Commercial Printers - Make Them Your Partners
To work effectively with commercial printers, partner with them. This means putting aside your fears of outsourcing and trying to educate one another.
No in-plant can print everything. Some items simply must get sent to outside commercial printers. Even the country's largest in-plants outsource work. Boeing, Allstate and USAA, which ranked at the top of our recent Top 50 list, outsource 22 percent, 30 percent and 39 percent of their work, respectively.
By outsourcing jobs that you can't print well in-house, you will get the best quality possible for your customers. Working with commercial printers, however, can be a tricky business. To get the best results, you should try to partner with them. This means putting aside your fears of outsourcing and your distrust of commercial printers. This isn't always easy—especially if you've had bad experiences.
You may know of commercial printers who have the attitude that an in-plant is not a real printer. Some of these printers may have tried to take advantage of you, thinking that you wouldn't know paper prices or other costs. They may even have handed you the ultimate insult by giving you a facilities management proposal—offering to take over your shop. Or maybe they tried to steal your customers by going right to them with a proposal.
Despite your experiences, it's to your advantage to educate the commercial printers you deal with and change their attitudes about in-plants. You can't let these experiences turn you bitter.
Your first step is to determine which items you print cost-effectively and which ones you should send out. Do an in-depth cost analysis of your in-plant. Compare your costs, rates and services to those of outside printers. If you see rates that are lower than yours, inspect the quality of the product being produced at those rates.
By comparing yourself to your competition, you can learn how to operate your business a little better. Also, you will be able to identify which jobs are not your core competencies. You have to be able to put your ego and prejudices aside and objectively decide who can do the work better.
By telling you do consider this, I'm also telling you to work with commercial printers, so it's only fair that I give you a few tips in order to ensure that this relationship is a good one and doesn't turn sour.
So here are a number of tips I've gotten from in-plants on how to work effectively with commercial printers.
• Communicate. Even when you're not sending them work, stay in touch. Many in-plants prefer to pick just two or three commercial printers with unique capabilities to handle all their printing. This makes it easier to forge a relationship with them.
• Explain why you keep certain jobs in-house. Commercial printers see you as a competitor, hogging all the work from your company. Explain why it's better for you to print certain items, like small, short-run jobs that require lots of oversight and would be too expensive to send outside. Tell them how in-plants operate as opposed to for-profit printers. They may not understand this.
• Make them see that you are a printer, like them. Bring them to your shop. If you get new equipment, invite them to visit your operation to see it. Show them work you've printed.
• Tell them how you can work together, what jobs you can send to them, and why it's important to stay on good terms. Explain that you don't wish to eliminate their business and that you want to be partners, not competitors. Tell them that if they try to steal your customers by underpricing their work, you'll stop sending them work. Explain your particular environment and needs.
• Become personally acquainted with the president of each commercial printer you deal with. Go out to lunch. Once you meet each other, it will be harder for you to distrust him or her, and he or she will understand you better.
• Make an excuse to get in touch with a printer. Call up and borrow something, even if you don't need anything: blankets, supplies, ink. This gets the other person to interact with you and lets him or her know you acknowledge them as a part of the industry and that you use the same products. Offer to lend them supplies, as well.
• Buy press time or prepress time. You can furnish the paper and use their equipment, helping them pay for their press and showing them that you are capable of running it. This also helps you serve your customer in a more timely manner.
• Arrange for the printer to store large-quantity projects that it prints for you. This helps you and creates more of a bond between you and the printer.
• Perform services for the commercial printer. If you have a capability that the printer doesn't (perhaps foil stamping or perfect binding), point it out.
• Act as consultant. If the printer is adding equipment that you have experience with, offer to help the company set it up, or offer advice on facility layout. Go to the printer's open houses.
• If you're adding new equipment, ask a commercial printer for advice on it. This makes the printer feel important and shows that you have the latest equipment.
• Invite the owners of one of your commercial printing vendors to serve on your college or university advisory committee. This will also engender good relations.
• Join an organization that brings printers together (like Printing Industries of America or The International Association of Printing House Craftsmen) so commercial folks can realize that in-plants are not demons (and vice versa). This will also show them that you understand printing.
• Keep up with news on your local commercial market. Stay up with industry changes.
• Make sure your staff is just as qualified and professional as you are when interacting with commercial printers. Let your staff visit the commercial printer's facility and ask questions of production workers there.
• When sending out work, find out exactly how the printer wants to receive it. Submit each job exactly as requested so you don't come across looking bad.
• Be professional in your requests, and don't expect more than was agreed on. Provide detailed specifications that make sense. If you show them that you know what you're doing, they'll treat you like you do.
• Learn your printers' capabilities well. Visit their operations. Learn their margins of profit. Then, don't let them subcontract a portion of your job to a third printer. You lose too much control this way. It's too hard to check on logos and colors.
• Develop a backup plan for overflow and emergency work—even if you don't send much work out. Don't get caught unprepared. Floods and fires can happen anywhere. Establish good relations with outside printers in advance.
• Include the commercial printer on your company's bid list. Show them you have no fear.
• Just as you don't want them trying to steal your customers, if one of the printers you use has bid on a job at your company, don't bid on it, even if you can save money. This keeps you from competing with them and lets you cultivate a stronger relationship.
• Negotiate pricing based on volume; the more work you send, the less you pay per piece.
Offer A Range Of Services
Within your organization, let your customers know about all of the services you can provide, including services you intend to buy outside. Your customers don't need to know where their work gets done, just that you can handle all of their needs.
It is in the best interest of your company or organization to allow you, the in-plant manager, to decide whether a job gets printed inside or outside. When individual departments send jobs out, they don't have negotiating power. You, as the company printing expert, have expertise and can get the best prices. Plus, it's your job. Your customers have better things to do for the company than negotiate with printers.
Have a qualified procurement person handle buyout, not the same person who buys trucks or other supplies. The person should be on the in-plant's staff and know printing.
So don't be afraid look to commercial printers to help you satisfy your customers' printing needs. Just approach the situation wisely, and think of the printers as your partners, not your adversaries.
by Bob Neubauer
