A Day in the Life of a Printing Company.
Friday always seems to be the busiest days in printing. People start phoning from early in the morning till late afternoon asking for urgent or last-minute print jobs – usually its banners for celebrations or parties.
The regular sort of telephone call is someone is asking for an urgent print job because they say that somebody has let them down.
Unfortunately as is often the case, they have no artwork or graphic design ready and they need their printing item the same day or the next day.
Digital printing or lithographic printing takes time. Creating artwork that can be approved by the client takes some time as well.
Unbeknownst to the client, there is a print queue in front of them.
The print queue has jobs on it that have been approved and paid for in advance by regular clients.
What is a Print Queue?
A print queue is simply a queue of jobs that have been lined up on a specific printer to get the work completed.
All printing machines are different. There are wide format digital printing machines. There are high-volume lithographic printing machines. There are small format digital printing machines.
So this means that the print queue which is relevant for the client may be a short queue or along you depending on the amount of work that we have at that time.
There have often been times when we have worked till 11 pm at night to try and get many urgent print jobs finished in time for the morning.
What advice can we give to clients who require jobs quickly?
Try and get some artwork ready somewhere like canva.com if you do not have a graphic design program on your computer.
Measure up the size of the items you require and be careful about asking for an urgent print job if you don’t really need it that urgently as this will increase the cost.
That is because often times we have to work later into the evening to get an urgent print job finished and so people have to get paid more.
Of course, the best thing is to try and get your print jobs on to the print queue well in advance by finalising your artwork and paying for your items so that there is plenty of time to complete the work that you require.
It’s also good to recognise that some machinery that is required for the printing jobs that you need is in a central location.
For example, 5 m wide banner printing machines are rare.
A Day in the Life of a Printing Company.
One Chinese client asked for several wide banners to be printed within 16-hours.
We tried to correct his spelling mistakes but he was insistent on the design that he’s given us.
This only held it back by 2 hours.
The items of printed and they had to be emergency couriered to his address.
The cost was significantly more because he wanted them within 16-hours.
Advance notice is really needed to print any important items.
A Day in the Life of a Printing Company.
A wide format printer is just like a desktop printer at home but much bigger. It has all the basic components of a desktop printer but in industrial size!
Also, it often has more ink cartridges which are bigger as well. It may have 6 print heads as well to produce the colour range that we want. Manufacturers such as HP are leading the way in new and innovative ways to print using wide format machines. Ie they can be used without air conditioning and are eco friendly. They are much faster now and more economical.
