Print estimation and job management tools
The challenge in estimating printing work is that every job is a custom job. The paper type, size, volume of pieces, the binding and finishing as well as whether the job is printed in colour or black-and-white are specific to each order. All of these vary from one job to the next.
In addition, digital technologies and computers have changed every aspect of the printing business, in terms of both production and costs. For example, work printed on a digital press may not require plate-making, but every unit costs the same to produce. So, does a printer continue to offer discounts for higher-volume or repeat jobs? How do you charge for variable data printing and personalization? What about the big important customer? A printer might want to offer a special price on a short-run job to keep the customer from looking somewhere else for his/her high-volume work. And, what about outsourced processes, shipping and mailing, or storage and fulfillment? The variables are infinite.
Any estimating method, including pencil and paper, requires that printers come up with a reasonable price for producing a completed job as quickly as possible, before a prospect or a sales lead goes cold.
“For printers to be able to grow their businesses, they have to reduce their administrative costs,” says Stephen McWilliams, director of marketing at Toronto-based Avanti Systems, a developer of this type of software. “You can’t bill a customer for your administrative costs. You have to automate. And, often whoever gets the estimate to the customer first has the best chance of getting the job.”
However, getting the job is pointless unless it proves to be profitable for the printer and automated systems can help here, too.
“A lot of print shops don’t understand their own costs,” McWilliams notes. “One of our customers didn’t realize he was losing money on a job until he got automated. These systems do more than estimating. They’re a control hub inside a shop that helps printers put estimates together as well as tracking all associated costs. They can give you an estimate versus actual costs so printers use that data to tweak and improve their estimates.”
More than estimating
Estimating systems of all kinds have been available to printers for many years, but the instantaneous flow of information provided by digital technologies on the production floor as well as in the front office have greatly expanded what they can do. The basic advantages of automated estimating systems is the speed and consistency they bring to the estimating task. Estimators, and even customers in some cases, can feed in job specifications and receive an accurate estimate in a matter of seconds. In addition, the specifications need to be entered only once, eliminating the errors that can result from typos or from misinterpreting handwritten orders and notes.
Avanti, like other developers, offers modular systems so that printers need to only purchase as much capability as they need to accommodate their particular business. Modules have been designed for all types of printing, including sheetfed and web offset, digital printing, as well as for a wide range of processes including the following: estimating; order entry/job costing, scheduling, purchasing, inventory, barcoding/RFID, shop floor data collection, shipping, invoicing, in-plant chargebacks, accounting integration, point-of-sales, fulfillment and mailing.
“Some printers want only a job ticketing system,” McWilliams adds. “Others say they need a full workflow system.” Avanti planned to exhibit a full workflow system at the Graph Expo ‘08 trade show in Chicago at the end of October. “We’re showing Avanti working with Adobe, Kodak, Prinergy and Duplo for complete workflow with JDF.”
For web-based 24/7 operations, Avanti also offers a front-end Web-to-print system that customers can access online through the Internet to type in their own job specifications and develop estimates on their own, or that salespeople can use from a remote laptop to deliver an estimate while they’re in a client’s office. Web-to-print capabilities cover job estimating and submission, variable form templates, soft-proofing and order approval, fulfillment/online catalogs and online payment.
“That saves printers a lot of time,” McWilliams notes. “One of our New York clients says they’ve saved one-third of their CSR time with the Web-to-print front-end.”
Avanti Systems software has been designed for operations with 10 or more employees. Start-up costs for a basic system run to about $20,000, with a typical installation in the $35,000 – $50,000 range. A Web-to-print front-end adds $25,000 – $35,000 more to the basic costs.
Web-to-print and more
For print shops seeking primarily a Web-to-print system, Print Quotes Software, Kitchener, Ont., offers highly functional solutions. The browser-based software allows for three types of job estimating: fixed price/fixed quantity, fixed price/variable quantity and dynamic product pricing.
To define these terms, Print Quotes Software’s Brent Clarke notes key differences between production-based and product-based costing and pricing. Production-based printing is a blank slate for specifications that are entirely determined by the customer with an infinite number of variables. By contrast, product-based printing provides fairly standardized products that still offer customers a wide range of options for customized design, and at prices that are fixed per unit with some flexibility.
“Web-to-print templates are pre-defined products, including the client’s own products,” Clarke says. “With web-to-print templates, the client can design a file that can be associated with a pre-determined costing file.” Though the templates have been developed for ease-of-use by even non-professionals, additional options are available to customers with a higher skill level.
The main point is that pricing and estimating is based on the end product, not the processes used to produce it. Business cards come to mind as an example. Using Print Quotes Software, printers can offer customers a catalog of basic card templates along with a choice of graphics and typefaces. Customers can mix and match these to suit their own tastes and purposes, or may download their own preferred images and designs, but the prices are predetermined by the printer based on card size and the quantity ordered. Special options, like gold ink, can be offered as premium and priced accordingly; volumes can trigger discounts per pre-set parameters.
Print Quotes can accommodate nearly any type of printing including digital, sheetfed and web offset, large format and screen printing. In addition, it can be used for variable data print brochures and other materials that use the customer’s database.
Once a customer has submitted a design, the Print Quotes system develops a soft proof that Clarke notes is a “true” soft proof (a PDF file built on the server and based on customer specifications, rather than just a Java-based representation rendered by the browser). Once approved, the job ticket and file is sent to the printer.
“We don’t do preflighting of the files,” Clarke says, because the files are submitted as customer-approved PDFs. “We do uploads and file management. We generate a job ticket before the job is placed as an order. It gives the necessary job details, information for scheduling and can include notes on a job, and additional notes can be put in.”
Among other features of Print Quotes Software are job reporting and fulfillment inventory tracking. It can handle mailing functions as well, including mailing to multiple destinations, and it can report data out to other business accounting systems. Print Quotes Software also allows customers as many as 20 “skins,” or various Internet storefronts owned by the same company.
A recently-introduced “lite” version of the software is available for $2,500, making it affordable for smaller businesses.
An imposing solution
Though not an estimating system, Impostrip software solutions from Ultimate Technographics in Montreal, gives printers tools to manage jobs more effectively and maximize productivity for a variety of applications using Dynamic Templates and Hot Folders. These can be used for all types of commercial work and multi-page book/booklet printing, which are printed on sheetfed and web offset as well as digital presses. While the company started out working primarily in the arena of offset printing, Joanne David, CEO, notes that lately Ultimate Technographics has been focusing on products for digital printing, the industry’s fastest-growing segment.
“If you look at the differences and changes in the market, you can see you need a new set of solutions,” David says. “The old concept was offset. Now, it’s digital printing as an alternative because digital is a more direct process for shorter runs with no prepress and very fast turnarounds.”
As the name suggests, Impostrip is an automated system for imposing pages on the press sheet. Printers can define and create Hot Folders by entering the press sheet size along with job parameters like page size, binding method and output method, be that a computer-to-plate system or a digital press. Blank pages, creep and bleed can be factored as well. Jobs dropped into the Hot Folder are automatically imposed according to the pre-set parameters and cut marks (bar codes can also be applied). The job is then sent to the press. Printers can even place a Hot Folder at their FTP site so that jobs will be automatically imposed as they are sent in from customers in web-to-print operations. In addition, Dynamic Templates accept jobs of different page sizes and page lengths and automatically imposes them. And Ultimate Technographics’ Ink Ready solution generates CIP4 ink data taken from the job’s PDF file to set press ink keys or zonal inking charts when CIP4 is not available.
“We’re also adding a finishing tools module, Ultimate Bindery, to automate the finishing process,” David adds. “We’re working with Horizon, Muller Martini, Duplo and others. All imposition software puts out JDF and bar codes to basically set up a job on that equipment.”
Versions of Impostrip are offered for most printing applications. For offset printing, Ultimate Technographics offers Impostrip Unlimited and Solo, both employing Dynamic Templates and Hot Folders. Impostrip On Demand Offset imposes press sheets up to 30”x30”, while On Demand Digital handles even large variable data files in optimized PDF format, imposing them automatically and sending them to press. Impostrip Proof and Repurposing enables outputting an offset file in digital format for laser proof printing or to reprint low volumes of what were initially offset jobs.
Impostrip Book Stacker was designed for producing digital books and other multi-page documents, and will gang books of similar page length to optimize production and reduce waste. Card Stacker is for “flat” applications, like postcards, business cards, Web-to-print jobs and variable data work, and also gangs similar jobs to help printers get the most out of their run-time and materials.
Ultimate Technographics has partnered with Xerox, Hewlett Packard, Xeikon, Kodak, Agfa, Ricoh and a number of other major hardware manufacturers to develop solutions specifically for these printing systems.
Although Ultimate Technographics initially approached print production from a very different perspective than estimating, like the estimating systems, the company has moved into the broader realm of job management because of the fluidity and flexibility of information in digital form. The net result is that printers, today, have a number of options for managing jobs as they move through the production cycle-whatever types of processes that cycle might include. This can go from full-blown estimating and monitoring, to effectively managing Web-to-print operations, to focusing more closely on production and getting the work out quickly, accurately and efficiently to the appropriate press.
