Nowadays there are many ways that can help you develop your business, and in order not to stand still, you need to keep up with the world. One of the most popular and useful ways is something that automates your things, and that something can certainly be a software solution.
Finally, in this article I want to tell you about the return on investment in a web-to-print platform.
Why Investing in Automation is Key to Business Growth
Before we start, a few words about Infigo. Infigo is a web-to-print platform that can help you a lot in this field. Believe me, it has a lot of functionalities and allows you to do a lot of things that you didn’t even know could be automated.
Which is why I will try to convince you that a software investment can be a very good investment. In this article I will focus on the printing field.
What Is ROI and Why Does It Matter for Print Businesses?
There is such a term as ROI (return on investment). ROI is a measurement of the income generated by an investment in software, as opposed to the costs associated with it. Before you decide to make an investment, it would be a good idea to do an ROI analysis. This analysis can help you understand whether you really need an investment to achieve your business goals.
How to Calculate ROI for Web-to-Print Software
To calculate ROI, you only need a simple formula – costs weighed against the benefits. Let’s say you are in the business of printing business cards, and you own an industrial printer. At some point you realize that you could automate certain things in your entire printing workflow and you decided to invest in a software solution.
A basic web-to-print ROI example
For illustrative purposes, let’s say the subscription for the software solution costs €10,000 per year. But this software saves the workers in your company 20 hours per week. Let’s say one hour of labour costs €10.
Now, to calculate the benefits, it would be approximately: 20 hours per week * 52 weeks = 1040 hours per year, 1040 hours per year * €10 per hour = €10,400 per year.
Now we just have to apply the formula:- ROI = ((Benefits – Costs) / Costs) * 100
Based on these figures it would result in: ROI = ((10400 – 10000) / 10000) * 100 = 4 %
From this is follows that the return on investment in this example would be 4%.
So, through a basic analysis, you can quickly understand whether such an investment is worth it or not.
Different savings for different workflows
Let’s do another quick example. Let’s say you are in the business of printing personalized envelopes. You have found a platform that can help you a lot to automate certain things in your printing flow.
Let’s say you need some software features of a certain software, and the subscription for them would be €12,500 per year but the automation features, eliminating manual tasks that would cost you €30,000 per year across the workflow.
Now, applying the formula, we will get ((30,000€ – 12,500€) / 12,500€) * 100 = 140%. So, depending on the functionality of your platform, the bigger the savings you will find.
To see how much you could save across the workflow, check out our ROI calculator by clicking here.
