How Your Business Could Save Money With Print Management

Orange, the mobile and cellular communications giant owned by France Telecom, is well known to UK consumers. This is not least because of the large scale advertising and marketing campaigns it runs, just like any major brand. Advertising and marketing in print format (ie on actual paper) forms a big proportion of this budget. This includes things like leaflet printing, booklets and pamphlets, consumer magazines, billboard posters and direct mail marketingmaterials. It is completely feasible that such a huge company would spend vast amounts on this type of work.

But a recent news story in the print indusrty press revealed that Orange also spends £7 million every year in the UK on 'print management'. Not a penny of this is actually spent on ink or equipment or printing costs - it all goes into the strategic planning of that printing. It might seem a little OTT to spend this much on a third party service merely to oversee printing. Yet if you understand what is meant by print management, you might begin to see why such sums are justified. The basic fact comes down to this. Companies which spend money on a print management specialist actually tend to save money compared to those who try to manage their printing by themselves.

A large part of these savings comes down to reducing wastage. Millions of dollars are lost every year by mistakes such as incorrect color calibration, problems with paper stock and simple typos which were ignored before sending to print. If you consider unwieldy and complex print marketing strategies this is quite often the case and these costs are written off as 'inevitable'. It is because commercial printers needed to find an efficient solution to these that the discipline of print management was born.

Aside from reducing waste, another thing print management is able to achieve is planning the logistics of all the varied print campaigns so that resources and time are used most efficiently. Print jobs and schedules are planned in scientific detail to reduce the cost associated with electricity use, overheads and purchase of unneccesary equipment. For example if you are using a large number of printing machinery units during peak times, by planning ahead and spreading the load you can use less machines, and less power, at any one time. Do the math and the outcome of this is that your printing costs come down. So you can either achieve the same amount of output for less money, or reinvest the savings in more print marketing and ultimately more ROI.

Here's the good bit: print management is no longer the exclusive domain of huge enterprises like Orange. In the past decade the gains in digital printing technology have meant smaller scale print management solutions are possible for small to medium enterprises, meaning that the rest of us can enjoy the same kinds of cost savings the 'big guys' have been enjoying for years. Is your business taking advantage?

Sourced from www.printerscentralonline.com/blog/How-Your-Business-Could-Save-Money-With-Print-Management