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Adding more Presses
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Adding more Presses
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Overview
Here is an e-mail we received from a printer in Connecticut, reflecting real-world conditions in a shop that wasn't built yesterday. It brightened our day to read those heady comments. Thank you, David.
If there is a configuration that will throw a gale-force headwind into Morning Flight's flight plan, this has to be it: Four presses, all single-color, with separate run prices calculated for each press. We can safely assume those run prices are all based on Return on Investment. Or, if the press is paid for, on how much it would cost to replace it. That's not counting the slow days when prices free-fall to where income from that press barely pays for its share of rent and utilities. Anxious days, when machinery is mostly sitting idle.
Printing is what printing is. That shop in Connecticut is far from uncommon.
Accounting for the Basics
When a company installs a new estimating system, the natural tendency is to try to configure that system to the way estimating was done before - to simply automate the manual process. Quick Copy shops generally lean more toward price-book estimating (Counter Price Lists, Crouser Guides, prices governed by what the market will bear), while traditional printers favor press-based, cost-plus methods (Budgeted Hourly Rate, prices based on the press used for the job). Morning Flight is a combination of both, but is usually a more "instant" fit for Quick Copy estimators. Traditional shops may need to take a fresh look at pricing.
Leaving aside the merits of cost-plus versus market-based estimating, here is what I'm absolutely convinced of: When people go to buy grass seed, it's not the seed they care about. What they care about is their grass.
Printers love to show off their new acquisitions ... and buyers couldn't be more indifferent. Need proof? See if you can remember the last time you took your car in for service, then asked which machine they performed the tune-up on. Never happens! In today's "always-late-for-something" world, your customers have neither the time nor the curiosity to be impressed by that fancy new inkenspritzer you ran their letterheads on. They'll look right past it. What matters to them are the results delivered to their office. And they'll get vocal when a $100 letterhead you ran last month on a Multi suddenly costs $150 coming off the Heidelberg because the Multi was out of commission. Once you agree with that, the product-centric ways of Morning Flight will look like a very good fit.
Looking to the future, here is something else we need to consider. Some day soon, your customers will expect to find prices on your website 24/7, and when that day arrives, the press you ultimately run the job on is no longer a factor. That will leave the product, not the press, as the price maker. Estimates coming off the internet will by nature revolve around the product, and Morning Flight is just ahead of the curve.
I won't argue that cost-plus isn't the way to go for large printing firms. No one with any sense would use a price list, or even a pushbutton computer estimating program like Morning Flight, to quote a million+ run. But in smaller shops, consistent pricing is the key to keeping customers (and shop owners) happy, and that's where Morning Flight excels.
The Plan in Action
So how do we accommodate the presses of the printer in Connecticut? Let's start by setting up the Multi as our one-color, the 17-1/2x22-1/2 as our two-color, and the 23x29 as our four-color press. Designating a press as a four-color doesn't mean we can't run one-color jobs on it. The key is in the number of print heads we specify. All three presses are single-color, so in the press update window, Units would have to be set to one for not only our one-color Multi, but for our two-color and four-color presses as well.
If the $457.80 price for 1,000 Letterheads seems exorbitant, that's because it's for four-color letterheads, run four times through. Keep in mind that the sole purpose of displaying a price in the press update window is to help set the hourly rate. Even with one print head, this is still our designated four-color press, so the price has to reflect four-color work.
Step Two
Next, let's make three new products: A one-up version of an 8.5x11 flyer, a four-up version on a 17x22 press sheet, and a six-up version on a 22x25-1/2 press sheet. When we quote on either of these flyers, Morning Flight will automatically pick the right size press. The one-up job will be assigned to the Multi, the four-up to the 17-1/2x22-1/2, the six-up to the 23x29. What's more, the program will automatically add cutting (the $4.50 shown as Postpress in the product entry window below).
What if we wanted to run the flyers one-up on the 17-1/2x22-1/2 because of ink coverage? Nothing prevents us from quoting the job for the Multi, setting the product properties to "very high" for top dollar, then print the flyers on the larger press. That doesn't conflict with what I said earlier: When you sell one-color flyers with the same ink color, the same ink coverage, and on the same paper, they should be priced the same, regardless of which press you print them on.
What about the Letterpress ...
Ah, yes, the letterpress. We still need to find a corner for that "cylinder letterpress used for designer-friendly letterpress work." The Free Edition unfortunately has no place for it. The only way letterpress printing can be quoted in Morning Flight is as merchandise in the Silver and Gold Editions. The die-cutting part, of course, can be quoted as postpress.
See also
