Printing more than one piece at the same time saves costs
Looking for a way to stretch your marketing budget? How does saving 25% sound? How about running a job in four-color process for less than two-color? These savings and upgrades are a reality if you can plan a bit in advance.
A great way to save money is to print more than one piece at the same time. Putting more than one item on a sheet spreads out the fixed costs. In some cases the fixed costs are the largest part of a job.
Let's examine the nature of costs for a printed piece. There are three types of costs: non-reoccurring fixed, reoccurring fixed and variable costs. Non-reoccurring fixed costs include steps in the process that would be done only for a new job. Prepress costs (electronic prepress and proofing) are examples of these costs. Reoccurring costs come up every time the job is run. These are usually referred to as "make-readies and are incurred in the press and bindery departments. Variable costs are directly related to the run length. This includes press time, paper and the cost to run the bindery equipment.
Let's look at an example. A customer prints 3,500 sale cards every month. The cards are 6 X 11, two-color, run on 80# gloss cover.
Imagine if the customer planned in advance and ran cards for the next three months instead of only one month. Instead of 12 jobs a year they do only four. Each time the job comes in the same steps are done, it's just done on three cards rather than one.
The additional costs to print three costs versus one are minimal. The time to process the job in prepress is a little bit more but not three times as much. The proofing costs are the same because the card is small. The plate costs are the same regardless of the number of cards. The press makeready time is also the same. The paper cost is more but not three times as much. The quantity is relatively small as a large portion of the paper cost is for makeready. Again, the makeready is the same regardless of the number of cards. The cutting cost is roughly three times as much for three versions. This is because the makeready time on the cutter is minimal so most of the costs are variable.
Here are the costs for this project, run both ways.
Run one card, $907.00 or $10,088.40 per year.
Run three cards at the same time, $1,126.00 or $375.00 per card and $4,504.00 per year.
As you can see, this customer saved $532.00 per card by running three cards at the same time. This is $6,384.00 over the course of a year. That’s a savings of 55%
The story gets even better though. At the beginning of the year the customer and I met to discuss all of her marketing needs for the year. She was still doing the monthly cards and had three new marketing efforts planned. We decided a series of card mailers would work well for the new efforts. We wrote copy and designed a total of 12 cards: three months of sale cards and eight cards for the new marketing efforts.
Because we were doing so many cards we were able to print them in four-color process at an attractive rate. The cards looked great. The cost was $7,780.00. She saved about $4,500.00 by running them together and was able to get them in full color!
The bottom line is if you are able to plan in advance, you can save big bucks on your printing. You save the fixed costs that would be incurred on subsequent runs. So plan ahead, talk to your printer and start saving $$$!
