Orange, the mobile and cellular communications giant owned by France Telecom, is well known to UK consumers. This is not least because of the large scale advertising and marketing campaigns it runs, just like any major brand. A big chunk of this advertising budget is spent, inevitably, on printed paper marketing in one form or another. Some common examples are flyer printing, point of sale posters, magazine inserts, printed merchandise direct mail marketing materials. You can imagine that they would spend a huge amount of money on producing this type of material, with colossal budgets to boot.
But a recent news story in the print indusrty press revealed that Orange also spends £7 million every year in the UK on ‘print management‘. Remember this is not spent on the actual printing costs, but on the overall planning and management of all that printing. It might seem a little OTT to spend this much on a third party service merely to oversee printing. Yet if you understand what is meant by print management, you might begin to see why such sums are justified. The basic fact comes down to this. Businesses who invest in a robust print management solution actually make cost savings as opposed to trying to deal with all their printing inhouse.
A large part of these savings comes down to reducing wastage. Every year, millions of dollars are lost forever in the ‘collateral damage’ caused by color calibration mistakes, messed up print jobs, typographical errors and the like. Where large scale printing takes place this happens frequently and is written off as an expected loss. It is because commercial printers needed to find an efficient solution to these that the discipline of print management was born.
The other side to the savings that can be made comes down to the logistics of managing sprawling print campaigns using different media and a range of different deadlines. By scientifically planning and project managing print jobs versus resources and available printers, print management companies are able to maximise efficiency. For example if you are using a large number of printing machinery units during peak times, by planning ahead and spreading the load you can use less machines, and less power, at any one time. This of course means that you can get more printed for your money. Ultimately this means you can print more and generate more return out of your print investment.
Here’s the good bit: print management is no longer the exclusive domain of huge enterprises like Orange. In the past decade the gains in digital printing technology have meant smaller scale print management solutions are possible for small to medium enterprises, meaning that the rest of us can enjoy the same kinds of cost savings the ‘big guys’ have been enjoying for years. Is your company making use of this opportunity?