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THE FASTEST PRESS DOESN’T ALWAYS DELIVER THE FASTEST JOB.
People often assume speed comes from bigger presses, faster presses or simply running production harder. It doesn’t.
Recently, one customer placed an order covering 40 different SKUs. A traditional production plan would have treated those as 40 separate print runs, taking more than 24 hours to complete. Our Commercial team looked at it differently.
By redesigning the production plan, grouping compatible products together and making better use of our 26-inch press, they reduced those 40 runs to 28. The entire job was completed in under eight hours.
Nothing about the customer’s order changed.The thinking behind it did.
We sat down with Brett, Head of Commercial Operations, to understand what actually happens behind the scenes.
How do you explain Commercial Operations to someone who’s never heard of it?
Commercial Operations is really the bridge between Sales, Customer Service and Manufacturing. We make critical decisions at critical points.
In a traditional print business, those functions tend to operate independently. Sales sells the job, production plans it and manufacturing prints it.
We’ve built the model differently.
Our role is to connect all of those areas, balancing lead times, quality, customer service, delivery and operational efficiency to make the best decision for every order.
At the end of the day, everything comes back to one question: What’s going to deliver the best outcome for the customer?
You describe the team as making “critical decisions at critical points”. What does that mean?
We talk about “critical decisions at critical points” because that’s exactly what the Commercial team is there to do.
Automation takes care of the repetitive work, but there are key moments throughout every order where someone needs to make an informed commercial decision. That’s deciding whether to run on the 17-inch or 26-inch press, whether to group jobs together, whether to hold an order for a short period to create a more efficient production run, or whether to prioritise delivery over production efficiency.
Those decisions don’t happen by chance. They’re made using live production data, experience and a complete view of what’s happening across the business.
Technology supports those decisions. It doesn’t replace them.
How do you create efficiencies that other printers can’t?
A big part of that is Print+.
Traditionally, printers would only combine jobs if everything matched. Same material, same size and the same product. Print+ allows us to think differently.
As long as the material is the same, we can combine different products, different sizes and different SKUs into a single production run.
That reduces make-readies, keeps presses running for longer and creates more capacity across the factory.
For customers, that means shorter lead times, greater flexibility and the ability to respond quickly when priorities change.
In practice this can look like seven lanes across the press, seven completely different products.
That’s something you simply wouldn’t expect to see in a traditional print operation, but it’s exactly the kind of thinking that creates more capacity and shorter lead times for our customers.
What’s the biggest difference between Catapult and a traditional printer?
Live information.
Most businesses are making decisions based on yesterday’s data. We’re making decisions based on what’s happening right now.
If a press stops, we know. If capacity changes, we know. If moving a job to another press means we can improve a customer’s delivery date, we can make that decision immediately.
We’re not reacting to problems after they’ve happened, we’re making decisions before they become problems.
By combining technology, automation, live data and experienced decision-making, we’ve built a production model that constantly adapts around our customers, not the other way around.
Commercial Operations isn’t just another department, it’s one of the main reasons the Catapult model works. Because the fastest press doesn’t always deliver the fastest job. The best decisions do.