Just In Time Printing – Doing Smaller Runs More Often

Not so long ago printing was a labour intensive time consuming process. Laying out documents by hand, etching printing plates, print and letting the ink dry on the page, doing finishing like trimming by hand, all took a great amount of time to complete. As such it made sense for a business to buy it’s material in bulk to make sure they always had their printed material on hand when they needed it. In the 21st century things are very different with design work being done on computers, industrial print systems capable of printing hundreds of sheets a minute and much of the finishing work now largely handled by machine. All of this cuts down the production time to a fraction of what it once was. The upshot of these advances is that your business only has to carry enough material to cover your needs for the short term and can quickly update it as your needs change. So let us talk about how to set yourself up for just in time printing.

The risk with the old approach of bulk printing is that material goes out of date so quickly, and printed paper sitting on a shelf can get scuffed and damaged (not to mention lost).  Quite often the savings from bulk printing are wasted when product has to be thrown away.  Have you ever received a business card from someone who had to cross out some detail and hand-write the “new” information?  Or received a brochure about something only to find that it was for the old model and the price or specs had changed?  It’s very annoying, unprofessional and embarrassing (especially if you are the one supplying the printed material.)

Just-in-time printing allows you to order just what you want, just as you need it – rather than ordering large quantities.  Lead times vary from minutes (100 business cards) to a couple of days (flyers and postcards.)

So how does Just in Time printing work? We will use a recent business card job as an example.

You need a print ready file

Now it doesn’t have to be a finished PDF. It can be something that uses variable data (like mail merge) or uses a standard template you use for all your material. The key step is that the printer don’t have to do any design work (this is often the biggest delay) – we simply generate the printing masters for your approval and then go ahead when you ok it. In our business card example, the client need 37 different business cards but they all used the same layout, so a printing template was created and combined with a spreadsheet containing the details for each card. We ran one simple command on our computers and 1 minute later we had 37 unique business cards emailed to them for their approval. The order was confirmed and we started production that day.

Order enough to cover your needs for a given period of time for the item being ordered

The rule that the more you get printed of an item the cheaper per unit it is still holds true for Just in Time printing, but moderate that by how much you would have to dump if things changed. For business cards it we recommend ordering only enough for 3-6 months when you have a new card, just in case the person doesn’t work out or things change in the business. So while ordering enough cards for a year will workout a lot cheaper per card, if they stop working for you after 3 months then, that’s 9 months of cards you paid for and can’t use.  In our example, the majority of people only had 100 cards each as that is our printing minimum and they weren’t expected to hand out many cards, but for a select few they had 500’s because they are expected to go out and meet a lot of people. Because they are using just in time, if one of the people with 100 cards is going to an event and needs more of them, because we have their design already on file we can print them right away, Just in Time – in fact, we can have them ready in an hour for collection in some cases.

Check to see if your printing company keeps your designs on file

By keeping the printing masters on file, a printer can go back to a job and print new copies knowing that don’t have to go through the long process of setting things up for printing again. Many companies will also send you printing proofs for your approval which is a good backup to have on file should something go awry at the printers. Here at Copy Express our habit is to keep most things on file for reprints when needed. This means that once we get approval from you it’s there ready to reprint again as quickly as possible. In our example case, not only do we have the printing masters on hand for quick reprints and supplied copies of the print masters to the clients for their records, we also keep all the original source files on hand so when they want to run a batch new people, we can ensure that the new card look like the previous ones.  Some printers also have online storefronts where your orders are stored for easy re-ordering (stay tuned on this one.)

Make use of variable data printing

A large amount of flyers and handouts a business uses tend to have the same format and look with just some of the contents changing depending on where it is being used. A good example of that is a product brochure that suppliers give to retail business to put on to their counters. These brochures are one design but they have retailers business details on them. This is where Just in Time variable data printing comes in. Instead of printing off thousands of generic brochures where the retailer has to stamp their details on it, print small batches where each batch has the details of one retailer as part of the printing. The cost of adding that is quite low, but it puts the brochure on the next level of professionalism and makes the supplier look great, while still allowing for the better prices of high volume printing.

Of course this is just a brief overview of what Just in Time printing is and how it can become part of your business processes. To find out more why not contact us at Copy Express.