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Pricing Products
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Pricing Products
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Overview
Before we explore how to price Morning Flight products, let's first define what a product is. Technically speaking, it's a container. Something to hold sheet sizes, makeready, press speed, plate type. A template then, in plain English? Well, sort of, but not exactly. When we think of templates, we see half-finished, fill-in-the-blanks frameworks, with placeholders telling us where to put the missing bits. In contrast, Morning Flight products are completely finished, ready to use as is. They can stand in as models for making other products, and in that case they do act like templates, but generally they're used straight out of the box.
Take a letterhead, for instance. As a template, that letterhead might have its size and plate type hardwired. Makeready and press speed stay open, to be filled in by the estimator. In a Morning Flight product, makeready and press speed are hardwired as well. Everything is. Except we would probably have at least three different letterheads in our product line-up: A standard, run-of-the-mill corporate version, a letterhead light with just an address on top, and a demanding prima donna, flying first class with an exact ink color match.
The Benefits
Ok, so what can a product do that a template can't? First and foremost, products can be held next to a bunch of printed samples and matched. Given enough samples to cover the range you're offering, even end-users can match their letterhead to one of your products. Your estimator does his job once, setting makeready and press speed and other parameters when creating each product. Few end-users would have the skills to do that.
Along similar lines, cousin Mel can now be entrusted to do most of the low-end quoting, leaving complex and more important projects to a professional estimator, which in the smaller shops means owner or manager. Between helping with production and pacifying customers and filling in for employees out with the flu, hardly the person with time to squander on ten-dollar jobs that never materialize. Cousin Mel, on the other hand ...
Finally, products open the door to automation. Few consumer products are more automated these days than digital cameras. How automated would those cameras be if they had to work with templates? If the amount of light and focusing distance had to be dialed in by the operator? With Morning Flight products, all specs are frozen, all parameters known. That allows the program to intelligently increase press speeds as run lengths go up, make sure letterheads don't get printed on card stock, calculate ink consumption based on coverage, keep envelopes from being folded ... the list goes on. Products just generally make a printer's life easier.
How do we price Products?
Actually, we don't, not directly. Copy products are the sole exception. On offset products, Morning Flight integrates the properties of the product with the hourly rate of the assigned press, reads the quantity, and comes up with a price. On digital products, it's the size and ink coverage of the product that combines with the properties of the press (hourly rate, run speed, consumables and/or click charges) to determine the outcome. It's a little more complicated than that - a host of other factors get pulled into the mix - but in principal, that's how it works.
Why Copies are different
Copies are priced per copy, so here the product alone determines the price. And that's what separates Morning Flight copies from Morning Flight digital. With advances in copier technology, the clear dividing line that once existed between the two methods - toner versus ink - has blurred. Many copiers now serve as digital printers. Today, it's no longer how the image is put on paper, but which pricing model best fits your needs.
See also
