In a world where many business owners look for savings by outsourcing key functions, digital printing is an outlier.
Improvements in production printer technologies are driving this move towards insourcing. New production printers, which are also known as digital printing presses, are a great benefit to medium and large organizations, which can realize significant savings by bringing previously-outsourced print jobs in-house.
Here are some of the main reasons businesses are choosing to insource their printing.
Today's digital printing presses don't look anything like the offset printers used to print newspapers and magazines. Instead, think of them as especially large, powerful versions of office printers.
A digital printing press is very different machine than a traditional offset printing press because a digital printing press uses toner or ink to print directly onto paper. Unlike traditional offset presses, digital printing presses don't require the added step of first producing print plates.
Offset printing remains the dominant technology for especially large print jobs, but today's digital printing presses are getting more competitive with offset printing presses in important metrics like cost-per-page and pages-per minute. The newest Konica Minolta production printers can print in color at 140 pages per minute.
The availability of production printers capable of large print volumes without the need for printing plates is a game-changer. Because digital printing presses are easier to operate than offset presses, companies that never would have considered an offset press are now considering in-house production printing.
Setup costs are the bane of any commercial print shop customer. With setup-costs factored in, the only cost-effective way to do outsourced printing is to produce large volumes of the exact same mailing, brochure or catalog. But these mass-produced printings don’t often fit the needs of organizations that need printed materials customized by date, geography, audience, or even tailored to specific customers.
With an in-house digital printing press, set-up costs melt away. Suddenly it’s possible to conduct print large runs that are both low-cost and personalized.
Services that used to be done only by print shops are now more widely-available features of production printers.
That means that if your organization needs to produce large quantities of books, pamphlets, or brochures, there are dedicated machines available to taking care of the cutting, creasing, or complete binding. There’s no need to outsource or assign employee time to the job.
Meanwhile, specialized label press printers can print large amounts of mailing labels in a hurry, while other high-tech production printers can mass-produce specialized items printed on glossy paper and foil.
Insourcing your printing is about more than saving money, it’s also about making sure your get the best quality.
Have you ever had a third-party printer make a mistake on a print run or tell you that a job won’t be ready until more than 24-hours after your deadline? With an insourced print department you have total control over all creative decisions, and are always the number one priority customer. At the end of the day, who would you rather trust, your own employees, or a third-party that’s not invested in your success?
Want to learn more about what’s involved in insourcing your office’s print services? See SymQuest’s gallery of wide-format, and production printers to research specific model capabilities.