General and specialty commercial printers the world over have been facing a perfect storm of market conditions that represent a clear and present danger to their profitability – but with no clear or present solution in sight. Global supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, impacts of inflation, and shifts in consumer demands have left commercial printers tying themselves in knots, most likely because their primary issues are more systemic than isolated, making solutions difficult to pinpoint.

Weathering the storm and building for the future
Many of the economic challenges that are impacting the industry and your business, such as paper availability and costs, are largely outside of your control. Outdated and manual processes can make it difficult to respond quickly to changing business and market situations, so focusing on increasing your overall productivity and efficiency is time and money well spent and helps you “control the controllables” better to make the most of what you have.

Making investments in productivity and efficiency will help your business weather the storm the industry is facing today while also positioning you for sustainable, long-term growth as market conditions improve. Modernizing your outdated software systems and digital infrastructure enables you to:

• Increase customer engagement and responsiveness to win more business,
• automate your operations to minimize manual steps, touchpoints, and communication, and
• increase throughput and reduce waste to increase profitability and improve environmental sustainability.

You have to be in it to win it
The key to success is to increase your level of customer engagement and responsiveness. While price matters, profitable growth starts with building partnerships with your customers, which includes presenting accurate, consistent, and competitive quotes in a timely manner.

Said another way—giving your customers what they want when they want it. The trouble is that print jobs are becoming increasingly complex and that can slow down response times. With an intelligent estimating and job planning solution, your estimators will be empowered to create complex estimates that are more accurate, more consistent, more competitive—and up to 40% faster, helping you win more business.The need for speed and how to find it
Finding profitable capacity—the ability to move jobs through faster while ensuring your schedule and resources can support the workload—is a challenge. The key is to create a “closed loop” system by introducing dynamic scheduling and real-time shop floor data collection solutions into your environment that optimize production sequences based on available resources while live data from the production line informs schedulers of exactly what’s happening on the shop floor. This approach to estimating, scheduling, and data collection will enable you to move faster from order acquisition through production and reduce the time spent on internal project communications by over 50%.Seeing more and using less
In these times of unprecedented global uncertainty and constraint, the key to short-term survival and long-term success is to look for ways to improve your organization’s overall productivity and efficiency so you can make the most of what you have. Investing in the right solutions can help you get there by providing better visibility anytime, anywhere, and from any device, which enables you to make timely, data-driven decisions, understand your true manufacturing costs, and minimize waste—all of which can make a positive impact on your bottom line.

Learn more about solutions that can boost productivity and efficiency for your print business here.