On our homepage we say manual workflow inefficiency can cost up to 20% of annual revenue. That is a big claim, so here is where it comes from, what it does and does not mean, and how to work out your own figure.
Where the number comes from
The figure most often quoted is an IDC estimate that companies lose 20 to 30% of their revenue each year to inefficient processes. It is widely repeated, it applies to businesses in general rather than print specifically, and the original study is hard to trace. So we would not ask you to take it on trust, and neither should anyone else quoting it.
What we can say is that the costs it describes are real in print, and you can count most of them yourself.
A worked example
Take a UK commercial printer turning over £3 million a year. The assumptions below are illustrative, so swap in your own.
| Cost | Assumption | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Prepress checking and fixing files | 3 operators at £40,000 fully loaded, half their time on checks and fixes | £60,000 |
| Re-keying between systems | 2 people at £35,000, a quarter of their time typing job data again | £17,500 |
| Remakes from file and data errors | 2% of turnover | £60,000 |
| Work lost to slow turnaround | 5 jobs a month at £1,500 that went elsewhere | £90,000 |
| Total | 7.6% of turnover | £227,500 |
That is the visible part, and it already comes to more than £200,000 a year.
The part that does not show up
The bigger cost is usually capacity. If your prepress team spends half its time on routine checks, it can only take on so much more work before you need to hire. In the Enfocus Workflow Automation Report, one time study saw a single prepress operator go from 15 jobs per shift to 60 after automating preflight and fixes. Even a fraction of that gain is new revenue you can win without adding people.
Then there is overtime, credit notes, the customer who quietly stops sending work, and the experienced operator who leaves because the job has become repetitive. None of these appear on a single line in the accounts, which is exactly why they go unmeasured.
Whether your own number lands nearer 5% or nearer 20% depends on how much of your workflow is still manual. The point is that it is rarely small, and it is rarely measured.
Work out your own figure
- List the people who check, fix, re-key or chase, and estimate the share of their week it takes.
- Multiply by their fully loaded cost.
- Add the value of last year's remakes and credit notes.
- Estimate the work you turned down or lost on turnaround.
- Divide the total by your annual turnover.
If you would like a quick first view, our Automation Score takes a couple of minutes.
// how we can help
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Sources: the IDC estimate is widely cited, for example by DSD (Is inefficiency killing your company?); Enfocus Workflow Automation Report, October 2019. Worked example figures are illustrative assumptions, not survey data.