CPrint, Double Wides and Insourcing

We recently met up with John Giles at the CPrint conference. The conference is always great - learning as much from the attendees as the presenters. Moreover, John is the only person we know capable of interjecting doublewide trailers into a discussion about print shops.

John’s epistle in the May 2012 edition of Quick Printing magazine makes a strong argument for outsourcing a variety of work to broaden service offerings, to increase profits or both. However, we suggest there is at least one case where insourcing (the opposite of outsourcing) may be advantageous.

Consider the print shop owner who faces a minimum charge of $120 or more at the mail house. It’s probably hard to do many small (like 350 piece) postcard jobs profitably at that rate. Outsourcing the address presorting and inkjet printing costs the print shop owner $120. Alternatively, the print shop owner could outsource the address presorting and have VDP print files created at the same time for as little as $60. He prints the pre-addressed VDP files, cuts, sorts and delivers the job to the Post Office - “insourcing” the address printing and mailing process and reducing job costs by $60 or more.

You’re probably thinking, “Yeah, but that’s just trading one type of outsourcing for another.” It might seem that way. Outsourcing the address presorting to the mail house or another service company is certainly similar. However, rather than the mail house inkjet printing the addresses, the print shop prints pre-addressed on its own digital press. The print shop also does the sorting of the pieces in to mail trays and delivering to the Post Office. Therefore, the address presorting is a push and the printing and mailing are “insourced”. Two out of three is a majority, and the bottom line is that the print shop saves money by “insourcing” the mailing process.

Insourcing the mailing process has some other advantages including:

- Avoiding “rush” charges

- Better print quality

- No “overs” to print, and

- Not disclosing print customer identities.

Sure hope we didn’t steal the wheels off John’s outsourcing double wide.