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How to De-risk Your Print Shop

De-risk Your Print Shop - The Print University

Episode Summary: How to De-risk Your Print Shop

Podcast: The Print University
Hosts: Ryan McAbee & Pat McGrew

Print operations face risk from every direction—technology failures, cybersecurity threats, equipment downtime, supply chain disruption, undocumented employee knowledge, customer concentration, and natural disasters. In this episode, Ryan McAbee and Pat McGrew explain how printers can systematically identify these vulnerabilities and build operational resilience before a disruption becomes a business-ending event.

The discussion applies broadly across commercial printing, transactional print and mail, wide format, franchise operations, publication printing, and in-plant environments. A central theme is eliminating single points of failure. That includes employees who hold undocumented tribal knowledge, unsupported RIP or DFE software, a single production server, one critical equipment platform, or dependence on one supplier or major customer.

McAbee and McGrew recommend layered cybersecurity controls, stronger authentication and access management, current software maintenance, regular backups, disaster recovery planning, and appropriate cyber and business continuity insurance. They also emphasize cross-training employees, documenting workflows, developing internal apprentices, and creating production partnerships with other printers that can accept work during an outage—important considerations for printing industry training programs for new employees and outsourced training for print production staff.

Supply chain resilience requires multiple sources for substrates, consumables, spare parts, and other critical materials, along with regular vendor reviews. Financially, printers should closely monitor customer concentration, cash flow, and overdue receivables. The hosts specifically recommend understanding revenue exposure across the top customer, top three, and top ten accounts.

The actionable framework is simple: rank risks by likelihood, business impact, and recovery time, identify the five biggest vulnerabilities, and determine whether each risk should be eliminated, reduced, backed up through redundancy, or transferred through insurance. Resilience, they argue, is now a competitive requirement in print manufacturing.

You Will Learn:

  • How to identify single points of failure across people, equipment, software, and suppliers
  • Why business continuity and disaster recovery planning are essential for print operations
  • How cybersecurity, authentication, backups, and software maintenance reduce operational exposure
  • Methods for cross-training staff and capturing critical tribal knowledge
  • How supplier redundancy and production partnerships strengthen print supply chain resilience
  • How to prioritize risks using likelihood, business impact, and recovery-time scoring

Who This Course is For:

  • Print business owners, operations managers, production leaders, and department heads
  • Commercial, wide format, transactional, print-and-mail, publication, franchise, and in-plant teams
  • Companies developing printing industry training programs for new employees
  • Organizations evaluating outsourced training for print production staff or lean manufacturing training for the printing industry
  • Teams responsible for MIS software training for print production, prepress workflows, cybersecurity, and business continuity
  • Managers building cross-training, apprenticeship, and operational resilience programs

Time to Watch:

  • Approximately 31 minutes
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