Printer Dsicmm
Turnover £120m
Sectors Financial services, corporate, travel and leisure, education, charity, local government
Staff 1,200
Issue Ensuring clients’ communications remain effective and efficient
Solution Re-engineering documents

Passport: check. Guidebook: check: Latest bestseller: check. Personalised digital print: check? Back in 2003, holiday brand Thomson added a new piece of print to the list of holiday essentials with its ticket book, which set the bar for the power of one-to-one colour digital. The pioneering printer behind the book was Dsicmm.

Fast forward five years and Thomson’s parent company TUI Travel UK has once again turned to the Dagenham-based company to refresh its ticket book in an exercise of ‘document re-engineering’. This new version would take the form of guidebook that also contained the tickets, luggage tags and labels of the previous incarnation. Once again, it fell to Dsicmm to deliver with personalised digital.

Dsicmm head of creative development Fraser Church says: "The concept was to provide relevant information for holidaymakers within an easy-to-use format. As long as you’ve also got your passport and your swimming trunks, it’s everything you’d need."

"The Thomson ‘sell’ is all about delivering additional value to customers," he adds. TUI told us that its clients wanted more information in addition to where they are going and where they’re flying from."

The original booklet included tickets, details about the accommodation and departure airport, luggage tags and regulatory details along with a limited amount of information on the destination resort and offers. The enhanced document has been packed full of extras, such as the top 10 things to do at the resort, details of the beaches, shopping, places to visit, food and drink, and nightlife.

Form and function
As the book’s function evolved, the design had to follow suit. Getting the design to match the document’s expanded purpose involved changing the format as well as the page layout and the graphic design template. We opted for perfect binding to make it look like a guidebook and not ticketing, says Church.

We worked with TUI’s designers to come up with the right look and feel. Not only did the binding style change, the shape and size of the document was altered from DL to an oversize A6 (160x127mm) portrait format. To reduce hassle for the end-user, a combination of four substrates was used. These included perforated stocks for the tickets, self-adhesive stock for labels and tear-proof stocks for the luggage tags, in addition to the main body stock.
The change in format wasn’t just about matching the aesthetics of a guidebook. It also enabled an 8-up imposition on the SRA3 sheets run through the firm’s raft of Xerox iGen3 presses, rather than the previous 6-up. This 33% improvement in pages per sheet ensured that production costs haven’t risen, despite the 10-12pp increase in the document size to around 50pp.

The switch from stitching to perfect binding was one reason why Dsicmm invested in a new Muller Martini perfect-binding line. With volumes in excess of 1m packs per year, it needed the grunt offered by the kind of hefty machine usually associated with litho rather than the lightweight kit typically found in a digital print environment.

The work also needed a heavy-duty approach to compliance, due to personalised details such as contractual information. To make sure that the booklets are all produced correctly and each one contains all the necessary details – and nothing else – the perfect binder is fitted with barcode readers to ensure every page of every guide matches up. You can’t have mistakes, says Church, adding that it is important not to rush the production of this kind of work. In fact, planning and attention to detail from the outset have been crucial to making the project a success.

Investments and returns
Church estimates that for every week of development work, there will be three weeks of planning to ensure everything runs smoothly during production. Many jobs go through several iterations, says Church. Planning is by far the most important part of the process; if you invest in planning, you get a better product. It helps us to explore postage rates and the most efficient means of production, so clients get a better return on their investment.

This kind of makeover doesn’t happen overnight. I’d be surprised if a substantially re-engineered document took less than six months, and more like a year, he adds. Much of that time is spent on involving multiple departments within a firm. Getting different departments involved adds value, says Church. We try to find as many commercial opportunities for the client as possible. Often you end up turning two or three different documents into one. For an example of this, Church turns to another high-profile job: Dsicmm’s staff benefits book for Marks & Spencer. Here the company combined what were previously nine different documents produced by six suppliers. Now it’s one piece of communication that saves vast amounts of postage and print cost. It’s a great example of re-engineering a document, he says.

Making sure that data processing and the handling of the personalisation are performed perfectly are important aspects at all stages of a project. Just as you’d proof a standard job, it’s necessary to proof hard copies of a personalised project. However, there’s also a need to go deeper and apply electronic techniques to proof the business rules – the logic and programming that underpins the personalisation. You need to ensure that the correct images are always pulled in, says Church.

He emphasises the importance of making sure there is a tightly written specification for all aspects of the document so that it can be thoroughly tested, and that the specification includes appropriate tests. Dsicmm uses its proprietary NexDox platform and internal data specialists to automate the data processing. The system also provides reports that allow clients to reconcile what was sent to the firm with what was actually produced.

Data may make the difference, but it can also make for bottlenecks. We’ve found that demanding data in a particular format can really hold things up, says Church. Dsicmm has learned that data-driven work needs to be made as simple as possible for the client. And if the data needs supplementing, we try to generate it from within the existing data. If you need to go back to the customer’s IT department to work on the data internally, it can add a significant delay to a project, he adds. The firm has a 50-strong team dedicated to developing NexDox and client applications that use the platform. Efficient processing remains vital when the data hits the print side. One of the things we’ve learnt is that you need to be able to rip quickly, says Church. You need to rip quicker than you can print. To that end, NexDox produces VPS format files that the iGens’ RIPs can handle swiftly.

Opportunities and education
Having the technology to process the data and print the results is only half the story. It’s also essential to have the sort of people who understand changing client needs and how to fulfill them. Church lauds employees who have experience of the client environment – those that bring an understanding of customers’ price pressures, departmental dynamics and marketing.

Client-side experience is useful, he says. We have a number of people who are ex-agency. Other useful skills are the ability to see past technology to what it can deliver and who can put themselves into the client’s shoes. He also sees a change in the role of the sales team. Sales people are becoming more about business development and being able to see opportunities, make recommendations, and helping to educate the client, says Church.

In fact, revising the colour digital product has also helped revitalise the business proposition. Dsicmm’s work with TUI in re-engineering its ticketing has twice shown how bolstering core print production skills with digital data and client understanding provides ongoing business benefits for both sides. The process proves that change really is as good as a holiday.

INSPECTION LESSONS
Re-engineering documents

• Looking beyond production to the purpose of the print you produce provides a win-win for the printer and the customer
• A broad mix of skills in programming, data processing, pre-media, print and post-press deliver the most added-value
• Staff with experience in your target customers’ markets and sectors ensure you understand and can meet client needs
• Development can be a long process, taking up to a year before the presses start to roll
• In-house data skills speed up project development and improve client buy-in
• Although it adds to development time, getting multiple departments within the client involved in document re-engineering can deliver bigger benefits from the end result