Do you have an ink estimation program in your shop? It may have come bundled with your press or you may have actively purchased a solution designed to help you estimate the amount of ink needed to produce the jobs you onboard. It may be a standalone program, or it may be part of a data-sharing protocol that updates your purchasing, inventory, and quoting/estimating systems. It may be sophisticated, or it may be a spreadsheet that requires manual interaction. They come in all shapes, sizes, and degrees of accuracy, so knowing what you have and how it works can help you avoid pricing mistakes and manage inventory expectations. To put that another way, if you don’t know how the estimating happens, how can you apply the information to your business?

The place to start is with the ink estimator you are using. At the start of this year Inkjet Insight published a survey of production inkjet owners that asked questions about their use of ink estimating tools. While not all respondents use an ink estimator, of those that did two-thirds were using the ink estimator provided for free by their hardware vendor. Some developed their own, and others bought a solution. That survey told us that 79% of the respondents considered ink estimating important or very important to their estimating process. It also told us that 81% of the respondents found that there were certain types of jobs where ink estimating gave them a competitive edge.

This is music to the ears of those who provide ink estimators! The take-away is that if you have access to an ink estimating program, you should be using it to gain an advantage, but that brings us back to the question of understanding what ink estimation means and how to use it. With any of the ink estimators, no matter how sophisticated or integrated, you should still be comparing what the estimator told you in advance to the actual ink usage so that you can evaluate the accuracy and adjust your assumptions if needed.

Begin by asking the purveyor of your ink estimator how their estimator is designed to work, and follow up with these questions so that you understand what the ink estimator is trying to tell you:

1. Does the ink estimator use the same RIP as the DFE to estimate the number of ink drops for each color used for a target job?Not all ink estimators are built the same way. Some use the same RIP. Some use emulators. Some use separate programs that estimate the amount of ink based on information about the size of the droplets (some use multiple size drops in the same job) and the printhead technology. Some use a variety of techniques to aggregate an estimate. Every type of estimator can be valuable but understanding the technology can help you to set expectations about the accuracy of the estimate. For business purposes, estimates that are 95% accurate are very different from those that are 85% accurate. No matter what the vendor tells you, run some work and test your actual ink usage against the estimator’s predictions.
2. Does the ink estimator understand the media that will be used for the target job? Some paper is more absorbent and will need more ink to achieve the desired print quality. Your ink estimating program may have an option to provide media specifications. If it does, use it. The more detail it accepts and uses, the more accurate your estimate can be.
3. Does the ink estimator use a color profile that you can control?Some ink estimators make assumptions about ICC profiles, while others allow you to attach the target profile to the estimator at run time. The profile carries information that can make the estimate more accurate, so if you can attach it, don’t bypass that step!

The take-away is that ink estimating can bring more accuracy to your quoting and estimating, no matter what type of print is in your catalog but take care! Ink estimating programs provide information you can use, but it would be a mistake to use them without testing. Trust, but verify. On a regular cadence you should compare the estimates to the actuals. You may need to adjust how you apply the estimates to the systems that use the data.

Check out this previous article from Elizabeth Gooding and Ali Pekar on work-arounds for estimating for more ideas on controlling costs.