In today’s challenging environment, the reliability of the supply chain for substrates has most likely been keeping you up at night. It’s an ongoing daily challenge to manage your raw materials inventory to meet your customer’s needs and provide them with enough finished goods to give them the security they need to ensure they don’t have disruptions.
Digital printing can help in several ways, from reducing wasted raw materials to managing inventory daily or even hourly. Digital printing gives you one more valuable tool to use in your daily business decisions.
Initially, digital printing allows you to minimize start-up waste. Over the course of days and months, that can make a huge difference in how much of your precious raw material gets used. 25-50 ft of setup vs. 300-500+ ft can add up quickly with many small runs. Given the minimal waste, you now can make decisions to run jobs multiple times for “on-demand service” to your customer without losing money on each setup.
With conventional thinking, one would want to run longer runs and extra inventory to hedge against the raw material supply. However, with Digital thinking, you also have the option to protect your raw material and only run what the customer needs when they need it, so neither of you needs to carry extra inventory. This also can protect against obsolescence when designs change.
The value of running smaller on-demand runs can be measured in dollars by understanding what inventory costs you and your customer. Running smaller runs also keeps the raw material on your shelf at a much lower cost and allows you to keep it available for other emergency needs providing a much nimbler approach to delivering that necessary security to your customers.
Times like this require more than conventional thinking, and everyone must look at the whole picture vs. simply $/M labels. Using digital to think outside the box has become valuable to many narrow web label printers.