e-Commerce and Job Submission: Content Meets Commerce

Originally appeared in GATF Technology Forecast 2004

By Chuck Gehman

We’ve reached the point in the printing industry where we should no longer talk about “e-Commerce” as a standalone subject. Entering 2004, an integrated business and production workflow that incorporates content and commerce has become an essential part of business for printing companies of all sizes.

We shouldn’t focus on ways to combat reverse auctions, or sites that provide buyers with the ability to send print RFQs to multiple sites for quotes. Instead, by offering compelling, functional and integrated online services to customers, their perception of the Printer changes from a commodity supplier producing goods that can be anonymously procured to a value-added service provider. The discussion is more about the next generation of workflow—where the customer’s workflow is “connected” to our own via Internet applications.

The Landscape Today

In their recent study, entitled “The New Corporate Print Customer: A Profile of a Market in Transition”, July 2003, CAP Ventures (www.capv.com) confirms the premise that very few corporate customers are using their own print e-procurement systems today. According to CAPV, only 14% of those surveyed said that they employed a system for either print or paper procurement. They were also asked whether their print providers offered such a solution, and over 59% of document owners and 48% of print buyers said they did not know.

According to CAPV, in their March 2003 study entitled, “The U.S. e-Print Infrastructure Market”, more than half of the print providers surveyed said they offered Web-enabled services to their customers. This disparity in results between the two surveys can only mean that either Printer’s sales forces are not effectively promoting their online solutions, or the functionality of those solutions are not meeting the needs of their corporate customers.

In the July report, CAPV goes on to say that they “believe that integration of Web infrastructure with production systems and back-office business systems is critical for print providers to realize the full benefits of the technology. Until this integration occurs, Web solutions will primarily have value as customer acquisition and customer retention tools, and will remain a cost of doing business.“

Fortunately, as we enter 2004, the “year of JDF” (Job Definition Format, www.cip4.org, an industry standards initiative that promises to make such integration possible), web-based solutions that provide such capabilities are emerging and are, in fact, in use by some printers today. Market segments in the industry that are benefiting by offering such integrated online workflow applications to their customers include the small quick print shop, digital on-demand facilities, corporate InPlants, sheetfed and web offset commercial printers, packaging printers and specialized corporate identity printers.

Drivers for Adoption of Online Technologies

Printers and their customers are discovering that there are numerous benefits to be found in working together online. For both, the primary drivers are increased employee productivity and cost savings. Printers specifically can benefit from restored profitability due to the increased efficiency and the ability to offer value-added services. There are numerous ancillary benefits for printers, including better customer service and customer lock-in.

Drivers for printing companies to offer these services include:

• Need to improve sales and customer service productivity (keep sales people selling new jobs, not chasing status on work in progress or delivering proofs)
• Need to minimize manual order entries, decreasing chance for error; integration between internal business systems (like accounting, estimating, production systems, etc.) and the web site provides this benefit
• Desire to link incoming jobs with estimates, costing and production workflow (again, integration provides this link)
• Need to automate job progress through departments, and control change orders and track digital job files
• Increase internal and external communication and improve customer service (if the system used by production personnel and CSRs in the plant has status information, you should be able to share a subset of that information with customers and sales people via the web)
• Need to offer value-added services (mailing, fulfillment, on-demand, etc.)

While a relatively large number of printers have web sites today (by some estimates, more than 85% of printing companies), very few have sites that are actually “functional” and provide real services to customers (as witnessed by the CAPV survey results). Most today are still “brochure-ware” sites that briefly introduce the company and its technical capabilities. Many printers have “request a quote” button on their sites, but they typically provide a single form (often either too complicated or conversely, too limited) that sends an email to a sales person or the owner with some basic information—there’s no direct connection to estimating or to workflow, so the information must be manually interpreted and re-keyed into another system.

Printers who have adopted functional web sites today have, in many cases, done so in response to pressure from competitors offering such services, or upon the request of an important customer. This tracks closely with the way Printers have traditionally adopted most new technologies, and isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it explains why, despite much of the hoopla (both positive and negative) of the last few years, these applications are now beginning to achieve widespread acceptance—most customers weren’t asking for them before. Today, print buyer customers want their Printers to deliver such services because:

• Most print buyers are not experts in printing processes and technologies (in fact, successful print procurement managers tend to move quickly up the ladder into what are perceived as more “important” corporate commodities like raw materials used for manufacturing)
• Want to move most print buying from a corporate procurement function out to the document “owner” (i.e., the creator or user of the printed product), while still maintaining control over print spending
• Desire 24/7 customer service, and want to delegate the lion’s share of this support to the Printer rather than directly supporting end-users
• Need higher value interaction with suppliers (i.e., don’t want to call for status information, preferring to spend time working on new jobs and other ways to improve their own service to their internal customers)
• Want self-service status, billing and shipping tools

Anatomy of a Fully Integrated, Web-to-Print Operation

What are the things that a printing company web site needs to do to provide real value to the print-buying customer and to internal operational needs? How does this translate into better customer service and increased efficiency in the print manufacturing operation? Figure 1 outlines the range of functionality that a robust, full-featured printer-delivered web site, integrated with business and production systems, should provide.

The ability to specify a new job, and to submit simple specifications of the job for estimating is the first step in the process. Only a limited number of print buyers will want to provide complete, technical specifications for jobs that they want quoted, but that ability should be provided. For everyone else, a “quick ticket” should be provided so that the minimal required amount of information about the proposed job can be submitted.

In an ideal world, once the job has been submitted for quote, it will flow directly into the estimating system so a print professional can “fill in the blanks”, and deliver the fleshed-out spec back to the customer in an interactive process.

Once the customer has decided to move forward with the job as quoted, a robust web offering includes the ability for customers to deliver files via a simple transfer method. These files should be associated (in business and workflow systems) with the quote that has been previously provided to the customer.

Figure 1: Anatomy of a Fully Integrated, Web-to-Print Operation

Source: EFI, Inc.

As we all know, it’s a rare job that is actually complete when the digital files are first sent to the printer. There are bound to be changes, and a web-integrated content management system allows those changed elements (i.e., images, graphics, pages, text) to be delivered from the customer to the printer easily and with version tracking. It’s also important to track changes that impact work in progress at the printing plant (in prepress, for example), so they can be associated with change orders and an approval workflow and later be billed back to the customer (preventing miscommunication and billing disputes).

Once the job moves into prepress at the printing company, customers should be able to view page proofs of jobs (i.e., softproofing and/or to download files for color-managed output on a local proofing device), and to approve or decline them.

For many print applications, variable print is becoming an important component. So an integrated web solution should offer the ability for customers to both create “versioned” documents (i.e., typesetting their own business cards), as well as to “customize” template-driven variable documents by applying pre-programmed business rules that provide the ability to programmatically change out text, images and database-supplied content (i.e., one-to-one marketing applications).

Integration with mailing list providers and corporate databases are becoming another essential touch point for Printers offering web site solutions. For example, an insurance company may want their agents to order customized brochures (with their own office address and the agent’s name, as an example), and then choose from a list of customers and prospects to which they can mail the brochure. The Printer will receive orders from agents around the country via the web site. Workflow automation features turn the orders into optimized print jobs (where multiple orders are ganged on the same press run) incorporating the agent’s customized data as well as the customer-specific data from the mailing list provider’s database.

Many jobs today will incorporate elements that are printed offset, some items that are pulled from finished goods inventory and others that are printed on-demand. The web site needs to allow an order to be built that supports all of these type of job elements, and allow multiple ship-to destinations, as well as pre-built and build-on-the-fly kitting for fulfillment applications.

Workflow integration can be as simple as digital files landing on a file server at the printing company, or as complex as automatic settings-correct PDF generation, automatic soft- and color-managed hardcopy- proofing, whether at the Print manufacturing site or at the end-user site.

For some customers, Printers may desire to provide workflow integration that goes as far as actual output (for example, on digital variable jobs: customer places the order, digital files are chosen, and the job automatically enters a particular “workflow” pipeline, where they are processed and automatically output on a digital press. This type of automation can be particularly suitable for InPlant work, but is beginning to see adoption in commercial print, too.

While most Printers don’t want their customers to see all the “ups-and-downs” their jobs go through as they move through the production process, they do want customers to be able to login and see the status of their jobs at the level of detail the printer wishes to communicate. Since this job status may well be tracked today inside an existing print management system, we need the ability to populate status fields out to the web site.

Any robust, integrated web application should also provide email notifications to both the Printer and the customer upon major events (i.e., order received, order in process, proof sent, proof approved, change order, order shipped, reorder, inventory low condition, etc.)

At completion, the job is shipped, and it is a necessity for the customer to be able to view status on the web that this has happened, when, by what carrier and when they can expect it to arrive at its destination.

Accepting credit cards for smaller jobs, and processing corporate payments electronically or interfacing to corporate procurement or ERP systems (like SAP,) are becoming necessities for Printers, too. An invoice should be presented to the corporate customer in the way they desire, and the web experience should support that. The more accurate the invoice, the more timely the manner in which it is presented, results in the higher the likelihood of its getting paid more quickly.

Finally, respecting and supporting the sales relationship is a delicate issue with online systems. A system should be complimentary to the personal relationships between buyers and their reps at the printing company—not work at odds with them. For larger jobs, the ability for the sales person to view the invoice, add markups and/or make corrections in an interactive workflow with plant personnel is a huge value-add.

Summary

Restoration of shrinking margins, the ability to handle more complex work (and shorter runs), while controlling costs and at the same time capturing additional market share via value-added services are all key goals for successful printers in 2004.

By offering a workflow- and business- integrated, functional web site that provides better service while streamlining both your customer’s business processes and your own internal operations is a key way to achieve these goals. All of these things are possible today, and are key ingredients for the successful Printer in the future.