With all the overhead associated with a commercial shop, how are you dealing with the margins of digital making sense? Other than the variable nitch jobs where you can charge up charges for the ROI how do you handle short run color. We all do it, most probably do it as the bulk of their digital printing.. So how do you keep it profitable, especially if your a larger commercial print house?

Some of my personal struggles being from a smaller Digital Printing company merged with a larger commercial printer is that they tend to not want the small jobs (as a company), but when the small jobs make up several million in sales a year how do you not want them?? The constant battles that I am personally faced with is mostly with the billing department as they seem to have the mentality that these small jobs are not worth their time and they have bigger jobs to be focusing on. Then there is the Sales force who do not see the point in selling digital unless it is a campaign tied into a larger project. While that is everyone's prefect world there is tons of jobs out there for short run color or smaller variable mailings.

I preach automation, implementing as much as possible and showing ROI charts and improving department effieciencies, but still see steady clients with smaller jobs getting turned away as the company just doesn't seem to want to be bothered..

Then there is the broker work, which seems to be the way of the future at least in the smaller print arena. While I think there is good and bad with brokers I also see most printers don't want to deal with them.

I truly think Digital is where it is all going. Shorter runs, personalizing and personal service needs to be embraced in my opinion, it's coming like it or not...

How do you change the mentality? How do you merger the two worlds of Traditional and Digital? Has anyone faced some of these struggles and been able to create change within their company?

Thanks for your feedback..

Dale

Dale,
I own a small shop, so I have some of the same thoughts about "little" jobs as you. The main reason for getting into digital printing 12 years ago was to turn the small jobs more profitably. What difference does it make if you turn 10 small jobs in a day that total $2000.00 or 1 job that totals $2000.00? Short of a few extra minutes of set-up and a few more invoices to make out, in the end it's the same.

If your company doesn't want the small jobs just tell your bosses to send them to the competition, I'll gladly do them! ( When I am done servicing your client on their "little" jobs, maybe I'll get some of the "more profitable" work too. Tell the sales team to wake up and smell the coffee. Every sale is an addition to their commission. Don't just put the big eggs in the basket, add some small ones as well to take up the space when they lose one or two big ones.

As for broker work, I love it! They do the art, deal with the customer, send me a print ready file. I do what I do best.... print and bill!

How to change the mentality? That's a good question. I guess they will need to lose a few of those large jobs, maybe then they won't be so picky, after all it's all money!

Slow week here ah Dale!

We are a large commercial printer, to make our digital more profitable, we look at it as a separate department within the company. The operators need to have prepress, press, and post-press experience. That way one operator can run the entire show if they need to. And if it's variable data, then it stays in one person's hands. Automation is key, we set up complex W2P and POD applications for our customers, one click on there end and our automation drops the file into the que on our NexPress, just click the green button. As for billing, when we have customers that submit "small" jobs several times a month, we set up one "monthly job ticket" for that particular company, even if they have other larger jobs that get billed separately. So once a month we bill for the group of smaller jobs. Implementing Lean manufacturing and 5S is also key in todays economy. Anything that you can do to reduce waste will turn a better profit. I am the entire second shift in our digital press department, one guy. I take jobs as they come in, traditional prepress or variable data programming, send out proofs, run the press, while the press is running i'm usually trimming the previously printed job, or setting up our Duplo, ordering stock for our shelves, etc... There are lots of small things that add up to "value added" for the customer.