What should I look for in a print shop’s waste and spoilage records?

Waste is where quality problems turn into money. Ask for any logs of misprints, reprints, trimmed offcuts and damaged stock. If none exist, ask how the owner knows what is lost. A shop that cannot say may be absorbing losses inside its margins without noticing.

Break the records down. Does one press produce most of the waste? One shift? One kind of job, such as short colour runs or heavy coverage? Those answers point to a worn machine, a training gap or jobs that ran over their quote. Ask what was done after the last big spoilage event and whether the cause was fixed.

Compare waste to quotes. If estimates assume little waste and the floor produces more, margins are thinner than the quote sheets suggest. Check how paper and substrate returns, credits from suppliers and customer refunds are handled, and whether they appear in the books. Walk the scrap area too. What you see should roughly match what the records say. Ask the seller to walk you through one recent reprint from the original problem to the final fix, so the explanation can be checked against the paperwork.

Key takeaways

• Ask whether waste is recorded, and by press, job and operator.
• Spikes and repeat reprints point to equipment, training or quoting problems.
• Compare real waste with the allowance built into quotes.
• Ask what was changed after the last major waste event, and whether it worked.