Printing costs are a significant component of every organization. Just think about all the different printed pieces that are used by your organization as a whole. When was the last time your organization looked at its entire printing budget for the year? Did you include business cards, invoices, purchase orders, payroll stuffers, flyers, sell sheets, stationery, employment documents, marketing brochures, direct mail, annual reports, and training materials just to name a few? Now, how many members of your staff are involved in the purchasing decisions for all those projects? If your organization is like most then these products are ordered by multiple departments and individuals throughout an organization, and those individuals have very different job functions and skills. Have any of those individuals made a career in print procurement? If so, then your organization is probably a large enterprise that can afford that level of expertise in order to maximize all the dollars that are spent in printing to conduct your business and communicate your message to the community, region, country or world. But, most organizations cannot afford that luxury, nor do they need that level of expertise on a daily full-time basis.
Most companies allow each department to purchase the printed materials it requires. Sometimes this works well, but it can also be very costly. By not aggregating your print projects, competitively bidding, designing for value, or managing deadlines and changes, your organization could be spending far more than is needed. And, in order to accomplish all of those tasks you will need an experienced professional that is well versed in the creative, financial and technical aspects of commercial printing. If you couple decentralized purchasing with the technical expertise that is needed to truly understand commercial printing, then you start to get an idea of how much waste can occur and why print management may work for your organization.
Print Management is the professional management of the entire print lifecycle, and is becoming an attractive and cost-saving service that many organizations of all sizes are choosing to outsource. The print lifecycle goes like this:
- Collaborating with creative to understand the purpose and medium that has been chosen.
- Development of print specifications that optimizes the end use of the document while orchestrating the technical requirements to obtain the best value.
- Competitively bidding those projects in a vendor neutral environment.
- Selection of vendor based on quality, price, dependability and timeliness.
- Releasing the Purchase Order and placing the work into production.
- Maintaining the production schedule, and reporting back to the organization.
- Management of proofs throughout the production process (i.e., art proofs, color proofs, bluelines, press proofs, bindery proofs, etc…)
- Management and oversight of change orders when needed.
- Press and Bindery inspections.
- Final packaging, distribution and/or mailing.
- Analysis of invoice and payment.
Traditional methods of print procurement include sole source suppliers such as your local print shop, print brokers who work with a cadre of pre-qualified printers, or advertising agencies that handle the entire process from creative through production. But, with each of these scenarios there can be drawbacks. With the sole source option many organizations find themselves in the habit of buying printing from one particular vendor, and this can result in materials being primarily designed to fit that printer's capabilities as opposed to being created with its primary function and purpose being of foremost importance. And, your sole source supplier salesperson may be looking toward maximizing the dollars spent on the project as opposed to increasing its value in a non-partisan way. Print brokers can offer a variety of printers and capabilities, but the broker is still going to be looking to maximize its sales through markup or increasing quantities, both of which can translate into waste for the organization. Print brokers typically only provide the actual printed product and not the coordination of your internal stakeholders, or the overall view that will maximize the success of the entire project from creative to distribution. Advertising agencies on the other hand can provide turn-key solutions, but here your creative component will be most important which can result in highly effective and beautiful print projects. However, most agencies do not have the technical knowledge and experience to marry the creative side to the technical aspects which can keep projects within budget and optimize the value of each purchase.
Professional print management can be done with several different approaches. The service can be provided on an ongoing retainer basis where they function as a "virtual" member or extension of your staff which aggregates the entire print expenditure. Or, an organization can out-source specific components such as the bidding process, the production oversight, or the coordination of all the members of your organization that are involved in a particular project. Traditional print management does not stand to gain with using any specific vendor, so in most instances you can choose whether to use your own printers or select from pre-qualified vendors depending on the results of the bidding and selection process.
So, you ask, when does out-sourcing print management make sense for my organization?
- When your organization is growing rapidly and there is more work than your current staff of artists and publication managers can complete.
- When you have only a couple of major print projects each year, and their management does not demand a full-time employee across the entire calendar year.
- When you have recurring projects that need to be aggregated and managed in series while allowing your staff to focus on other developing projects.
- When your organization needs professional expertise to lead and coordinate activities by several of your internal departments, vendors and agencies.
- When you see your overall print spend growing and you want to take control of your print sourcing to make sure that you are spending the organization's resources in the best possible way.
TheMarketPro has chosen to add this service to our offerings at the request of our current customers seeking to conserve their organization's human resources and to save actual dollars. TheMarketPro is fortunate to have several staff members that have spent many years in all aspects of the commercial printing industry from art development, customer service, plant management, and sales to project management for Fortune500 customers spending millions of dollars each year on marketing and training materials.
Like many of the services offered by TheMarketPro our overriding mission is to help our customers be successful, and that means that we are equipped to customize programs to best fit the needs of each of our customers. So, just like our traditional promotional products and marketing services, we can offer a comprehensive approach to print management or a la carte services. That means you can choose for TheMarketPro to provide any or all of the traditional print management functions. What's more you have the peace of mind in knowing that you only pay for the hours of service that you actually require, and not the traditional "mark up" approach that many print brokers add to your print spend. You are charged an hourly service fee with no retainer or minimum for only the functions that will help your organization maximize its print spend.