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Last weekend was Precision Printing’s busiest of the year, with all hands on deck, including managing director Gary Peeling, who started at 6am on Saturday to muck in with packing and shipping.

The firm handles up to 25,000 orders per day as part of its trade photo printing service, which with its range of personalised cards, calendars and photobooks is busiest in the run up to Christmas.

Peeling admits to having been a bit of a ‘bah-humbug’ in the past, although with the boost to his business he’s more of a fan of the festive season. "Christmas was spoiled for me back in the 1980s when we used to overprint customised messages in corporate Christmas cards," he says.

Even then the firm was no stranger to short runs and versioning, but it was working in an antiquated way using hot metal type on an old platen. Dealing with 100 orders in the run-up to Christmas was a struggle for its administrative systems, which often descended into chaos. So to be processing so many jobs in one day now is a sign of how far the business has come. To put it into sharper perspective, before the advent of digital print, the firm averaged 12,000 orders per year. But with order volume rising, the average value has plummeted from £600 to "a few quid" for the photoproducts.

The challenge is twofold: one to keep on top of the orders by making sure work flows as efficiently as possible; and two, to do so profitably.

The company’s response has been a bespoke software package, Oneflow, which manages the process from order receipt to despatch. Precision takes in job details as XML along with PDF artwork. Oneflow batches up the jobs for production according to substrate and post-press processes, prioritising the jobs to ensure deadlines are met and ensuring everything is reconciled and shipped to the right address using the right firm and invoiced to the client. In the factory every sheet is tracked by barcode, with PCs on all print and finishing lines to record progress and prioritise the most urgent jobs. It’s having these tools in place that help everyone in the firm, despite it being a hive of activity, to keep calm and carry on.

Streamlined
Order processing is completely automated and files are routed straight to one of the firm’s four Indigos, keeping transaction costs to a minimum.

"In conventional digital print, you’d get charged £50-£60 for 200 copies, and probably £40 of that is order processing costs and the client has the same overheads too," says Peeling. By automating that, costs are slashed to a point where the firm can profit from orders with a value of a few pounds. Customer service is still key, with a software development team to make sure Oneflow works seamlessly with customers’ procurement systems seen as a natural extension of the customer service delivered by its 21-strong team of CSRs dealing with its other digital and litho work.

The growth in the firm’s digital business, largely on the back of the photo market, has been phenomenal. This time last year the firm produced a none to shabby 3m clicks per month; in November, it hit 8m and is projecting 12m for December. Digital now accounts for more than half of the £12m turnover anticipated for 2010, not bad for a firm that made its first move into digital only five years ago.

"Photo products came via digital cameras and the internet, two digital technologies that combined to create a need for print," says Peeling. "Now I’m looking for the next product to grow print."

And he believes he has found it in cross-media marketing.

"Print complements what clients do online," he says. "Previously print-on-demand has been encumbered by high unit costs – because there was no idea of the volume there was no way to price.

"The exciting thing is that we can use physical media economically in a multimedia campaign and can produce it at a fixed cost. The opportunity was demonstrated by working in the photo products market, which created the one-copy model. Now we can offer that to our corporate customers for marketing communications."

Peeling has turned from a bah-humbug into print’s not-so secret Santa. With Oneflow, Precision has produced a present for print, courtesy of solving a problem for the photoproducts market, that will keep on giving for Christmases to come.

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PRECISION PRINTING
Location Barking
Turnover £12m (projected for 2010)
Market sectors photo products, on-demand digital, stationery and operational corporate print, marketing collateral and direct mail
Equipment
Litho: two-, four-, six- and 10-colour B2 Heidelberg presses and full in-house finishing including cutting, folding, stitching, binding and die-cutting
Digital: four HP Indigo presses (two 5000s, a 7000 and a 7500), full in-house digital finishing including cutting, laminating stitching and wire-binding