RECENTLY AN item was posted on the IPMA listserv entitled "Rush Jobs." The posting pointed out the headaches caused by constantly shrinking deadlines. There were quite a number of responses to the original posting. It is a subject all of us deal with on a regular basis.
Rick Wise
I am happy to report that offset printing is indeed alive and well at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Why? There are several contributing reasons.
SOFT PROOFING seems to be causing at least some degree of discomfort in the in-plant world. Should we be offering it? How do we do it? What exactly is it? We use soft proofing a lot at the University of Missouri. Our designers and a good number of our customers really like it. We send PDF proofs to customers during the design stage. Our designer exports the job file into a PDF as soon as it is designed and sends it to the customer. Soft proofs save customers money on one or possibly multiple sets of proofs. For example, the least
I AM NOT a “techie.” I’ve never sent a text message in my life. I can barely navigate my basic cell phone, which I carry under protest. But that said, I am an absolute evangelist for Web-based submission for in-plants. By Web-based submission I mean the following: • A robust, interactive and customer-friendly Web site for your in-plant. • The ability to receive job orders, estimate requests and job files from your customers. • Easily accessible and useful information about all aspects of your operation (online work authorization forms, a map of how to find your facility, tips on preparing files, staff names and phone numbers, etc.). Why bother?
I SUBSCRIBE to an electronic mailing list for in-plants, and lately I’ve noticed a number of postings regarding various aspects of purchasing a digital color printer. One recent posting asked a very astute question: are you planning to produce digital color for existing customers or do you plan to cultivate new customers? This is exactly the kind of question we pondered long and hard prior to our purchase of a Xerox iGen3 last December. Where would the business come from for our new machine? Would we be “robbing” color work from our offset presses? Is there some big pocket of business out there waiting for
