Our Highly Optimized Production Space

Working on a shoestring budget for our start-up, I like to think of our space as a highly optimized production space. We don’t need cubicles to work from, nor are we looking to have a big footprint since much of our business will come over the internet and/or through direct customer relationships (i.e. we don’t want to be Kinkos with $5 print jobs). Really, all we need for this is a place to put our press, our UV coater (soon to come), our data compliance and verification hardware, a small prepress area and a conference table. I figured around 300 square feet would do well for us; the space we have now is just under that size. If we add a sales staff beyond ourselves, their cubicle is their car and home office.

I took some photos today of our space to show you what the space looks like. Ken, our production operations guy, can be seen doing some maintenance on the press. (He also scowls a lot, but I think it has to do more with the broken foot he has that he got while installing a press in the midwest last month). The digital press we have is the MGI DP60 Pro press.

Our prepress area can be seen to the left rear, just behind the press. On the right side is our paper storage area. We also keep our envelope feeder in that area, and slip it onto the press when we run envelopes. The feeder holds around 2,000 envelopes. Printing envelopes is one of the strong points of the DP 60, and it will produce about 2,000 envelopes an hour.

Also to the right bottom of the photo is our conference room table and also doubles as a production area for us to QC our work on. (Did I mention our space was highly optimized?).

From the backside of the space, you can see the rest of our area. There are finishing devices (folders, saddle finishers, etc.) next door to us that we outsource that portion of our work to when needed. We’ll be integrating some of that equipment into the solution from Ironsides Technology to give us complete print audit control.

As we grow, we may have a need for more space. But for now, this works perfect for us, and our budget.

Related posts:

1. Minor Adjustment – Bigger Space
2. Production Mistake – Week 2