After writing a few months ago about all of the great looking printers and production kit on show at Fespa 2013, stories have started to filter through about people’s purchases, including my own. But, a friend of mine made the decision to upgrade his two printers to the latest all singing, all dancing version. He was promised that improvements had been made in all areas and it was now faster, printing at a higher quality and onto a wider range of materials.
Great he thought. However, no sooner had it been installed that he started to have lamination problems with his prints. The side effect of the printer improvements had started to cause problems further downstream and it has taken weeks of head scratching to work out how and why. In the meantime, lots of time and money have been lost. And it doesn’t seem to print quite as fast as he had hoped either.
Somebody else I know took the brave decision to turn off all of his screenprinting equipment and to install a great new piece of digital print equipment that he put a deposit on at the show. He cleared out the ground floor of his building and waited in anticipation for the new kit to arrive. Two months later and the supplier’s engineer is still trying to get it working properly. In the meantime, the poor chap is having to outsource lots of work to his local rivals!
I’ve had my own problems. Having spent two days at the show looking at all sorts of machine, I made the decision to invest in another printer to increase our output ahead of a busy period that we had coming up. Two months after it was installed, it still isn’t working and the support from the manufacturer has been lukewarm at best and that busy spell has come and gone.
We are all keen to keep investing and improving our businesses, but sometimes I think it’s best to look at what we have in place already and to ask whether it’s best to keep the status quo. If it ain’t broke and all that.
My flatbed cutting machine is now ten years old, bought and paid for but still the best piece of machinery in the building. It might not be as quick or look as pretty as the latest model available, but it never lets me down and that’s important.?
Email your own stories to me at industrymole@imagereportsmag.co.uk