The streamlined, cost-effective, and well-controlled in-house production landscape doesn’t exist without digging in and getting your hands dirty a little.
The colorful blooms blanketing neighborhood lawns and flowerbeds are a signature denotation of spring.
They’re also the result of a lot of hard-earned preparation.
Cultivation, or soil refinement, involves getting your hands dirty: digging into or cutting up an existing soil bed to better prepare it for planting. Cultivating the soil boosts its nourishment and plays an integral first step in the eventual beautiful springtime displays.
The Production Print environment remains a landscape of seasonal change. Shorter run lengths paired with a higher number of small jobs. An increasing number of job submission channels. Increasing deadline pressure. Organizations who consider bringing their production in-house relish in the control and flexibility gained over producing their final product, but wonder…. at what cost?
Many businesses find themselves somewhere between the extremes of printing everything in-house and out-sourcing. But increasingly, DIY Production Print is becoming more accessible. The streamlined, cost-effective, and well-controlled in-house production landscape doesn’t exist without digging in and getting your hands dirty a little.
What’s an integral first step in taking a hard look at your own print landscape, and bringing opportunities to full bloom?
3 'Cs' Cultivating Your Own Production Print Landscape:
1. Cost Justification
What type of pieces are you producing (brochures? Business cards? Three-part-forms? Handbooks?), and at what volume? What equipment components are necessary to provide a desired result and streamline the process with minimal off-line work?
A thorough discovery process with your technology partner will help decipher what cost justification is there for bringing production in-house, but also strategically find ways to help contain wasteful costs within the production process.
Consider also that as short-run jobs increase, bringing production in-house can drastically cut down on large set up costs, processing fees and mark ups. By eliminating the need to print a large quantity with an outside vendor just to justify the set-up costs, your organization can print on demand and dictate its own turn-around time (and also replace those obsolete brochures collecting dust on your showroom floor).
2. Exploring Capabilities
Your marketing rep may drool over the two-knife trimmer and face-trimmer add-on for your Canon imagePRESS, loving the idea of full bleed leave-behinds. But is it justified? Maximizing your capabilities with your production print environment should be driven by maximizing your return on technology investment.
A few considerations:
- Finishing Features: Features like booklet trimming, binding, stapling, as well as production print speed and media capacity, should be bound by what your core production initiatives entail.
- Workflow: The capabilities with workflow automation have created new standards for streamlining and automating the production print process from end to end. From the print operator, to acquisition, pre-flight, make-ready and the internal and external communication, automation tools can essentially make the production process limitlessly efficient.
- Color Coordination: Color consistency is a continually-perfecting art with most digital office systems. For example, Canon's PRISMAsync incorporates an in-RIP G7 calibration method. Without a need for third-party software or complex procedures , print professionals can quickly and easily calibrate their PRISMAsync-driven imagePRESS color presses to achieve a near neutral print condition.
How do these tools correlate with your needs? Through a Discovery process, it’s essential to nail down what essentially you are wanting to produce and the necessary workflow process to achieve your business goals.
3. Compliance and Security
In today’s data-breach-weary business technology environment, security becomes an always-relevant conversation.
The security of out-sourced jobs hinges on the security controls of your vendor – how do they collect, use and store confidential information? Law, Finance, and Healthcare markets particularly deal regularly with private, sensitive information that could be vulnerable without adequate protection measures.
A variety of digital production print solutions can increase document security by allowing only authorized access to devices, keeping confidential documents out of the wrong hands. Additionally, these solutions can be encrypted when being transmitted across a network, leaving them unsusceptible to interception.
Seasonal change is prevalent in today’s production print environment. Through our signature Datamax Discovery process, we can help your organization begin digging into your own printing backyard and examining the potential for bringing more print jobs in-house.
Are you ready to spring into action?
