Christmas Card Making Machine.

The “Christmas Card Making Machine” is an over-sized Christmas card display in the London agency’s front window. The card houses two large screens showing a scrolling chain of 12 characters. When passers-bys stand in the footprints outside the window, the installation captures their image and embeds their face on a character, which then joins the chain. The ever-growing chain can be viewed at www.christmascardmakingmachine.com, where users can also create their own Christmas cards.

Does Your Print Provider Subcontract Out Work?

When your job goes to press, does your printer do all the work in house? You may be surprised by the answer.

This is not a problem if the process that is subcontracted out is a specialty task, such as die-cutting, thermography, or perfect binding. Most printers do not own all equipment needed for every specialty process, particularly if this equipment would be used infrequently. It’s not good business sense to have equipment stand idle. In cases like this, it can be to your benefit to have the outsourcing take place, particularly since the printer is then responsible for the quality of work the subcontractor provides.

In addition, your printer might subcontract out a complete, self-contained component of a larger job. For example, if you are producing a magazine at a web-offset printer, and you ask the printer to produce cover wraps or inserts for the magazine, this smaller job might fit better (more economically) on a sheet-fed press. Therefore, your printer might broker out this portion of the job.

The time to worry is if your printer subcontracts major portions of your job or the entire job, particularly if it is a high-profile piece that has to be perfect. Perhaps in this case you should look more closely at the kind of work in which this printer specializes to make sure this is a proper fit.

In general, consider the following:

Do you thoroughly trust your printer?
How long have you worked with this printer?
Are you comfortable with your printer’s coordinating the activities of other supplier(s)?
How much of the job will your printer farm out?
Is your schedule so tight that outsourcing could put your schedule at risk?
And is your printer willing to take full responsibility for the quality of the entire job?

If you can answer yes to all these questions, then your printer’s subcontracting elements of a job should not be a problem, as long as the total price of the job is acceptable.