Articles By Lois Ritarossi

Offering new ideas to your organization while leveraging the USPS promotions may set the stage for positive change in 2020. Using inkjet platforms to enable print mail operations to enhance the usefulness of mail and take advantage of the various USPS promotions, while delivering value to consumers and postage savings to their organizations. A win, win, win.

Many in-plants justified investment in inkjet platforms based on three criteria: reduced cost of running inkjet over older print devices, increased speed, throughput, and the elimination of pre-printed shells. However, newer inkjet technologies from several manufacturers have improved image quality and substrate flexibility opening up a range of new opportunities and continuing to drive efficiency improvements.

In-plant managers are challenged every day to meet the complex and evolving needs of their organizations. In-plants with stronger alignment with their internal customers have been able to justify new equipment like inkjet and expand their capabilitiesI recently spoke with print mail managers from three different in-plant organizations. My intent was to get their perspective on the challenges in providing relevance to their organizations.

With the evolution and variety of inkjet options now available, smaller volume print operations like small and medium size in-plants are now considering inkjet adoption. The justification and cost analysis for inkjet is not as straight forward as the cost of acquiring previous new printers. In evaluating the cost of inkjet adoption there are many considerations beyond the cost of acquiring the printer. While there are varying opinions and models for comparing total cost of ownership (TCO), a detailed cost analysis should compare total cost of finished pieces leaving the facility and the opportunity for impacting the results of printed communications.

Too often, the term “in-plant” has become homogenized. It is used as a generic term for any organization-owned print operation. When we take a closer look, we see that in-plants have varied names, especially when broken out by vertical market. These differences are important for OEMs to understand, and buyers to communicate when evaluating production inkjet.