Benchmarking Productivity -- Pursuing Profitable Pressrooms

For sheetfed printing productivity leaders, approximately 8.2 percent of production time could be classified as non-chargeable. This figure too has increased slightly since 1999 when the average downtime for productivity leaders was under 5 percent.

For most printers, the main sources of non-chargeable time was waiting for press repairs/maintenance and for the production of plates. Together, these two problems were regularly responsible for almost 50 percent of total non-chargeable time. For productivity leaders, the leading sources of non-chargeable time were delays associated with waiting for customer approval and for repairs/maintenance. Combined, these two quandaries accounted for more than 60 percent of the typical productivity leader's downtime.