REVEALED: 3 Things That Cause Your Printing Company To Lose Money

Can you imagine copying out the same piece of information over 30 times?

Well that’s exactly what one printing company was doing. When they carried out a process audit it was discovered that some pieces of information were re-entered into systems time and time again.

Clearly this was a massive waste of time and effort. Far more seriously, this introduced a lot of error points as well. Every time a piece of information was re-entered there was a chance it could be entered incorrectly.

If only this company had invested in the right systems and used them correctly it could have avoided all these potential error points. The simplest way to have achieved this would have been to have invested in a Print Management Information System or MIS. This sort of system prevents the need to enter information more than once.

An MIS system would have avoided this problem and so many others

Re-entering information so many times certainly makes processes lengthy, expensive and prone to errors. However, strangely enough, although this can be a much bigger issue than many printing companies realize, it is not the main reason why many printers lose money.

We have outlined below three of the most major causes of lost revenue and profits for printing companies. And we show how an MIS system can reduce these problems.

The first cause of losing money happens way before anything is printed, or before the job is even confirmed.

1. Inaccurate Print Estimating

It is still surprising just how many printing companies use a spreadsheet, a piece of paper or a system that doesn’t really work out their prices accurately. This leads to two problems. The first is that, especially when things are busy, it is easy for an estimator to make errors under pressure. The second is that it is incredibly difficult to estimate ink usage exactly when using basic systems like this. The small amounts required for many jobs cannot easily be calculated quickly.

An MIS system can work out ink usage exactly. It also produces all other elements of estimates quickly and accurately. There is no danger of human error. And the right profit margins are applied to different products or customers automatically every time.

If an estimate is not correct, it can cost a printer a lot of money. But it is equally frustrating when a job is estimated with too much cost and the job is therefore lost to the competition. An MIS system stops this happening as it allows you to see the profit margin before you give your client a print quote. It also reduces the chances of the next major revenue loss happening.

2. Reprinting Jobs That Have Gone Wrong

There is a whole number of reasons why jobs can go wrong on the press. The first is simply that it is easy to write up a manual job ticket incorrectly. As soon as an error is on the job ticket there is no chance that an item can be printed correctly. The same errors can happen if order confirmations to your client are not correct.

With a MIS system, once a customer has approved the estimate there is no need to re-enter information. All the information for every department in the factory is automatically created by the system. There are no errors.

Another issue is that customers often make last minute changes. If these changes are not recorded correctly and communicated to everybody then the job will go wrong.

Using an MIS allows all stages of the job to be updated automatically as soon as a change is recorded. This means that there are no misunderstandings about job changes and that no-one is forgotten. There will be no need for the dreaded reprint! However, we should remember that the last-minute customer change can also lead to another big issue for printing companies.

3. Making Billing Errors

It is no good creating a fantastic job for a client if we don’t charge them for it! However, the costs for the extra changes that the customer requested are often not passed on to the accounts department. Alternatively, there can be errors in manually raising invoices. Worse still, we have seen more instances than you might think when a printing company has completely forgotten to bill a client.

If a company has an MIS system installed, then these errors cannot happen. In addition the cost of invoicing can be dramatically reduced. According to Sappio Research, manual invoicing costs around £25-40 per invoice and is estimated to be around 30% of the cost of an accounts department.

Addressing these three areas can make a very big difference to the profitability of a printing company. However, we do find that some people are opposed to the idea of using an MIS system.

Do you have to change your processes to work with an MIS system?

Some people incorrectly believe that an MIS system forces a company to work to a fixed workflow to suit the MIS software. This may have been true for some early systems, but these days a good MIS system can be adapted to work to your processes rather than the other way round.

Find out more about how MIS can work for your company

Our solutions work for all types of printing companies. Simply book a demo. We will talk you through how MIS can work for your company.

If you have any doubt about whether you should talk to us simply look back at these three reasons that cause so many printing companies to lose money. Can you honestly say that you never, ever suffer from any of these?

How many times do you enter information?

Remember, every time you repeat data entry you are wasting time and money and risking an expensive error creeping into your workflow. That can be fatal. The printing company that was entering information over thirty times held their audit too late. They have now ceased trading - and they were a big business.