Ok guys!

I could really use some input on this as it hits close to home right now. What should a structure of digital / traditional print look like. What pricing differences and department differences need to be in place?

I'm having a lot of issues regarding digital being priced like offset... Efficiencies and Workflows that can make or break the profitability of digital print in our shop. The administrative cost, the overhead, the paperwork to produce Digital gets out of control when handled like traditional offset printing. I need to prove my case to high ups who appear reluctant to change an old mindset. Digital can be very profitable but how do you prove that when all they see is lots of little jobs and profit margins small for all the work taken to produce a piece

How do you run your Digital Printing in a commercial printing enviroment? What efficencies did you impliment? Did you see a problem that had to be addressed and changed it or did everything just run profitable from the start??

Would appreciate your thoughts!!

Thanks!

Dale Zahnke

Usually digital's biggest competitor isn't the guy down the street with a digital press, its the offset press.

Offset is in such shambles with below cost quoting due to over saturation in the 40" offset space. So that naturally trickles over into digital.

The key is to focus on the differences between offset and digital from a sales perspective but from an operations perspective combine and leverage every efficiency possible.

For example, is there a need to have 2 prepress departments, one for digital and one for offset? Nope, but is there a need for separate sales force? Maybe.

Estimating / MIS systems don't get digital, with all the speeds, clicks and sheet sizes, its very difficult to accurately estimate a digital run using offset tools. It is possible, but difficult.

The biggest challenge, I believe, is in the operator skillset needed to run the digital press. Because that person is being asked to do way too much... Prepress, job ticket setup, color setup, proofing, running, maintenence, pre/post press cutting, folding, binding, boxing and shipping.

Chances are, you already have almost all these skills in your traditional shops with 1 or more people already doing these tasks. Have the operator focus on running and maintaining the press and have the overlapping roles pick up the slack.

JDF connectivity from the workflow system such as Prinergy can make job ticketing a simple upstream task and removing the burden from the operator.

Web to Print solutions can solve some of the challenges with the small jobs syndrome, but frankly you have to do a lot of small jobs to break even due to the costs of the solutions and backend integration.

The key to digital is to find the niche that belongs to digital and what your company is good at. Just doing short run offset transfer on digital is a reciepe for disaster.

I agree with Patrick about having the press op just doing print and maintenance, so many houses cut back in this digital age by employing a press op/pre-press/data/finishing & delivery - (extreme cases). The result is an over-stressed under paid monkey. This person will always be to blame.

And as Patrick say's you need to find a niche for digital or you'll be stuck doing 30+ jobs a day with little profit unless of course you employ the monkey mentioned above.

We dont do litho (I used to be a litho op) here but have experts in their feilds regarding pre-press/data/press op's and finishers, we all collaborate with each other and implement changes where needs must.

Running Litho and digital under one roof will require an exceptional person to know both. Ive spoken to many litho people and they just dont get digital.

Pre-press can do the same job, they just need to learn about ripping and maybe personalized images but then again you'll need someone for data to assit them or they'll be doing stuff they generally should'nt and taking on another role......The whole thing comes down to money. Employ 4 or 1

For some the answer may be in adding customized communications to your offerings. Adding variable data services affords you the opportunity to charge a premium for the service, and once you own the data the customer is more likely to keep coming back to you for print work. Digital will never be as economical as offset except for short run, that's a given. But I guarantee that many of the same static work customers are candidates for variable data, web to print, transpromo and other integrated marketing campaigns. That's the sweet spot for digital printers.