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Smart Inking: Increasing profits with effective color management

When you truly know your square foot-ink costs per printer, you can maximize your profits on each job

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Dean Derhak is the product director at SAi (Salt Lake City). As part of his job, Dean visits signshops and large-format print businesses, to learn what processes they’ve employed to increase their profits. He often asks about the shop’s ink costs per square foot on each printer. Dean said two out of three shops admit they don’t know. He also asks about ink waste and , again, few shops are aware of ink costs they are losing. He said some confess they would rather not know, lest they discover the inconvenient truth.
Here, in a series of monthly articles, Dean will share print-cost saving ideas with ST readers. He’ll explain how costing effective color management and media profiling can help signshops and large-format print providers reduce ink costs and also keep customers coming back.

Knowing your ink costs is a good business practice because it helps you prepare effective job quotes and reduce ink usage. For example, a shop that annually spends $35,000 on ink, but learns to save 15% of that cost, could add more than $5,000 in additional profits.
Calculating average, square-foot ink cost through a given period is easy. Each month, simply divide your total ink costs into the total area you’ve printed. Be sure the print area figure is your actual print area, per printer.
Most RIP software packages include a job log that allows a shop to determine the total amount of media used. Also, some RIPs display the per-job print area, while others give the width and length for jobs (and therefore require a manual calculation). Tally this for the month, to learn the overall area printed by your business.
Other ways can determine this figure. For example, the HP latex printers and HP Designjet Z6200 printers feature a built-in web server that reports the print area per job. SAi also has a free mobile application that reports the total print area per month on your iPhone or Android device.
Calculating ink costs requires adding up the amount of cartridges you’ve used during the month and totaling their cost. For example, if your signshop produces 480 sq. ft. of output in one month, and the total ink costs are $390, that month’s average cost is $1.23 per sq. ft. (480 divided by $390). Because each printer has different ink costs, you can gain even more cost accuracy by applying the formula to each printer.
Importantly, this formula includes unused and wasted prints, and any ink used for printhead cleaning and purging. It enables you to learn your true ink costs, not just print-ink usage. What matters is how much you spent on ink and how much you printed — per square foot.
I’ve seen shops quote jobs using a single, fixed, per-square-foot cost. However, not all print jobs use the same amount of ink, so such quotes can cut your profits. When you truly know your square foot-ink costs per printer; you can quote jobs on low, medium and high ink usage and maximize your profits on each job.

Dean Derhak is a product director at SAi with 17 years experience in RIP software technologies gained across roles in product management, marketing, sales, engineering, and technical support. Dean can be reached at: deand@thinksai.com

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