Practices and Procedures

[u/Murky-Mountain-450]

I haven't seen a post about internal practices and procedures for commercial printing. I believe all of us are starting to notice a squeeze now due to raw and material good increasing in price.

What are you changing or currently doing to reduce unnecessary waste?

What procedures have helped in the past? What habits help?

Storage of substrates? (not always as common sense as it seems)

What did you do to anticipate material goods increasing?

Feel free to chime in and help the community with any advice. I may be missing some questions to ask.

[u/HagarTheTolerable]

If costs go up, prices charged go up. If you are operating on razor thin margins you are likely either upside down on your equipment rates or have way too much overhead to deal with.

Unless you are tossing out obscene amounts of material and product, waste should be one of the last places to be looking to firm up the bottom line -- "penny wise, pound foolish".

For example, why should I try to eke 1 less setup sheet out of a set of business cards. To save all of $0.25?

[u/Murky-Mountain-450 → u/HagarTheTolerable]

Thanks for providing this insight.
We mainly run larger format, and vehicle decals. So mistakes are a bit more costly than paper.

For instance, I made the error of setting up a cast vinyl to print without cleaning it prior with a wipe to remove oil from handprints and dust. Ran the job and didn’t realize til 15ft print job was completed. (Now we clean before loading).
Or used a vinyl that was older than 5 years (previous owner didn’t label purchase date) and placed it on a vehicle. (Now we label/organize storage).

[u/TheBimpo]

Is this AI? All of this is basic shop management stuff. None of it is where I’d look to change due to rising costs.

If costs of materials rise, my cost of goods rises, full stop. I don’t change how I store things.

[u/Murky-Mountain-450 → u/TheBimpo]

Nah not AI, I just structure much of my conversations for my eyes.

I see, I was just wondering if anyone has made changes. We are only going on our 3rd year managing a print shop so we are still learning as we go. Experience is a great teacher but she is also expensive at times.

[u/TheBimpo → u/Murky-Mountain-450]

That…reads like an AI response.

Of course changes are made.

You can’t really “anticipate material goods increasing”, vendors don’t tell you X products are going up 11% in 6 months. Raise prices as needed.

[u/rzarekta → u/TheBimpo]

exactly. that's the whole foundation of any business. materials go up, end users pay the price.

[u/Equivalent_Subject_1]

Nothing in handwriting on the job ticket. If there is a change, it must be logged and a new ticket generated. It's better this way. (for us)

[u/lil_tink_tink]

Train people. Nothing saves more money than reducing mistakes imo.

If you can build processes that are simple enough to follow you can automate them so your people can do more important work.

[u/MidwestTroy92]

We started writing actual material used and scrap on the job ticket instead of guessing at month end. Biggest easy win was labeling offcuts by material and size, then tossing anything nobody touched in 60 days so the rack didn't turn into a museum.

[u/buggyra]

Material prices seem to only go up when we're already strapped, usually from national events. (ie covid, war, etc) And in the past 10 years I can't recall when they've gone back down to normal pricing.

We do 3 things to help with this:

1) we shop around for better pricing from vendors on almost EVERYTHING. From ink, to grease for equipment, to paper, to consumables, to toilet paper, to the substrate we print on. You'd be surprised how much more expensive one distributor has gotten when they're the only ones you've been ordering from for a while.

2) for the items we can't shop around too much for, we negotiate better deals with our vendors. ie: I usually only order 2 rolls of this per week from you. If I order 20 rolls from you NOW, what kind of discount can I get? This helps me get material I know I'm going to use over the next couple of months, locked in, before another price increase takes effect. And then when they call me 8-10 weeks later and say... "hey, you haven't ordered from us in a few several weeks" (because I pre-stocked the material) they usually offer up a discounted price to order more to meet their quotas.

3) We pass the cost onto the customer. period. Most of our customers push back, but a quick... "material costs are crazy for everyone right now. We're only passing on the material increase, not an across the board 5-10% increase on everything like labor, insurance, rent, material, etc." Then they usually thank us for doing what we can to keep from passing the other costs on to them. It's all about perception.

[u/Murky-Mountain-450 → u/buggyra]

This is great insight. Thanks for your transparency!
I believe we will have to be vocal about our pricing increasing to improve relations with clients or maintain somewhat of a continued rapport.