IPMA Report: Wide-Format 400

There was a heavy focus on wide-format printing at the 2024 In-plant Printing and Mailing Association conference in Des Moines, Iowa. Over the course of the three-day event, in-plant managers led a series of leveled courses (e.g., Wide-Format 100, 200, 300, and 400) to mimic college courses that go more in-depth as you move up.

The highest-level course, Wide-Format 400, was led by a trio of managers from CHRISTUS Health: Del Shankle, Rayna Rudasill, and Kirsten Noyola. They focused on how in-plants should price their wide-format work.

One of the key starting points for understanding pricing is knowing the cost of your materials and coming up with a standard size for your wide-format projects. To do that, Shankle said that it’s important to talk to your vendors.

“Having a strong relationship with a vendor is very helpful. Early on, we learned a lot because we just did not know [much]. But we did have our vendors there to help us understand what substrates to choose and how to work with them,” Shankle said. “And then from there, we worked with a consultant to help develop our sign sizing family so we could get the most out of the material.”

Know Your Space

Another important component to determining your price is knowing the exact square footage of your in-plant. This way, you can price out a burden rate, which determines how much space is dedicated to the project, as well as how much time.

“Every time we increase square footage or every time we add additional things in our wide-format area, we have to make sure that we account for that number so that we can have the best cost and the most accurate cost,” Shankle said.

Implement an MIS

Shankle stressed the fact that there is no one-stop solution for pricing. While it will take time to figure out pricing, using tools like an MIS can help ease the process along and aid you in calculating pricing for services like contour cutting.

“I will tell you that over time as we go through phases and we have more data, it’s really helpful. We're now implementing a new MIS system that gives us the data we need to know to see how many passes we can estimate. It’s gotten more refined over time, but you have to start somewhere,” Shankle said.

Del Shankle, Rayna Rudasill, and Kirsten Noyola shared CHRISTUS Health's wide-format experiences at IPMA 2024.

Have a Backbone 

As the discussion came to a close, Shankle joked that his in-plant is not Burger King; customers can’t have it their way. When it comes to figuring out pricing, you have to set boundaries with your customers. They can’t ask for whatever they want; they must understand they can only get what you offer. This way, you’re not compromising quality and therefore affecting the price of your work. To avoid this, Shankle suggested in-plants make portfolios or toolkits that customers can look at to see what is available.

“We’re not here to stroke egos, we're here to meet the needs of our organization outpatient print shops. We have a backbone,” Shankle said.  “Instead of being inconsistent, we're going to be making things to scale, having standard sizes, and being more strategy-driven.

“We will never meet the expectations of our customers if we always just tell them what they want to hear,” Shankle concluded. “We're here to support them. We're here to serve, not to be servants.”