Pressroom Capital Investment – View the Complete Article Here!
Printers are faced with having to take a look at their businesses today more than ever before and decide how to make improvements to their business while maintaining profitability in a tightening economy. Capital expenditures for printers are a fact of doing business. Today, printers must carefully examine those expenditures to determine if a real return on investment exists or if the investment sets their business apart from the competition, both of which are reasons for investment. While some investments are capitalized over a relatively short period of time, perhaps three to five years, other investment such as in a press, is a much longer investment, often in the 10+ year range and cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.
While printers like to think that a press investment for 10 years would require no incremental investment, the reality is this is not the case. With the rapid changes in technology, printers must find new ways to make their pressroom investments even more profitable. Finding ways to make improvements can often be very puzzling. View Ink Key Presetting Savings video by clicking here!
Reduce Labor Cost and Material Waste
While the lease cost of a press is a fixed monthly amount, there are also variable costs associated with every job, the largest of which is the cost of the paper. Another variable cost is the press hourly rate especially as it relates to the press operator’s salary and benefits.Paper represents approximately 20% or more of the cost of any printed job. Reducing the cost of paper and the time to print the job can result in real savings to a printer along with the gain in productivity.
Make-ready savings of up to 90% on repeat jobs
The way to reduce the cost of paper in a job is to reduce the amount of waste in a job. Waste is typically generated during the initial setup of the job as a result of the time it takes to bring the color up to the correct level for printing. While the latest presses generally support automatic ink key settings using CIP3 or other data, many older presses did not include ink key presetting as a standard. Ink key presetting was offered by the major press manufacturers however, these solutions were often very expensive additions and cumbersome. Ten years ago technology in the prepress department was not always capable of producing the necessary files or data required for these presetting options on the press, thus most printers opted not to include this option in their purchase.
Using an automated system such as KeySetter Connect can reduce the make-ready time and materials by as much as 90%. Typical savings on new jobs can be between 30-50% making your pressroom more profitable.
KeySetter System Choices
- KeySetter Lite – Chart-based
- KeySetter Pro – Proprietary press console file formats
- KeySetter Connect – Direct connect to press console
Contact us to receive your Free downloadable brochure. If you have any further questions and would like to talk to our sales department, please contact us at 1.800.343.4231.
Mid-State Litho, Inc.
5459 Fenton Rd.
Flint, MI 48507
midstatelitho.com