New Year planning gives a printshop a chance to reflect upon what has and has not worked as well in the past year, and what is a good strategic plan. Usually, this involves an honest assessment of not only profits and losses, but also customer trends and expectations. While it is fairly-simple to analyse and re-hash problem jobs or customers, doing so for the trends in evaluating customer expectations and evolving requirements requires planning.

I often find that a lot of the issues about new product offerings are driven from the sales teams. Usually, this is in the form of a salesperson returning to the shop after servicing customers, and saying something to the effect of ‘Hey mates, can we do this for my customer? They are asking for it’. Sometimes it refers to a new service, such as wide format banners or labels, and others, it is more of a better way to work with them, for example, using a web-to-print system as a method to take incoming work from customers.

This request for service also must to be a fair and balanced approach. Just because one salesperson returns to your printshop, and says ‘Customer XYZ would give us a ton of work, if we just added a wide-format banner product’. This is often much easier said than done. Much like traditional print, it is not just printing, it is the other accoutrement that add to the issue. For example, when you added a new larger-format press, you often have had to look at imposition solutions, cutting, binding, and other supplementary hardware/software to be able to meet that product’s needs. The same comes into play when planning for new features and capabilities. If you add wide format capabilities for banners, you need to plan for grommets, vinyl, Tyvek, and even warehousing/finishing requirements and ink-estimations in addition to just getting the job out. While maybe not as significant an addition as adding a new six-colour perfecting offset press, it is still a consideration. No new product is easy, and rarely does it just dovetail into an existing product offering.

It also means that just because a salesperson is coming to the shop asking if a new product can be offered, does not mean they have planned-out how they intend to sell that additional product or capability. Even the most experienced of salespeople often overlook the whole ecosystem of offering new products and services.

Do not react to this,  be proactive.

I think it is most important to plan and anticipate the needs of your customers, and begin plans to meet them, before the question is posed from them. It always looks good to your customers when you inform them that you are considering adding wide-format, 3D, foil stamping, die cutting, cartons, and it gives them a good bit of reassurance that they are indeed working with a partner that is ‘looking out for their current and future needs’.

That is not to say it is not important to court new customers. Do not solely base your planning on requests and requirements of your existing customers, unless you are too busy to service their needs today. Sometimes adding capabilities like wide-format signs or banners will allow you to sell to a new market. There is a large market of customers who need a banner, but are not typical print customers. They often resort to services that are beyond their knowledge-pool and require some hand-holding in the procurement process of their needs. Maybe they have never ordered a brochure

It is for this reason that you cannot just hope that your customers are aware of such new capabilities you may be adding. You may need to explain what those products are, and how they would prepare content for them, or what the difference between a Grommet and a Pole Pocket is. Just adding that capability will require training your sales people as well as CSR staff on a new product, your prepress department how to handle these jobs, and your scheduling and estimating departments on how to load, and plan to keep a device running.

This is really one of the hardest parts of new services. Knowing the terminology, the vagaries, how to request customer content, and how to price them. Particularly in new mediums and products that can consume long run-times and expensive materials. It can also impact heavily on lights-out operations.

Lights out?

Let’s say for example you have added a new wide-format printer, and you have five banners to run overnight. Each one will take several hours to complete, so you need to make sure you have some pretty good estimates in place about how much material and ink consumable you will require etc. that will be needed to be in the device before you start printing. The absolute worst time to discover that a job that is going to consume three hours of machine-time, and two more meters of expensive media than you have on the roll, is when you have already have printed 18 meters of it. That result is that you have wasted hundreds of dollars of media and consumables, only to run out just before the end.

This is even more concerning and difficult to ascertain with colours. Sometimes simply re-arranging the job queues, so that a job that will use nearly a full tank of magenta ink, because the customer has a red background for example, runs in the morning, or just after an ink-tank change – and allows the planning/estimating department to schedule the other five jobs that can run without needing that ink – is key.

The end result however is that new products and services are not a lot different than the expertise you have built up over years. Your employees have likely become experts in dealing with these variables in other production such as plates or film, but will need to learn the specific nature of these new products. Be proactive, and be eager to meet customer demands, but do not do so without understanding the product you are selling.

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