Feast or famine. Those tend to be fairly regular extremes of a lot of print production. Every shop has ebbs and flows in the volume of work that comes through the door. For those that produce retail signage and POP materials, pre-Christmas and back to school periods are peaks. Late December and early winter are troughs. Other businesses serving specific vertical markets have other predictable variations in volume.

In general, shops can anticipate these crests and troughs, and in fact the troughs can be quite welcome, as it gives everyone a chance to rest, catch one’s breath, reevaluate equipment, products, and services, and perhaps even go on holiday. The challenge, however, is when changes in volume are unpredictable. Dealing with an unexpected spike in volume may sound like one of those “good problems to have,” but it isn’t necessarily. Can customers’ jobs get turned around as quickly as they need to? Is the quality up to snuff? Especially in many wide-format applications, where print jobs can be complicated manufacturing processes (printing and installing POP graphics, vehicle wraps, etc.), it’s not a question of turning a switch and making presses go faster.

Changes in volume can also present problems if there is a heightened influx of jobs that run on one specific press; if you have a flatbed printer and suddenly you get three or four times as many jobs that can only go on that printer, you’ve got a serious bottleneck issue.