Can I be a commercial printer?

OK, I couldn't close out the week without a discussion about quality. When operating budgets get tight, which has been the case in the newspaper industry for several years, two things are the first to see the cost cutting knife - travel and consumables. Consumables? Yes, consumable because that is an operating cost and there is generally a relationship between a product's cost and quality. That is why premium gasoline is more expensive than regular and there are different grades of paper. So newspapers have been reducing their operating cost by using less expensive products.

So fast-forward to 2008, travel budgets are all but gone and newspapers have made decisions to use less expensive materials in their printing process. But is this a good idea. Newspapers have to meet customer and advertiser expectations by printing a quality product and generally that benchmark is met. (I'll talk about color gamut, ICC and ink density on another day) Now consider the trend in the newspaper industry: commercial printing. Commercial printing of either newsprint products or cold-set printing on E-Brite stock. This is where a newspaper might run into quality problems. If your press, consumables and quality systems are not dialed to the highest quality product you need to print, you'll have a very difficult time stretching your process capabilities to meet a higher print standard. So before you look at less expensive consumables, consider the impact of the new products on your capabilities and future business plans.

An example, a small market newspaper in Colorado added a UV printing tower to their press for covers and inside DT advertising. The strategy was to offer higher quality printing options to customers who left for heat-set products. The advantage to the newspaper is the ability to offer a later ad close (closer to the publication date), premier ad position and higher quality printing to customers looking to stand-out from ROP advertising. But to offer advertisers coated stock with the normal ROP schedule -- now that's an advantage! Advertisers are no longer required to contract commercial printing 6-8 weeks before the publication date. Now they can close an ad a few days, or even hours, before the press run. Getting back to my point about consumables, the consumable cost for UV printing is higher than cold-set news; but the advertiser is paying a premium for the higher quality.

So don't be too quick to cut consumable costs without comparing product performance. The higher price product might be achiving better performance or mileage; allowing you to produce a quality products in a broader range of print conditions.