Is the Data You Report

By Howie Fenton – Often what is measured most in production print is the least useful. Since most digital press manufacturers count clicks/month (pages or sheets of paper), it is the easiest data to collect, but it has limited value because it is not actionable.

While an indication of page volume, page counts are generally not actionable. One way to determine if data is actionable is to ask, “What could I change if this data (page counts) increased or decreased?” Actionable data means you make a change and determine if that change helped or hurt your measurement, which in this case is page count.

In contrast, if you could change something based on page count, that measure would be actionable. For example, some in-plants are insourcing work, which means selling to outside companies. For an in-plant selling printing externally, you could offer lower pricing when volumes increase, which would make that data actionable.


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One of the highlights from Print 17 were a number of…