The real profit problem in commercial print isn’t on the press. Printing machines operate at high speeds, making it an efficient part of the printing process. However, the real inefficiency lies in all the manual labor and time needed before the printing presses are put into operation. In the case of many print shops, it is not the lack of printing capacity that slows the process down but the administrative and prepress tasks that need to be completed.
The hidden cost of manual order processing
Every job that you enter via email, phone, or FTP requires someone to rekey it. A CSR has to read it, type the specifications, send it out for the file, possibly chase an approval, and then take the ticket and hand it to prepress… a process that can consume 20 minutes or two days, depending on how available/organized the customer is and how “on” your admin/prepress team happens to be that given morning.
With long-run offset work, you can absorb this without too much pain. A $10,000 offset job can hide $200 in admin labor, lowering the margin by a couple of points without much having been noticed. On short-run digital, though, the math doesn’t work. A 500-piece business card order or a 50-copy brochure might bring in $80. Rekeying, admin, and prepress eats up between $30 and $50 per job, meaning losses are between $30 and $50 per job. At that math, the job is either break-even or quietly blowing up. It’s not the printing or the printer – it’s the workflow around the print that’s the problem.
Why email-based intake is killing your margins
Let’s talk about what traditional order intake is, well, in reality. A client sends a file. Someone downloads it, opens their Acrobat, manually checks the resolution, notices a bleed is missing, emails the client, and waits. The file is sent back. The check is redone. The job is manually added to a spreadsheet or MIS. A quote is generated and emailed. The client responds with a purchase order number. Someone takes the PO number and rekeys it in somewhere else.
Each of these opportunities for error – mistaken specs, overwritten files, incorrectly copied versions – costs time and money. And even when nothing goes wrong, tens of minutes are spent across numerous tasks every day, which amounts to an untracked but substantial labor cost in terms of operational overhead. We don’t notice because it’s spread across several functions.
Building the foundation with web to print
The technology that enables workflow automation to even exist is a proper web to print software platform that consolidates order input, file submission, preflighting, proofing, and client correspondence within one system instead of relying on a hodgepodge of emails and networked folders.
This is important, because the pressure points in print production are not left up to chance. They are generally the same for everyone: They come when a file first comes in from a customer, when you need to create a quote, when a proof is awaiting approval, or when a finished job is ready to ship. A good web-to-print system is specifically set up to handle file handoffs just like this, which means with a little setup jobs can move through these crisis points in your production system without a person having to carry them there.
Automated preflighting at the point of upload
One of the greatest efficiencies that can be gained within a print workflow through automation is file validation – the preflighting process. This has historically been done after you’ve received the file from the customer and involves manually checking that the file is in the correct resolution, is using the correct color profile, has the appropriate fonts embedded, is PDF/X compliant, has bleeds, and has safe zones. A failure in any of these areas will stop the job in its tracks, sending you back to the customer to upload a new file.
When preflighting occurs at the point of upload, while a customer is ordering through your web-to-print portal, everything changes. The customer immediately gets a report, telling them exactly what’s wrong with the file. They – not you – fix the problem. In many cases, their file will pass automatically because you’ve set up a solid web-to-print solution that only allows correctly generated files to come through in the first place. The print order isn’t delayed – or fully stopped – by chasing down corrections from the customer. In fact, your prepress team doesn’t even see a “bad” file.
Self-service B2B portals and what they actually solve
Dealing with corporate print buyers is a special kind of challenge. They order all the time, they’re extremely particular about their brand, and they need it yesterday. Giving them the attention they demand via the standard email-fire drill requires a devoted account manager, because taking all those one-off orders off the top is a time-suck for someone.
B2B storefronts change everything. When a password-protected website you designed specifically for your biggest client allows their different departments (marketing, regional management, franchisees) to log in and reorder the materials you’ve approved complete, that’s an order you didn’t need to lift a finger to fetch.
They logged on, found a product you already designed, discovered the contracted price you’ve already negotiated, and pushed order. The order appeared in your inbox automatically. No time discussing options, tracking down logos, or confirming brand specifications. The order was perfect, because the only things they can order from your catalog are things you’ve already produced and approved.
If the above client is one with far-flung franchisees, the kind who need to control brand but still allow local managers to personalize banners, business cards and flyers, then storefront with variable data is an outright game-changer. They log in, change only the fields you allow (name, location, phone number), and push order. Voila, a banner perfectly representing the brand of someone who isn’t a graphic designer.
Connecting the storefront to your print MIS
If you are part of a modern print business, your customers will likely already be placing orders through some kind of B2B storefront. (If they’re not, helping them to do so may be the most valuable consulting service you can offer. You could even invest in building them a space to order from you!) They want the convenience of self-service, and you’d likely prefer they interact through a system that never sleeps and makes fewer errors than those sleepy humans do.
Your goal is to make that connection capable of flowing all the way through your production, dispatch, delivery, and invoice processes. Order streams in. Job magically appears in the operator’s queue. Finished, packaged order appears on the loading dock. Invoiced job appears in your accounting system. Payment magically appears in your bank account.
A couple of options if you already have some ordering systems active: It might be a relatively simple task to add an e-commerce engine with a shopping cart to the front of your existing workflow management system. Some MIS vendors offer web-to-print storefronts as optional modules on their systems and those get you a good way toward the lights-out job of the future. Some print software vendors even charge on a per-order basis, which sounds nuts at first but actually encourages you to take as much work as your system can swallow. Because the more that flows through automatically, the cheaper your labor burden gets.
Digital proofing and shifting the approval burden
Print reworks are costly. They involve paper, ink, press time, and the additional labor costs to reprint the job in its entirety. One rework can potentially eliminate the profit margin for an entire week’s worth of small projects. The most common reason for reworks is due to the fact that the customer gave the green light without thoroughly reviewing and the print shop is the one who absorbs the costs associated with the mistake.
By integrating digital soft proofing into the ordering process, the onus is shifted to the customer. They view a rendered image of the final product, specifically what will be printed, they click approve, and that approval is recorded in the system. If a name is misspelled, or the wrong version of a logo is used, the customer notices this before the job goes to production or after approving the proof.
This isn’t meant to relieve anyone of responsibility, it’s about creating a system where mistakes are detected at the least expensive stage in the process, which is before the presses begin to roll.
API integrations for shipping and dispatch
The picking list and job ticket represent the final handoff from sales to production. Handwritten lists and tickets work fine – until you reach about 20 jobs per day. Then, between selecting the job, estimating the time, scheduling the time and machine and operator, physically shuffling the job jacket and tickets between departments, and finally entering time and closing the job, the amount of time spent walking and typing outweighs the time spent making something.
Having a digital job jacket and job ticket tied into the MIS allows the salesman to double-check specs and the production manager to see exactly what’s expected. Scheduling software can help choose the best job to run next, and collecting time automatically from the machine as well as the operator can help build a very detailed picture of what drives profits. Having transparent, available data from one end to the next – from a customer’s click to the final invoice to the accounting software – is the only way a printing shop can hope to operate in an automated Web-to-print world.
Scaling without proportional headcount growth
The logic behind all these automation points is the same. Every manual step in your workflow comes with a cost – time, error rate, and the necessity of having highly skilled people do it. When you automate that step, it doesn’t just save time; it changes the entire equation of job volume to staffing.
Print shops with semi- to fully-automated workflows are producing more short-run jobs than they could have handled before, often without increasing their CSR or prepress headcount. The CSR and prepress people they do have are spending their time on work that actually necessitates human involvement – managing demanding clients, addressing production issues, selling new work – not rekeying and chasing problems.
The press has been the most efficiently running machine in most shops for the last 50 years. Faster run speeds, lower makeready times, less waste due to better color management – this is the kind of waste reduction the industry has worked on for decades, and most of the available gains are already gone. The next big round of efficiency increases for almost every commercial printer won’t be on the production floor. It will be in the workflow that feeds the production floor.
