Staying Relevant in a Changing Production Print World
“Change is the new constant,” is probably the best phrase to describe our fast-paced personal and business lives. Experts keep telling us print is dead, and in a traditional sense, they certainly have a point, especially regarding office printing. Other branches of the printing industry, namely production printing, are still very much alive on both sides of the pond. However, even within production printing, we must differentiate, as anything document related is becoming less common, although some of it, at least for now, remains relevant, and poses, in the light of reforestation initiatives and advanced ink technology, a reduced impact on the environment.
For today, let’s keep our focus on transactional printing, direct mail, and catalog printing. Other fields, such as textile printing, packaging (revolutionary developments here), label printing, signage (very exciting battle of printed vs. digital), direct to object, and all other industrial technologies and their challenges will have to wait until another article.
Digital production printing has shown substantial growth over many years. Evolving and changing technologies, both in hardware and software, helped improve productivity and quality. The most recent “upgrade” to color inkjet systems presents a significant shift in what is possible on paper. Here, we’re referencing, in particular, the functionalities for pre-printed and short-run production compared to offset printing and its decreasing unique selling point color, by producing equal quality at a significantly lower price and more timely execution.
However, only those ready to embrace change in all aspects of the printing process will be able to stay on top of their segment, namely PSPs (print services providers) and in-plant printing departments.
Compared to the shift in the office, where change is comparatively straightforward, moving away from paper-based document and communication strategies to digital ones, production printing faces a few more challenges, as in most cases, a centralized printing department or services provider is only the executing arm of a communication/document and marketing strategy. And as such, expectations are multifaceted, ranging from technology across to creativity, and the ability to satisfy an omnichannel output and delivery strategy, including highest paper quality, optimized customer engagement using detailed personalization, and technologies going beyond paper, for example, augmented reality.
But how can a “traditional” print shop complete the transition from, say black & white laser printing to full-color, fully personalized, fully tracked inkjet printing?
How about starting with an assessment just like we do in the office imaging industry. Assess and optimize, implement and secure, automate and simplify (thank you, Xerox for letting me lean on your methodology) are no different in the production printing environment from any other. If you don’t know what you have and what your goals are, how can you future-proof your business? That’s why you need to start with the assessment.
- Know your hardware, software, workflows, and customer expectations.
- Define what has to stay. I’m thinking of some environments still using now archaic-feeling host systems to manage their data, industries that rather run systems on-premise rather than in the cloud, mainly for security reasons, or print jobs that may not easily migrate to new technologies.
- Look at your finances. How can you improve your productivity and revenue?
- What are you offering now, who are you serving now, and what could you offer going forward? Who could be additional customers for your business?
- Are you using your devices to their full capacity? If not, why and how can you change this?
- What security challenges could you face?
The list of questions is endless but necessary to get on to the right path for hardware and software.
As usual, assessment and workflow design go hand-in-hand, complemented by analytics.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, as in how productive are your printers, how can you make sure what you’re doing is the right thing? It is important to understand what print job is best handled on what device, how you can optimize color, how you can distribute jobs between devices, or even locations, what’s going wrong, and many more answers to pressing questions.
And as it is with office printing, software is crucial. Software comprises design communication, optimizes communication and resources for the desired output, optimizes data for personalized communication, and produces next-generation pieces of communication combining paper and digital experiences, to mention some examples.
Feeling overwhelmed now? Think teams. Looking at the current mergers and acquisitions, it’s not only big ones going fishing for small ones; it’s one specialist teaming up with another, even across countries and continents, to make sure as a team they can fulfill and stay ahead of customer expectations.
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