Managing your Company’s Printing can be a Sensible Investment
The multinational mobile phone company Orange is one of the biggest cell providers in the UK and Europe. This is due in large part, much like any other big company, to the fact that they spend large amounts of cash on advertising and branding. A large proportion of this advertising involves a huge proportion of physical printing of some kind. Some common examples are leaflet printing, instruction manuals, advertising billboards, magazine inserts and direct mail marketing materials. It is completely feasible that such a huge company would spend vast amounts on this type of work.
Yet according to a recent news story within the print industry, Orange in the UK also spends £7m every year on ‘print management‘. Not a penny of this is actually spent on ink or equipment or printing costs – it all goes into the strategic planning of that printing. In these times of recession this amount of money may seem excessive, even for such a big company. Yet if you understand what is meant by print management, you might begin to see why such sums are justified. The simple fact of the matter is this. Businesses who invest in a robust print management solution actually make cost savings as opposed to trying to deal with all their printing inhouse.
A big chunk of the money saved is due to lowering the amount of wasted print material. Every year, millions of dollars are lost forever in the ‘collateral damage’ caused by color calibration mistakes, messed up print jobs, typographical errors and the like. If you consider unwieldy and complex print marketing strategies this is quite often the case and these costs are written off as ‘inevitable’. It is because commercial printers needed to find an efficient solution to these that the discipline of print management was born.
The other side to the savings that can be made comes down to the logistics of managing sprawling print campaigns using different media and a range of different deadlines. Print jobs and schedules are planned in scientific detail to reduce the cost associated with electricity use, overheads and purchase of unneccesary equipment. For example if you are using a large number of printing machinery units during peak times, by planning ahead and spreading the load you can use less machines, and less power, at any one time. This in turn can dramatically bring down the costs of printing. So you can either achieve the same amount of output for less money, or reinvest the savings in more print marketing and ultimately more ROI.
Here’s the good bit: print management is no longer the exclusive domain of huge enterprises like Orange. In the past decade the gains in digital printing technology have meant smaller scale print management solutions are possible for small to medium enterprises, meaning that the rest of us can enjoy the same kinds of cost savings the ‘big guys’ have been enjoying for years. Is your business taking advantage?
