Paul Dombrowski - ROI Analyst for Digital Print Systems's Newsletter

Investigating the Return on Investment for Digital Presses

December 15, 2016

​Investigating the Return on Investment (ROI) for Digital Presses  An ROI Analyst offers insight on tools that help printing organizations calculate the costs and benefits for new digital presses. How do these tools work to expose the return on investment that you can realistically expect?  New digital presses and finishing equipment are magnificent examples of inventive engineering.  If we could match these new machines with equally brilliant financial engineering to enlighten the purchasing decision – printers would be geniuses once again.  The Wright Brothers couldn’t find a press they liked – so they built one. Today it is easier to find the right press – with research, a capital budgeting framework, customized data analysis, and TCO calculators. These are the ROI tools in the tool cabinet. They must be calibrated and customized to align with the press, your operating parameters, job data, and cost information. When used in combination with support from your...

Estimating ink usage for production inkjet presses

December 15, 2016

Estimating ink usage for production inkjet presses – What, no job file?  Ink is the single largest variable cost for production inkjet presses. What’s the estimator to do when the estimate request has no job file?  The cost figures shown in Fig. 1 below are generated from estimates to manufacture 500 each of 11 books on a roll fed inkjet production press with finishing to collated book blocks. In this example, ink is ~ 22% of costs. Fig. 1 Estimated costs for manufacturing 500 each of 11 books on a production inkjet press & finishing  platform. Direct press costs are comprised of the lease payments for production inkjet press and digital finishing platform.As you would expect, ink usage is determined by the job content and then by the number of drops required to print that content. In this case, the ink usage difference between a book with the lightest vs. the heaviest ink usage is ~ 9x. With this range of ink usage, multiplied by the cost of a barrel of ink, you can see that...

Economic Study for Comparing Printing Presses

December 14, 2016

The art of the economic study for comparing printing presses – How job data and cost information are used to inform capital expenditure decisionsEconomic studies make use of 3 tools, including: the manufacturers’ total cost of operation instrument (TCO), ink estimation tools, and data-driven cost analysis.The economic study delivers data-supported comparisons for the printing press’ cost-per-unit for the current state vs. future state. It’s a collaborative exercise that typically involves: press and finishing equipment manufacturers, estimators, production managers, IT technicians, and senior management from the printing organization.Every economic study starts with a question. Here’s a sample of questions that focus the analysis for comparing printing presses. Rows read across and provide summary descriptions for: (1) Manufacturing segment & press, (2) Question, and, (3) Deliverable (report).The economic study is referred to as an art because it is a creative,...