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Into A Profit Maximizer

By Pat McGrew of McGrew Group, Inc. and Ryan McAlbee of PixelDotConsulting LLC

As an industry, we learned many lessons during the years of the analog-to-digital transformation, and it’s still ongoing.

Digital printing unlocked new applications for customers through print customization and personalization.

Customers also realized that their print buying patterns could shift to extend their budgets while giving more flexibility to marketing and fulfillment that could match their business cycles. Fewer quantities spread across more frequent orders became the norm.

Digital printing also pushed the diversity of what could be printed cost-effectively, which was particularly helpful for small and mid-sized businesses.

However, what is great for the customer became an operational challenge for the print service provider (PSPs).

As the print quantities decrease and the number of orders increase, the production processes and workflows used for analog printing are failing PSPs. The time-consuming and costly analog printing tasks in the prepress, printing and finishing departments require some changes to support digital printing.

Time and costs shift to job onboarding, estimating, administration and scheduling as platemaking processes are replaced with processes that transfer printready files directly to print queues.

PSPs applying their analog processes and workflows to the increasing volume of digital print jobs quickly find two problems.

First, too many people touch the job from the point of the customer’s request for quote (RFQ) to the point of it becoming a live job ticket (JT).

Second, the time and subsequent costs between the RFQ and the JT can be longer and more costly than the steps required to print and finish the job. The burden of onboarding and printing digital jobs using existing analog processes quickly erodes profitability.

The solution is to maximize profitability in digital printing by eliminating manual processes and integrating the flow of job requirements and tasks between the software solutions that form your technology stack.

Follow these steps to build the best stack for your needs.