Print Management - The Smart Way to Print

Why it makes sense to use a print manager.

• Using a print management company makes sure that you’re getting the most out of your resources.
• Sheer convenience.
• Tap into the expertise of people who handle print for a living & avoid disappointment.
• The Bottom Line – use our purchasing power to reduce your bottom line.

Getting the most out of your resources

A printer’s view.

In an ideal world, everyone would have access to unlimited resources. We’d all have the time we needed to dedicate to all our projects, abundant funding for all our schemes, and the ability to increase our resources in the blink of an eye when a new project came along before scaling them back at no cost to cover the lulls. If this sounds anything like your working model then congratulations – you own the perfect business. The rest of us need to learn to make the most of all the resources at our disposal – wringing every last drop of value from them and getting maximum return from our investment.

The fact that we don’t live in an ideal world is the reason that commercial printers need print management companies like Pulse Print. A printing firm, burdened with the cost of running presses, paying employees & renting the huge amount of factory space they need to do their job, has two options for recouping their costs and running at a profit. They can raise their prices, or they can raise the number of jobs they’re processing, keep the presses running all the time, and use the resources they’ve already paid for to greater effect. Raising prices is a risky strategy, for obvious reasons, while hiring a sales force to increase the volume of jobs being done has it’s own costs attached. This is where print management firms come in handy for a commercial printer

A print management firm will work out deals with a range of suppliers to lower their profit margins on individual sales in return for a guaranteed stream of income. Rather than having to spend on expanding their sales teams, commercial printers make the calculation that it’s more cost effective to sell their products for less in exchange for the sheer volume of business that a print management firm will generate for them

When a client approaches us with a a quote request we’ll contact our suppliers to see what’s the best price we can get. Any one supplier we contact will know that we’ve put the exact same request to a number of their competitors, but they won’t have any idea who, or how much they’re going to quote. In order to guarantee their income stream, therefore, it’s in their interest to offer the best price they possibly can. It might not be worth their time to offer an outstandingly good price on your individual order, but if they know that we’ve got another twenty orders to fill that day, then it’s worth trimming the profit margin on one of them to increase their chances of securing the rest of the business.

A client’s view.

As of March 4th 2010 a google search for ‘online printer’ threw up this information:

It might have taken Google less than half a second to find them all, but how long is it going to take for you to find the best printer for you? A print management company like Pulse Print has done all the research already – we know who can be relied upon to keep their promises on turnaround and quality, and we know who to avoid like the proverbial. Our company exists purely to get the best deal possible for our clients, with a focus on customer service and smoothing out the niggles in the printing process. We’d like to say that this is just because we’re such nice guys, but nobody buys claims of pure altruism anymore… We focus on these things because happy customers who receive high-quality products for a reasonable price are more likely to use our services again in the future. Our suppliers specialise in keeping a printing press running, we specialise in building client relationships & finding the best solutions for their printing needs.

Convenience

Without wanting to labour the point, there are nearly one hundred million results for a search for online printers. By anyone’s standards that’s a ridiculous number. And it’s not like picking a printer is the final hurdle. In addition to our print brokerage we offer a comprehensive reprographics service, so when you send us your artwork (if you haven’t opted to have it designed professionally you can be sure that it will be checked for any problems before it’s committed to print, giving you the security to order with confidence. We have some of the best lead times in the business – because our suppliers are keen to keep us happy & gain a larger portion of our business – so if you need it yesterday you can be sure that we’ll do our utmost to get it to you as soon as possible. Most importantly, once you’ve handed your print job off to us we’ll make sure that you don’t need to worry about it any more. We’ll give you a delivery date, we’ll give you a number to call in the unlikely event of problems, and we’ll take it from there. It simply couldn’t get more convenient.

Experience + Expertise = Excellent Results

An end client might order print once or twice a week, if they order a lot of print. Far more likely, they’ll be ordering from time to time, with weeks between each order. Contrast that to the employees of a print management firm, who do this all day, every day. If there’s a niggle that the print process can throw up, we’ve seen it. If there’s a short cut that can be taken without compromising quality, we know about it. If there’s a price out there, we can beat it. Our company survives and thrives solely on the basis of our willingness and ability to keep learning about the industry, to find new suppliers, and to research ever more efficient ways of navigating the printing process – it’s not an overstatement to say that being ahead of the game is the bedrock of our livelihoods.

The Bottom Line

A print management company like Pulse Print can offer consistently better prices than you’ll be able to get directly from a printer. It really is as simple as that; compare the price of our Premium Business Cards with those offered by our competitors to see what we mean.

At the end of the day, a print management company putting through twenty to thirty orders with a printer each day has more purchasing power than an individual who makes an order once every couple of months. They also have a wide range of experience of the common (and less common!) issues that come up during the printing process, so they’re better equipped to offer snap responses to small scale issues & more considered answers to the bigger problems. By putting your printing in the hands of a dedicated print management company you get everything done, all under one roof, at a better price than you’re likely to find if you go direct to a printer, and with the weight of the print management companies client/supplier relationship backing you up. You’ll have a single nominated contact for your entire print contract – a go-to guy that will have instant access to all your details instantly, for maximum convenience. You’ll also benefit from our experience & expertise being brought to bear on your project from start to finish.

When all’s said and done.

You wouldn’t use a hammer to drive a screw, and you wouldn’t MOT your car yourself. Your printing is no different – if you use the right tool for the job you’ll get better results, for a better price, with less hassle. Pulse Print UK, is that tool. If you want to get the job done, get in touch.