How many jobs can your factory handle in a month?

Quote & Print’s Dave Bell does the math and comes up with some interesting answers.

Quote & Print has more than 500 printers using their software throughout Australasia with most of them turning over 200 to 400 jobs a month. That corresponds to 50 to 100 jobs a week or 7 to 15 jobs a day. As the companies have grown the dollar value of the jobs has increased; but the number of jobs printed each month has stayed roughly constant.

Up until now this has not been an issue; their customers' requirements have kept pace with their upgraded printing presses. Most of their customers now want 4 colour printing instead of 1 or 2 color printing. The really small orders such as the $30 business cards could always be subbed out to that small printer down the road.

The problem now is that the size of print orders is now decreasing. With Computer-to-Plate reducing the cost of plates and with reduced make-ready times on the presses and reduced make-ready wastage it is now becoming economically viable for companies to reduce the size of their print orders. Instead of ordering 100,000 brochures once a year they may want to order 25,000 four times a year. They have also mentioned that they would like to implement variable data printing next year so you are thinking about buying a digital press which could process another 400 jobs a month.

If your factory and personnel have problems outputting more than 400 jobs a month then you will start to have a real problem on your hands as the dollar value of your turnover starts to decrease.

To solve this problem Quote & Print investigated about five of its customers who were turning over between 1,000 to 2,000 jobs a month. They have done this every month for over five years. What distinguished them from the other printers was not their equipment but rather the processes they used to track the jobs through their factory and plan the production for each day. Walk into their production planning office and the first thing you notice is that there is no production board. The second thing that is evident is that they all have short turnaround times for their jobs.

The status of each job was tracked with Quote & Print Shop Floor Management software. They then had written their own reports to extract information from the Quote & Print database to generate the production lists for each day. They were in complete control of the production process.

At Quote & Print we have now improved this whole process. Our new Workflow Software combined with Shop Floor Management will automatically track the progress of jobs through your factory and generate production lists. It is also integrated with the Q&P JDF Interface and Scheduling Software. In addition the workflow stream can be automatically split between Offset and Digital printing.

Good software combined with good processes will dramatically improve your company's productivity.

Visit Quote & Print at Printex07 Stand 2024 to see the latest in Workflow software.