Big Color: A Necessary Next Step

OUR IN-PLANT just made a big change in the way it does business: we sprang for “Big Color”—a digital color press.

Over an eight-month period we considered the Canon C7000VP, the HP Indigo 3050, the IKON CPP 650, the Kodak NexPress 2100, the Konica Minolta bizhub PRO C6500, Océ’s CPS900 and CS650 Pro, and Xerox’s DocuColor 6060, 7000 and 260.

Many of you are considering a similar acquisition, so I will share some aspects of our experience with you. You’ll see how the process itself presents possibilities of better service to your parent organization, how it better integrates your in-plant into its parent organization, and how it improves the attitude and morale of your staff.

Justifying Big Color

Let’s not mince words: unless you’re in a very unusual situation, you must get Big Color if you don’t already have it. Black-and-white printing still has its place, but that place gets smaller and smaller as color gets better and cheaper—and as more people understand that a color document communicates more effectively than a black-and-white one. Your parent organization hasn’t given much thought to all that, but they realize it. You’ve seen the color multifunction devices in their offices and the jobs they run on their desktop ink-jets. If you can’t offer your co-workers more than that, then why should they patronize your in-plant?

You know about the work outsourced to commercial printers. If you handle that work, don’t think it makes you more secure. One new purchasing hotshot can make his reputation convincing your parent organization of how much money he can save them versus using the in-plant as a middleman, and right or wrong, you’re in deep trouble. Bottom line: if your organization isn’t getting the very best color quality, turnaround and pricing from you, they’ll get it elsewhere. It’s only a matter of time.

But if you think you can’t afford a digital color press, think again: they make economic sense in almost every scenario. Big Color is more affordable than you think. In our search, we saw presses as far down on the food chain as the Xerox 260 and the Konica Minolta bizhub C6500 produce prints of superb quality. The pricing we saw on these machines indicates one can get into a basic configuration for $35,000 or less, and we received quotes from four different vendors of click charges below $.05 for any sheet size with no minimums. One vendor whose click charge was also below $.05 included a $232 monthly base charge.

Here’s an example: if you run two-up on 11x17? and cut it down to 81/2x11?, at a monthly volume of 10,000 81/2x11? prints, a paper cost of $35 per 1,000 for 11x17?, a machine cost of $40,000, and a click rate of $.08, and then charge a price of $.35 per print, your hard cost ROI is less than 17 months. Crunch the numbers and see for yourself.

So you must have Big Color and you can have Big Color. Here’s how to make it happen.

Support From Within

When I realized that my in-plant needed Big Color, job one was selling my staff.

Now, people aren’t generally hostile to the notion of big bucks being spent in their area for a new cool toy, and in our business Big Color is about as cool a toy as it gets. But people don’t like change, and acquiring Big Color certainly upsets things.

If you have sufficient credibility, an assurance to your staff that Big Color enhances their job security by better serving the parent organization may be all that’s needed. For me, however, that wasn’t enough. I’ve been with our in-plant only two years, and while I believe I have a good working relationship with my people, I was still seen by some as the new guy who stirs things up.

The solution was involving our in-plant’s supervisor, Nancy Green. Nancy came to our in-plant 15 years ago and earned her stripes and her co-workers’ respect by working elbow-to-elbow with them. Making Nancy a partner in the digital press acquisition assured our staff that their viewpoints were represented, and it didn’t hurt that she is a smart manager who gets value out of every dollar spent. She’d recycle stitcher wire if she could.

Listening is how you find out if you’ve succeeded in winning your staff over to Big Color. When one of your people speaks with a co-worker outside the in-plant about the impending change, listen carefully. If what you hear is apprehensive and/or sounds like an elevator speech, you’ve got more work to do. When that conversation is positive and spoken in that person’s own words, you’re there.

Since we committed to Big Color, everyone here seems to have a little more spring in their step. I think our people feel more secure and valued now that they see we are investing in their futures.

Support From Without

Job two is selling the idea to your parent organization. You’ll be selling the output from your digital press to them, so identify beforehand those individuals and departments who will be purchasing that output and get them involved. This may even drum up additional business for your in-plant before the press arrives, as it did for us. Here’s how:

Nancy and I learned from our purchasing department that our parent organization was outsourcing almost $500,000 worth of printing annually, and almost all of that came from our marketing department. Armed with nothing but a goal of capturing at least 25 percent of that business and a desire to find out how to do it, Nancy and I met with marketing and discussed their requirements with them. What could we do to make their jobs easier?

We took that knowledge and applied it to the criteria we used to evaluate the presses. We also learned we could address some of marketing’s needs before the press was delivered by changing our proofing procedures and offering more paper choices. Making those changes resulted in new business from marketing before the press arrived.

You also must show how acquiring Big Color helps your parent organization do its primary job in a better way. Our parent organization is a community college, so naturally it recruits and educates students. To help it accomplish that, we proposed a partnership with our college’s graphic arts department. While very strong in flexo, offset and prepress, graphic arts offered nothing in the digital printing arena and wanted to remedy that situation. We involved them in the press selection and offered them the use of the digital press for seminars, at our cost, an offer they quickly accepted.

And which press did we eventually choose? Give me a call or drop me an e-mail and I’ll tell you all about it.IPG

Richard Griffin has been a flyboy, a press helper, a pressman, a shift supervisor, a pressroom manager and a plant manager. He’s been a press mechanic and a press erector. He also sold printing, offset presses and Xerox machines, and founded Press Statistics, a consultancy for offset press acquisition and printing operations. He is currently the director of Campus Printing at Central Piedmont Community College. Contact him at (704) 330-6606 or richard.griffin@cpcc.edu