In his new blog entry, Ray Chambers reveals why comparing prices with other in-plants may be of limited value.
If you’re looking for a benchmark to evaluate your performance, we suggest that you continuously benchmark your pricing against the prices charged by available commercial alternatives. You are not competing with other in-plants; you are competing with the print shops that operate in your area.
Everyone has suddenly become aware of “in-plants.” There was a time when in-plants were looked down on by our colleagues in the commercial world. We were somehow not quite as good as our commercial counterparts. Now that’s changed.
In-plant closings are nothing new; we’ve all been under the outsourcing cloud for years. But why so many in such a brief period of time? These institutions are planning to shut down their printing plants even though they have not seen proposals from potential outsource vendors.
Last time I looked we’re part of the printing industry. A pretty sizeable part of it, in fact. But as usual, with the exception of In-Plant Graphics, printing and graphic arts media coverage will focus on how the unification impacts the commercial printing industry, but not the industry in general—and certainly not in-plants.
I wish there was a way to help in-plant managers see things from my perspective. I’ve worked on 50 or more projects over the past few years trying to help top management understand why they have an in-plant and why the in-plant really is “core” to whatever business they happen to be in.
Why is it that sometimes in-plant printers can’t catch a break—at least, not from commercial printers? It seems like every time I talk to a commercial printer and the subjects of in-plants comes up, all I hear is negativity.
A blog hosted by a well-known print periodical recently included a posting on why price should not be the sole criteria for choosing a printer. What’s the big deal? What if the print buyer is upper management, and the printer is the organization’s in-plant?
My wife Catherine and I recently returned from an incredible experience. We were invited to present at the annual University Print Managers’ Group (UPMG) conference in the U.K.
I had the opportunity to spend a few days recently visiting a shop that I worked with two or three years ago. Revisiting a shop that had issues, only to find that most—if not all—of the issues have been resolved, is one of the most rewarding things about my job.
