In depth
In a gang run, several customer jobs are imposed onto a single press sheet — for example, four customers' business-card jobs printed 8-up on the same sheet of 350gsm board. The shop pays for one makeready and one stock change instead of four, and the sheets are cut down into individual jobs after printing. The customer sees a competitive price; the shop captures the difference between gang cost and individual cost as margin.
Gang-running works when (a) the jobs share substrate, finishing, and quality requirements, (b) the imposition packs them efficiently onto the sheet, and (c) the cutting plan is straightforward enough for the bindery to execute without errors. Specialty print web shops (Vistaprint, Helloprint, Solopress) built their entire commercial model around aggressive gang-running of postcard/card jobs.
For an SME shop, the gating constraint is usually orchestration rather than press time. PeakSpitz AIERP scans the open quote queue for gang-compatible jobs, proposes a combined press sheet, and shows the operator the estimated savings — leaving the go/no-go to the human. This turns a back-office discipline that used to be the privilege of large shops into something a 10-person shop can do daily.