Not All That Glitters Is Gold

There is a peculiar thing that happens when you buy industrial printing equipment.

You spend weeks comparing machines.

Print heads. Speeds. Resolutions. Ink configurations. Print widths. Production figures. RIP software. Build quality. Price.

You watch videos. You study samples. You speak to salespeople. If you’re buying from overseas, you look at the company’s website, see where they exhibit and try to establish whether you’re dealing with a serious organisation.

What you probably don’t spend enough time investigating is the person who is going to answer the phone two or three years later when the machine refuses to start.

We certainly didn’t.

Over the last few years, we’ve purchased five substantial pieces of printing equipment from one overseas supplier: two large DTF systems, a smaller DTF printer and two UV machines.

Collectively, they represented a considerable investment in our production capability.

I’m deliberately not going to identify the company because this isn’t intended to be an attack on them. For the purposes of this article, I’ll simply call them “S”.

In fact, when we first encountered S, they appeared to be exactly the sort of company you should buy from.

Excellent online presence. Professional marketing. International trade shows. An enormous range of machinery. Responsive salespeople. All the outward signs of an established printing-equipment company.

And that’s precisely why I think our experience is worth writing about.

Several years and five machines later, I’ve realised that evaluating the people selling and supporting a machine can ultimately be more important than evaluating the machine itself.

The honeymoon period

Buying a new printer is exciting.

It’s shiny. It’s fast. It’s probably considerably more productive than whatever you’re replacing.

During the sales process, everybody knows exactly what it can do.

The machine arrives, you install it and hopefully it starts making money.

Then one morning a sensor stops working.

And suddenly you discover what you actually bought.

This happened to us again recently.

We had a problem involving a safety trigger on one of our remaining machines. What should theoretically have been a fairly contained troubleshooting exercise developed into something considerably bigger.

We contacted S for assistance.

During the remote troubleshooting process, startup parameters were changed and the machine subsequently wouldn’t operate correctly.

So we began with one problem and ended up with another.

At the same time, we were trying to establish why an emergency-stop function wasn’t behaving as expected. Anything involving a machine’s safety systems is obviously something we take seriously, and the machine shouldn’t be operated until those systems are functioning correctly.

At one point I looked around.

Panels removed. Electronics exposed. Messages going backwards and forwards. Another technical conversation taking place on my phone.

And I thought:

I’ve seen this film before. A lot.

That’s really what prompted me to write this article.

We accidentally became printer engineers

The photographs accompanying this article aren’t from a machinery repair centre.

They’re from our print shop.

Over the years, this has become a remarkably familiar sight.

Panels removed. Wiring traced. Control boards exposed. Components disconnected. Photographs and videos being sent backwards and forwards while everybody attempts to establish what’s wrong.

Some of this comes with the territory.

We operate industrial printing equipment every day.

Printers break.

Print heads fail. Pumps fail. Sensors fail. Dampers block. Motors wear. Cables develop problems. Electronics occasionally give trouble.

That isn’t my criticism.

A printer that never develops a fault probably doesn’t exist.

What I hadn’t properly appreciated when we started buying machinery was that there are really two products involved in every machinery purchase.

The first is the printer.

The second is the organisation standing behind it.

And sometimes the second product turns out to be considerably more important than the first.

Technical support is part of the machine

When you buy a production printer, you aren’t really buying a collection of aluminium, motors, electronics and print heads.

You’re buying uptime.

That’s the entire point.

The machine exists because you have orders to produce.

If the machine stops, it doesn’t particularly matter whether the problem is a €10 sensor or a €2,000 component.

If nobody can identify the €10 sensor, the machine is still producing precisely zero.

This is where our experience became increasingly frustrating.

There have been occasions when troubleshooting with S appeared, from our side of the conversation, to become a process of trying one thing after another rather than following a clear diagnostic path.

Change this.

Try that.

Disconnect this.

Photograph that board.

Change this parameter.

Restart.

Try again.

Sometimes the original problem remained.

Occasionally another problem appeared during the process.

To be fair, diagnosing machinery remotely isn’t easy. There is a technician thousands of kilometres away trying to understand a problem through photographs, videos and messages, often across a language barrier.

I completely accept that.

But that’s also precisely why the technical capability of the organisation selling the machine matters so much.

Who actually built your printer?

This brings me to something I now investigate much more carefully.

Who actually manufactures the machine?

The printing-equipment industry has manufacturers, OEM arrangements, integrators, distributors and private-label products.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those models.

What matters is understanding the relationship before you buy.

Does the company selling the printer manufacture it?

Do they assemble it?

Do they specify components and have somebody else manufacture it?

Are they primarily a distributor?

Most importantly:

Does the person providing technical support actually understand this particular machine?

Because when everything works, the distinction hardly matters.

When something goes wrong, it can matter enormously.

Today I would happily buy a machine from a reseller who openly told me:

We don’t manufacture this machine. But we’ve installed hundreds of them, our engineers know them inside out and we stock the critical components.

That’s valuable.

What concerns me far more is an impressive catalogue containing dozens of different machines without equally deep technical knowledge sitting behind each one.

A big exhibition stand isn’t technical support

International trade shows provide reassurance.

You walk into a major printing exhibition and see a company with a substantial stand, numerous machines running and staff everywhere.

It creates credibility.

And, to a degree, rightly so.

But I’ve learned to distinguish between sales infrastructure and support infrastructure.

A beautiful exhibition stand demonstrates that a company knows how to exhibit.

A professional website demonstrates that it understands marketing.

A huge catalogue demonstrates access to a wide range of machinery.

None of those things necessarily tells you what happens at 9am on Monday when the machine won’t initialise and you have customer orders waiting.

That’s the question I want answered now.

Not:

How fast does it print?

But:

How fast can you get it printing again?

When the wrong machine turns up

We’ve also experienced the logistical side of things going badly wrong.

At one point, we were sent the wrong machine.

Mistakes happen.

I’ve run a business long enough to know that no company gets everything right. We make mistakes ourselves.

The real measure of a supplier isn’t whether a mistake ever occurs.

It’s what happens next.

In our case, getting the situation properly resolved and obtaining the replacement took almost a year.

Think about what that means for a printing company.

You don’t normally invest in production equipment because you fancy having another large machine sitting in the building.

There’s a business case behind it.

Capacity. New products. Faster turnaround. Additional customers. Reduced outsourcing. Growth.

If that machine isn’t available, the business plan behind the investment isn’t available either.

That experience changed the way I think about logistics, warranty arrangements and replacement policies just as much as the technical problems changed the way I think about support.

The cheapest machine isn’t necessarily the cheapest machine

We naturally compare machinery by purchase price.

Machine A costs this much.

Machine B costs more.

Machine C costs considerably more.

On paper, Machine A looks like the bargain.

Except the invoice price isn’t the true cost of owning a printer.

Downtime has a cost.

Wasted ink has a cost.

Wasted media has a cost.

Replacement print heads have a cost.

Freight has a cost.

Technician time has a cost.

Your own time has a cost.

Staff standing around waiting for a machine has a cost.

Having to purchase another machine as backup has a very substantial cost.

And losing a customer because you couldn’t deliver their order on time can have a cost that continues long after the printer is running again.

The cheapest printer on the quotation can quite easily become the most expensive machine you own.

Five machines and several years later

This isn’t a story about one unfortunate printer.

Across our relationship with S, we purchased two large DTF machines, one smaller DTF machine and two UV machines.

Collectively, they represented a considerable investment for our business.

Today, very little of that original equipment remains part of our long-term production plan.

One of our remaining UV machines is being replaced by equipment purchased elsewhere. Our remaining five-head DTF machine has also developed problems that have proved difficult to resolve.

That’s disappointing.

But it’s also been an education.

An expensive education, certainly, but one worth sharing if it helps somebody else ask the questions we didn’t know we needed to ask.

But don’t draw the wrong conclusion about China

There is an important caveat to everything I’ve written so far.

It would be very easy to read this and conclude:

Well, that’s what happens when you buy machinery from China.

I think that would be completely the wrong lesson.

We continue to buy Chinese machinery.

In fact, some of the best suppliers and some of the most technically knowledgeable people we’ve encountered are based in China.

And when you think about it, that makes perfect sense.

They’re the people building the machines.

They’re working with the components every day.

They know which boards fail. They know which sensors produce strange symptoms. They know which firmware setting can cause a machine to behave completely irrationally. They’ve encountered faults that aren’t in the manual because they’re the people who discovered them in the first place.

When you find a genuinely good Chinese manufacturer or supplier with technically competent people behind it, that relationship can be incredibly valuable.

The challenge isn’t finding a Chinese supplier.

It’s establishing whether you’ve found the right one.

The real test is what happens when something weird happens

Every machinery supplier can deal with the easy stuff.

Change a damper.

Replace a consumable.

Clean a sensor.

Restart the software.

The real test comes when something happens that nobody expected.

An intermittent electrical fault.

A machine that suddenly won’t initialise.

A sensor giving a reading that makes absolutely no sense.

Three apparently unrelated symptoms appearing at the same time.

A problem where the obvious solution doesn’t work.

Those are the events that expose the difference between somebody who sells machinery and somebody who understands machinery.

Before buying now, one of the questions I’d want answered is:

When something happens that nobody expected, who in your organisation actually knows what to do?

I don’t necessarily care where that person lives.

If they’re in Shenzhen, Guangzhou or on the other side of the planet, that’s fine.

I care that they exist.

And I care that I can get to them when I need them.

Nor is paying a huge European premium automatically the answer

There’s another extreme that deserves mentioning.

You can find machinery in Europe that appears very similar to equipment available directly from Chinese manufacturers, but at substantially higher prices.

There can absolutely be value in buying through Europe.

Local warranty handling has value.

Installation has value.

Training has value.

Local spare-parts stock has value.

Having somebody in your time zone has value.

And, occasionally, not having to translate a Chinese WeChat conversation while standing next to a machine with half its covers removed has considerable value.

But none of that automatically means the European company understands the machine better than the people who built it.

Put a European badge on the front of a Chinese machine and it’s still fundamentally the same machine underneath.

When a sufficiently unusual technical problem occurs, that European distributor may ultimately have to do exactly what you would have done:

Call China.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

In fact, if they’re calling the right person in China, that’s exactly what I want them to do.

The European intermediary can be the missing piece

This is where, after everything we’ve experienced, I think the best model starts to emerge.

Not:

Buy directly from China as cheaply as possible and hope for the best.

And not:

Buy a Chinese machine with a European badge at a huge premium and assume the badge somehow guarantees expertise.

The sweet spot, in my view, is something much more practical:

A genuinely competent Chinese manufacturer, supported by a genuinely competent European intermediary.

That combination can be extremely powerful.

The manufacturer provides the depth of knowledge.

The European intermediary provides proximity.

But that intermediary needs to be more than a salesperson.

They need to know the machinery.

They need to have had the covers off.

They need to understand the electronics, software, ink systems and mechanical components.

They need to know what normal looks like so they can recognise abnormal.

They need to know which parts are worth keeping locally because they’ve seen them fail before.

And perhaps most importantly, they need to know enough to communicate intelligently with the engineers in China when something genuinely unusual occurs.

Sometimes the intermediary doesn’t need to know the answer.

They need to know who does.

They need to be able to collect the right information from the customer, explain the fault accurately to the manufacturer, understand the response and turn it into something practical for the person standing beside the machine.

That’s not simply reselling.

That’s adding value.

The intermediary should be a bridge, not just a markup

That’s the distinction I’ve come to appreciate.

If somebody imports a machine, changes the badge and dramatically increases the price, I’m not convinced that alone gives me much.

But if that company has spent years operating, repairing and understanding the platform, that’s a completely different proposition.

You’re not paying for the sticker.

You’re paying for the bridge.

A bridge between your production floor and the people who really understand what’s inside the machine.

And this is where our own experience at Clearprint has changed us.

We’ve had the covers off.

We’ve traced the wiring.

We’ve changed heads.

We’ve dealt with ink systems, electronics, software, sensors and faults that make absolutely no sense when they first appear.

We’ve spent the hours sending photographs and videos backwards and forwards.

We’ve had the WeChat conversations.

We’ve experienced what happens when technical support gets it right.

And we’ve experienced what happens when it doesn’t.

Some of those lessons have been expensive.

Some have been extraordinarily frustrating.

But they have given us something that’s difficult to buy.

Experience.

This isn’t really about printers

The more I think about it, the less I believe this lesson is specific to the printing industry.

It applies to almost any specialist machinery manufactured on one side of the world and operated on the other.

CNC machinery.

Lasers.

Packaging equipment.

Textile machinery.

Automation systems.

Manufacturing equipment.

The machine itself may be excellent.

The engineering may be excellent.

But eventually something unexpected will happen.

And when it does, the success of the entire relationship depends on the chain of knowledge between the person standing beside the broken machine and the person who genuinely understands how it works.

The shorter and more competent that chain is, the better.

What I’d ask before buying a machine today

I’d still want to know its specifications.

I’d still want samples.

I’d still want to see it running.

I’d still negotiate the price.

But I’d spend considerably more time investigating everything that isn’t shiny.

• Who actually manufactures this particular machine?
• How many have you installed?
• Who actually provides technical support?
• Can I speak to somebody who has operated one for several years?
• Where are the critical spare parts?
• Do you have electrical schematics and service documentation?
• Does your technician actually work on these machines?
• If your technician doesn’t know the answer, who does?
• How quickly can we get that person involved?
• What happens when the machine produces zero?

Because everyone is delighted to tell you how many square metres an hour their printer produces when everything is working perfectly.

I’m much more interested in what happens when that number becomes zero.

Not all that glitters is gold

If you’re standing at an exhibition looking at your next machine, enjoy the experience.

Look at the samples.

Watch it run.

Ask how fast it prints.

Ask about the heads.

Negotiate the price.

But then spend another hour investigating the people standing behind it.

Don’t assume the cheapest direct purchase is the best value.

Don’t assume the expensive European version is automatically better.

Don’t assume a huge exhibition stand means huge technical capability.

Don’t assume a manufacturer’s catalogue means they manufacture everything in it.

And don’t assume that because somebody can sell you a machine, they can fix it.

Look for the shortest credible path between your machine and somebody who genuinely understands it.

Sometimes that person will be in China.

In fact, very often that’s exactly where I’d expect the deepest knowledge to be.

The value of a good European intermediary is not to replace that expertise.

It’s to connect you to it.

To understand enough themselves to solve the problems they can, recognise the problems they can’t, and know exactly where to go next.

Because eventually the exhibition lights go off.

The salespeople go home.

The promotional videos stop playing.

The machine gets shipped halfway around the world and installed in your factory.

Then, one morning, something stops working.

And that’s when you discover what you really bought.

Not just a machine.

You bought the people standing behind it.

And after everything we’ve learned, that’s probably the biggest pearl of all:

Don’t just tell me how fast your machine runs when everything is working. Show me the people who will get it running when it isn’t.