How it works · Books, diaries and commercial print
See where your print margin goes
Verbal proofs, makeready waste, missing covers and rush overtime cost you every week. Walk through your print floor, tick what you see, and find out what you can save when the floor records its own work.
A press does not lose money in one big event. It loses it in makeready sheets, plate remakes, gathering errors, foiling rejects and outsourced binding nobody measured. Each one is small. But there are hundreds of them a year, and none show up in any report.
The other problem is the calendar. Educational titles land together and tender dates do not move. Diaries are worse: eleven quiet months, then every corporate client wants their logo foiled on 4,000 books before the first week of January. With that rush, there is no time to check anything twice. A wrong logo goes to print on Tuesday and is found on Friday.
Below is the process, stage by stage, as it really runs in most presses. Read the left column and tick what is true for you. There is no form, nothing gets submitted, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Tick every line true in your factory.
Be honest. Nobody is watching. Each one you tick lights up the way the same moment runs on Prodman ERP, and adds what that problem is quietly costing you every year.
Estimate and quotation
Every closed job carries real makeready, real paper consumed, real binding hours and real rejects. The next estimate is built on those.
Quotes sit in a pipeline with a status. Anything untouched for a week gets flagged on its own.
Trim, extent, paper, binding style, foiling, lamination, quantity and every revision sit on one record everyone reads from.
Artwork, proof and approval
The client approves the exact file, on the portal, with a name and a timestamp attached. Nobody can mix up version 4 and version 2 again.
The check sits in the system, not in someone's memory under deadline pressure. No shortcut will start that work order.
A change after approval shows up as exactly that, in writing, and the approval check opens again by itself.
Planning the load
The production board and Gantt show the whole press loaded against real capacity, readable by anyone who should see it.
The Gantt shows every accepted job against real machine and line capacity. An order that will not fit shows up in September, while you can still act.
Extent, trim and sheet size set the forme plan. It goes with the work order, not on a loose sheet.
On the floor
The operator scans the job, scans the machine, enters produced and rejected. That is all the data entry your floor does.
The operator enters produced and rejected. Spoilage rolls up by machine, by operator and by job, in rupees.
Each scan has a name on it. Output and rejects link to a person and a shift, with no register to fill.
Downtime hours add up per machine and per cause, all year.
Paper, board and stores
Requirement from the forme plan, live godown balance, and a low-stock warning early enough to buy one lot instead of two.
Issues and receipts happen at the point of work, so the register matches the godown. Demand from accepted orders becomes a buying list with dates, approvals and goods receipts on one record.
Balances and overs are recorded at the end of the run, not pushed under a table.
Binding, finishing and outsourced work
Outsourced stages sit on the same job record, with the vendor confirming receipt, quantity and completion in writing.
Quality checks at each stage catch the fault at gathering or sewing, on that machine and shift, before the next 3,000 are made the same way.
Wastage rolls up by stage, machine, operator and job, in rupees, not in vague percentages.
Dispatch and the customer
Produced, bound, packed and dispatched are compared to the ordered quantity at dispatch, not after.
One order number carries every delivery address and quantity from enquiry through to the packing slip.
Jobs falling behind their promised date raise an alert on their own, without anyone running a report.
The client portal shows exactly which stage their job is at, updated by the floor, not by an executive typing an update.
After the job
Paper, plates, makeready, press hours, binding, foiling, outsourced work and rejects roll into one job cost you can compare against the estimate.
Tick the lines above to see what they cost you.
Assumes materials at 55% of turnover and a 12% net margin, the same assumptions as the ROI calculator, where you can change every one of them.
We set up every factory on site, by hand. That is why we take only a few each quarter.
Six months later
What a Monday morning looks like after that.
- You open one page at 9am and know every job, every signature and every machine, without a floor round.
- Not one book goes to press on an artwork or proof the client has not approved in writing.
- Makeready and spoilage are numbers per machine and per operator, and they are falling.
- Paper and rexine are bought in September against a plan, in one lot, at a rate you negotiated.
- Your laminator, foiler and binder confirm dates on a portal, so a delay reaches you the day it happens.
- A gathering or binding fault is caught at that machine, on that shift, not at the packing table.
- Your ten biggest clients check their own status on the portal, and stop calling you in November.
- In February you sit down with the season's real numbers instead of a bank balance and a theory.
Straight answers
What owners ask us at this point.
Every job we print is different. Can a system handle that?
Different specification, same stages. Prepress, plates, printing, folding, gathering, sewing or wiro, binding, foiling, lamination, trimming, packing. The specification changes per job and travels on the order. The stages are configured once, to your press.
Our diary work is only three months. Is an ERP worth it for a seasonal unit?
The short season is exactly why you need it. A press that runs steadily all year can absorb a mistake. A unit doing most of its diary business in eight weeks cannot. The reprint you avoid in November is worth more than the same reprint avoided in April, because in November there is no time to make it again.
We outsource binding, foiling and lamination. Does that break it?
No. Outsourced stages are part of the same job. The vendor confirms receipt, quantity and completion on the supplier portal, so an outside stage is as visible as an inside one. Losing track of material once it leaves the gate is a main reason presses miss dates.
Will my operators and seasonal binders actually enter data?
Scan the job, scan the machine, enter produced and rejected. That is the whole interaction and it takes seconds. We kept it short on purpose. Every system that asked the floor to fill in forms has failed.
Does this replace Tally?
No. Tally keeps your books and stays where it is. Prodman ERP runs the floor and the orders, which Tally was never built for. They work alongside each other.
When should we start, if our season begins in September?
Before June. We set every factory up on site, by hand, and we want a full quiet cycle to configure your stages, load your items and train your team before the first big order lands. Starting in August means learning the system in the same weeks you are trying to ship.
You should not need to spend your life walking the floor to discover the truth.
Bring us one problematic production order, one chronic bottleneck, or one metric nobody trusts. In thirty minutes, we will show you how Prodman restores order and calm, without asking your machine operators to become clerical typists.
Limited on-site implementations each quarter · Configured by hand