Business transformation to drive growth and gain efficiency
You will know that your print business needs transformation if:
This means that the print has to be better – more creative, more impactful, more targeted, more valuable to the recipient. Alternatively, the print has to be more cost effective, both for the customer to buy and for the printer to produce, handle and deliver. The natural response for print businesses over many years has been to buy a new press, so that it can produce quicker output, higher quality output, cheaper output per unit, sometimes maybe even different types of output.
This may have been successful in the past but Ricoh believes that print businesses of the 21st Century need to think in added dimensions if they are truly going to be able to meet their customers’ demands going forward. This is something that we have observed first hand, while talking to our customers and prospects about a new press investment. A great deal of diligence is put into assessing the market place and the printing technologies of the major manufacturers, as you would expect; these can, after all, be million-pound capital outlays. Printers look at issues such as the print quality, the speed, the cost of inks and clicks. A decision is made, the press installed, and six months later it is apparent that the company in question is not getting the best out of its investment. Make-ready times are no better than before, valuable time is being misspent in customer engagement before the job even comes in, and then during the printer’s own internal processes before and after printing.
Making it worse, the number of jobs is increasing while the number of copies in each job is decreasing, putting yet more strain on a system that needs more than simply a bigger, faster printing press to become efficient. Ricoh contends that the business problems that most printing companies have are not caused by a lack of printing firepower. They are caused by a lack of infrastructure around the printing department, leading to inefficiency, delay, error, miscommunication, missed deadlines and missed opportunities. The nature of the marketing, publishing and communications worlds is that documents – be they direct mail pieces, books or brochures – are moving from static content to dynamic. In doing so, greater and more intelligent use of data has become paramount. Increasingly, the difference that a print business can show is not in its ability to put marks on paper; it is in its capacity to cope with this growing dynamism. Consequently, printers need to be both more efficient and more innovative.
Our answer to this – articulated in the title of this document – is that printers must Think Beyond the Printed Page. They must give at least equal weight to the infrastructure they put around a printing press as they do to the press itself. In our experience, this is the key to pursuing a successful digital print strategy – one that enables you to produce the dynamic print your customers need and solve their additional marketing and logistics needs, while growing the business in an efficient and scalable way.
It is of course possible that you may benefit from investing in inkjet printing technology or upgrading a cut sheet toner device, but there may be real gold to be found in, for example, gaining a better insight into your customers’ buying habits and patterns through using a CRM tool to its full potential.
These enable a printer to get under the skin of their clients and shape their offering accordingly. They are included in every leading MIS solution on the market, yet few printers are squeezing the most from them.
Through analysing CRM information, you might discover that, for example, you have a client buying marketing collateral in bulk at the start of every year. As the year progresses, they are frequently needing to reorder items as they become obsolete. The customer may be under the illusion that ordering in bulk is the best option for them. Imagine the kudos that you will gain by pointing out that there are more efficient ways of managing this supply of print that will save them money, save waste and ensure documents are always kept up to date.
Such initiatives require a degree of business transformation, dependent on the nature and scale of the problem that needs to be solved. A framework needs to be created that will free the print business from the bonds of paper-based job and process management, and that will automate the complexity that surrounds every campaign and relationship. It is the completion of a transformation from being a 19th or 20th Century manufacturing-based operation, dealing in volume, and existing at a single point in the supply chain, to becoming a modern, responsive communications provider with a wide-ranging portfolio of digital capabilities that enable it to play invaluable roles up and down a vibrant supply chain.
The business transformation will be a technological, cultural and organisational undertaking that will present significant challenges for most print companies, and overcoming these challenges should not be a task that they set out on alone. They should make use of suppliers that have expertise in systems integration and that can shape the most effective methods of document and process management within manufacturing environments, with efficiency the final goal.
FCS Laser Mail in Birmingham became the first UK user of Ricoh’s Avanti MIS software, which has been built for digital processes. The company is moving from pre-printed stationery to customised high quality colour output and also invested in new continuous feed inkjet printing equipment. Through using Avanti, FCS Laser Mail has been able to gain full control over the entire production process.
Pensord, one of the UK’s leading trade magazine printers, was experiencing decreasing print volumes and increasing order diversity. It created a new digital print business and adopted Ricoh high end colour technology. With this, it was able to complement its litho services, target new audiences and reduce outsourced work.
Clays, a UK-based leading European book printer, needed to significantly streamline its processes to ensure jobs remained profitable. By deploying a vendor-neutral workflow solution, the business immediately saw automation have major impacts, such as creating batches of books instead of singles, managing digital and offset processes and integration with the MIS systems.
Each of these examples had its share of initial challenges and some further obstacles, foreseeable or otherwise, that cropped up along the way. Technology had to be appraised thoroughly to ensure that implementation would have the beneficial impact desired. Looking at the wider infrastructure however means considering the impact on people and processes too. Driving true business transformation means that behaviour and habits must change and that processes are refined or perhaps removed entirely.
We will look in greater detail at the challenges involved in successfully achieving transformation of print businesses in Chapter 3. For now, the central point stands that in the complex world in which many printers now find themselves operating, adopting a “thinking beyond the printed page” approach to efficiency and innovation is already a necessity. Technology is the driver of transformation, but it owes its success to the people and processes that work around it. Therein are the challenges and the great benefits of success.
