gen-Z employees who find sustainability important, and who are also the future of the print business. Look beyond the present. By making sustainability part of business-as-usual your company will be worth more.
By Noel Ward, Editor@Large
Digital press makers seem to think the 60-month (or so )lease makes the it feel more like buying a high-end car than investing in a critical piece of business equipment. Sorry, but as one who buys high-end cars used and keeps them for a decade, the story offered up by many equipment vendors does not play well with me.
A month or so back I wrote about building resilience into a business by taking on portions of service and support internally (https://printplanet.com/threads/how-resilient-are-you.295536/). This can be a good approach but depending on your needs, so can a couple other moves, especially in our present turbulent economy.
One is buying equipment as it comes off lease. If you make sure it has been thoroughly serviced by the vendor and has warranties that line up with your expected needs this can be a viable way to gain production capacity at less than budget-breaking levels. Know your needs, how they are likely to change over time, and what makes sense for your business. Be sure you don’t find yourself in the position of a small printer in LA who had bought from an office technology dealer who thought the work week ended at 5 PM on Friday. The printer called an OEM vendor and had new equipment installed. The offending boxes awaited pick up on his loading dock. When I visited he told me his “new”: machinery was used and had more capacity than he needed. But it could be fixed on a weekend.
Another approach—if the money works—is buying beyond your present volume needs. Getting more machine than you need often helps minimize the chance of unexpected failures while helping position your company for offering more than you do presently. This could be better color, a wider sheet size, longer print runs, and more. You may need to change your sales and marketing pitch to spread word about your new capabilities. It can be a leap but if your business is reasonably solid you may be able to do this.
Done right, both can be parts of a sustainable approach to business.
Sustainability not limited to Digital Presses
Digital presses get a lot of media coverage about efficiency and sustainability but printer shops running offset presses can make money while using environmentally sustainable practices—and talking about it. In the context of offset printing, sustainability is a host of practices that can also help make a printing business more competitive and profitable. Yes, you have to educate your customers via marketing and your sales pitch.
In doing that, talk about how a ] operational practices such as managing CO2, wash up, plate changes, and automated printing can be advantages fro customers. Internally, the advantages can include head count. For example, some newer offset presses require only a couple of people while also providing shorter make-ready times and providing fast output. This decreases substrate waste and energy consumption while reducing the resources required. This can be worth talking about inside and outside the print plant. The advantage for business owners is improved environmental management over the entire printing process that can translate into dollars saved per job—the part customers (and your bottom line) usually care about.
Just the facts
I pay attention to the relationship between scientific data and policy decisions. I find that’s some companies use science-based targets in formulating their environmental policies. What I find is that fact-based practices are being set at the corporate level. This matters because sustainable practices can be of rising importance for print shops and their customers. Some printers already integrate the environmentally related policies promoted by OEMs into their operations.
Why it all matters
Sustainability is an ongoing challenge that is up to everyone. It’s also a business issue that can generate revenue now and in the future. People—as in some of your customers—ask about it. As a print provider you can make smart use of the digital and offset printing technologies available and adopt new ones when they make sense. Start with small steps. From my quick dive into the issue, technologies and sustainable practices like those used by several vendors are part of a solution. They can be essential partners by offering ways of making your operation more efficient, sustainable, and profitable.
I’ve been in enough shops and talked with enough business owners to know that if you don’t take advantage of the changes and opportunities that arise a competitor will. They may even attract some of the millennial, Gen-Y and Gen-Z employees who find sustainability important, and who are also the future of the print business. Look beyond the present. By making sustainability part of business-as-usual your company will be worth more.
