Re: Ratio of Prepress Employees to Sales
It sounds like you're given a choice which body part you would like to remove.
Some people love fomulas that make no common sense.
"...compare to industry average film spoilage vs $$ in sales, we're high." I remember that one thrown at me.
Questions to consider:
What kind of work is brought in?
On the average, how much of it is needing to be reworked, additional file prep, etc.? (Final printer spread, trapped PDF compared to finished Quark file and you have to resize and place the images.).
Are you already working overtime?
How much idle time between jobs? None to 2-3 hours
Sheet-fed vs web? 24 million dollars is a lot, but the bottomline would be generally more prepress work per $1,000 dollar sales in sheet-fed.
The best recommendation I have is to talk to them returning with, "If necessary, we can cut back hours to 32 when we're slow. Each shift can go to 6 hours per day."
This will give your employees time to reconsider what they have to do and if they want to continue working there. One will leave, hopefully, not the key employee. It will also allow you to keep all of the employees without having to go back and forth retraining and the cycle of foolish errors. Personal experience, the slow periods would only last from 1 day to the longest, 2 weeks, unless there's a loss of accounts.
