Distinguish your digital

 In 2015, a commercial print company, typically a sheetfed offset operation, cannot expect to just print digital pages and turn a profit at it. So where is the money to be made, what do printers need to do to set themselves apart in digital printing, what niches are waiting to be exploited, what kind of products do printers need to be thinking of selling, what kind of services should they be offering through their digital presses?

 

Supplying the client’s communication needs

It has been a big 16 months for OnePoint, the Sydney hybrid print operation formerly known as ProGrafica, which began in 1995 and later became part of a hub-and-spoke operation with 13 other Sydney printers. It later transformed into a multi-channel cross media content provider. After a challenging period bedding down the 2012 acquisition of media agency McDowall Creative, CEO Kerim El Gabaili speaks to ProPrint of a change in mindset.

OnePoint is all about delivering commercial outcomes for their clients. They do this by offering engaging design, marketing strategies and communication plans. They identify and clarify what are the clients commercial requirements or KPIs for the campaign ‘rather than just providing print’.

Based at two factories in Auburn, with a satellite hotseat in Pyrmont, and 15 staff, OnePoint was one of the pioneers of cross-media content provision in Australia. A flagship project for the company some years ago was a B2B campaign for the Accor Group, to draw some 1,480 corporate customers on its database for a ‘meet-and-greet’ event focusing on conferences at three of its top Sydney hotels.

The campaign involved a mailout of a printed DM piece, consisting of a personalised illustrated envelope and contents, using DirectSmile software, and an email blast, with both these components inviting the Novotel customer to a corresponding PURL personalised landing page online. On that page, the respondent answered questions that enabled further database segmentation of value to Accor. This three-stage pitch yielded a remarkable 28.9 per cent response rate and face-to-face time at the event with customers who represented a potential $18 million in conferencing. The campaign was recognised by the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) for its virtuosity.

“Our next area of development is around plug-and-play marketing automation platforms,” says El Gabaili, where OnePoint can automatically communicate with its clients’ customers in ‘soft’ areas like birthday greetings and or loyalty programs. “With the print component, it is no longer a case of selling it on margins. It is a package solution.

“Corporate marketing managers have inadvertently become production managers, with no time for strategic planning, so it’s important that they outsource the marketing, and that is what we explain when we introduce our next stage of solutions to them,” he says. “This has very little to do with being a print provider.”

Central to OnePoint’s strategy is its print output using a new Ricoh C7110x press, which OnePoint has used in various applications, particularly envelope printing for its DM brochures. No run is too short, says El Gabaili, with the C7110x being used for a high-end property brochure showcasing the 1 Bligh Street office development in Sydney’s CBD. The client needed a top-up of only 100 extra brochures, which the press was able to print to a ‘blow you away’ quality.

OnePoint maintains an offset pressroom, but with a steady drop in offset demand, it increasingly outsources, focusing on in-house integrated digital solutions.

 

Three ways to profitability

Aline Schneider, industry marketing manager, graphic communications, at Fuji Xerox Australia, sees three major avenues for printer services providers to increase their profitability: firstly, reducing their costs, with automated and lean processes that reduce time and labour for each job; secondly, producing more jobs with the right technology that offers them superior uptime for constant productivity; and finally, growing their businesses into new markets – niche services being one example. “The size of the opportunity will depend greatly on the strengths, skills and experience of each specific business. Our customers are very diverse in their sareas of specialty, with services that range from personalised multimedia campaigns to wide format and POS applications, digital packaging, catalogues and others.”

For Raj Chandiok, national sales manager production print, Ricoh Australia, differentiation is the key in today’s digital print industry. The way he sees it, successful and profitable digital printers offer digital print as only one part of end-to-end multi-channel communication services, which may include marketing strategy development, brand management, design, print, finishing, signage and fulfilment, with some offering of telemarketing services to measure success of the marketing campaign. It is a view that has driven Ricoh, especially since its recent acquisition of American W2P and Software as a Service (SaaS) developer PTI Marketing Solutions.

Adrian Fleming, sales & marketing director, enterprise inkjet systems at Kodak Australasia, says printers are looking for ways to enhance revenue potential by shifting to profitable short-run jobs. These print-on-demand jobs reduce inventory costs and allow the printing of shorter runs on a just-in-time basis to meet specific orders.

 

Best digital workflow

For Schneider, a premium digital production flow is one that streamlines and automates job ordering through to fulfilment, removing manual touch points. This minimises waste and labour costs to improve the bottom line. A touchless workflow that automates the majority of workload helps printers produce more output per shift, even with reducing run-lengths.

“Workflow automation in silos – be it digital or offset – restricts a printer’s ability to be flexible and meet customer deadlines. Seamlessly integrating digital with offset, using industry standards like JDF/JMF/XML, meets a growing concern for most printers about how to maximise equipment utilisation. With pricing pressures intensifying, an important part of increasing profits is greater efficiencies. That means taking time, steps and labour out of the equation — be it digital or offset the only difference is sheet size,” she says.

At Ricoh, what is Raj Chandiok’s idea of the optimal digital workflow? “As an enabler for the disparate solutions in the market, a flexible offering which can fully integrate into the customer environment is a must,” he says. “The paradigm has shifted from the manufacturer ‘pushing their wares’ to working and partnering with their customer to fully understand their business needs.”

He sees developing business efficiencies, with a view to broadening their offering to their customers and having the agility to meet changing requirements, as becoming the norm. “Every aspect of the traditional print business is complimented by marketing diversification, therefore managing every aspect of the content and how the business reaches current and new customers is vital to ongoing sustainability.” Fleming says Kodak has found several benchmark characteristics in companies that have optimised product development, and found a streamlined, well defined workflow to be the most impactful. “Companies with best-in-class product development establish standard workflows that eliminate excessive handoffs and minimise wait time between steps. These organisations design customised workflows to handle exception and escalation processing, as well as rules stating when customised processes should be used.”

 

Digital/offset handshake

How important is it to maintain integration with a parallel offset workflow? Raj Chandiok says: “There will be a growing trend to capture the offset transfer – not competing with, but complimenting. This provides the ability to manage your investment in offset whilst having flexibility, with advances such as VDP.”

Kodak’s Adrian Fleming says integration can be very beneficial to a production environment where the types of work to be produced are known and limited. “If however the production environment has a wide range of products to be produced, sometimes the more cost effective as well as most efficient environment can be one where the finishing is not integrated. Rather having an offline solution can lead to greater efficiencies.”

 

Digital finishing

Aline Schneider perceives digital printing as allowing Fuji Xerox customers to expand their on-demand workload from dozens a day to hundreds a day, so he sees it as important that their finishing options keep up.

“Manual labour handling of each job slows down production and therefore profits. This is why Fuji Xerox offers a wide variety of finishing solutions such as booklet making, square fold trimming, stacking and even binding. What is important is not the type of finishing solution (that depends on the customers unique needs) but rather that the finishing works harmoniously with their digital workflow. It is this automation that keeps our customers productive and therefore optimises productivity and reduces costs.”

Manufacturing printed products, more than merely generating print, is the smart way forward, and Ricoh’s Chandiok points to some traditional finishing technologies, such as booklet makers utilising staple technologies and digital presses with perfect-bind capabilities. “Over the coming months and years, this will vastly change, driven by customer needs. At Ricoh, we believe non-traditional finishing that has been done offline will be further integrated into the cutsheet press. This will facilitate flexibility and the potential to improve printers’ ‘stickiness’ with customers,” he notes.

Adrian Fleming says Kodak works with a large number of finishing solution providers and has integrated solutions with many of them around the world. He says, “Integration can be beneficial to a production environment where the types of work to be produced are known and limited. If however the production environment has a wide range of products to be produced, sometimes the more cost effective as well as most efficient environment can be one where the finishing is not integrated. Having an offline solution can lead to greater efficiencies.”

 

Kwik Kopy Bankstown celebrates rising volumes

Kwik Kopy Bankstown has nearly doubled its volumes since February after the business bought a new Konica Minolta C1100 printer.

Owner Sean Weir says the ‘tough and diverse’ printing industry is going through a lot of changes and businesses need to adapt to new ways to survive.

“Our investment in the new Konica Minolta C1100 colour printer has increased our volume from 65,000 clicks a month to more than a 100,000 clicks,” he says.

“We are doing a lot more in-house rather than sending jobs out, so profit has increased, and speed of turnaround is much better.”

He says while having the best equipment is vital for a business to succeed, the owners and staff must invest energy into the business to increase their client base.

“A lot of people are down saying that print is dying, I don’t think so – there is heaps out there, if you want it you have to go and get it, it’s not going to come to you,” Weir says.

He says because the new printer is air-fed not roll-fed, it handles all different substrates, has better colour management with speed of 100 A4 and 53 A3 colour sheets a minute.

Weir says the company has also taken advantage of new technology, which caters for faster turnarounds and less down time.

“So now we can send the job straight on the system and it will print it for us, which means we don’t have to go through the prepress and setting up the job. It just does it for us, leading to less down time,” he says.

 

Digital inline finishing

Theo Pettaras highlights inline digital finishing as an aspect of his Digitalpress company that sets it head-and-shoulders above rivals. “We have been pioneers in digital foiling techniques and are continually developing our expertise here. There are also a number of offline finishing solutions that will provide great embellishments to digitally printed products,” he says. “We also like some of the wide format equipment. The ability to print on different substrates and raised spot UV inks is very appealing.”

Pettaras is emphatic that a successful print company cannot allow printing to become a commodity. “The minute you do this you open the door for your business to be just like everyone else’s. Profits are to be made wherever niches can be found.”

Digitalpress, with a staff of 13, processes short runs of premium B3/B4 digital print from its digital presses, which include a Kodak NexPress SE3000, a Konica Minolta 65HC and an Océ Colorwave 600 wide-format printer. Digital makes up 80 per cent of the total pie, with offset work outsourced to print management. “Our business has evolved over the years and as such we print manage plenty of offset print jobs. Our MIS system (Print IQ) has a brilliant outsource module. We request quotes online from two to three preferred offset printers, and work is ordered accordingly.”

The nine-year-old Surry Hills company produces what Pettaras calls ‘value-add digital’, with embellishing such as dimensional printing, spot varnishing and high glossing, much of it inline, but its bindery also incorporates post-press kit like a laminating machine and a digital foiler.

Pettaras states his preference for keeping finishing in-house to minimise non-scalable costs such as couriering on the short print runs of premium embellished print which the company produces for PR and design agencies, mainly in the event management industry. Volumes at Digitalpress can be anywhere from 1,000 68pp A4 books to a single book,

Pettaras calculates finishing costs at one end of the spectrum ‘can almost be the same cost as printing the job … something we are acutely aware of’. With the NexPress, clients can ask for inline varnishing in either a satin or gloss finish, watermark spot varnishing, and digital raised printing or dimensional printing.

But Pettaras says a recent attempt to take on multi-channel campaigns left him convinced that customers sometimes prefer to look beyond their printers for marketing services. “Multi-channel content provider bar humbug! We went down that road a couple of years ago. I suppose we got sucked into the media/ vendor hype and jumped on the bandwagon. Big mistake in my opinion. Whilst we had some interest with our existing customers, we found that they were quite happy to do it themselves. We focus on what we do best and not be a one-stop shop. How many printers do you know who have made a success in this area?

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