How would you react if a supplier told you that you didn’t know how to run your company? Many proud printers would stop that conversation in its tracks. Others, however, might ask whether the supplier could provide a toolkit to help.

The race for success in print is highly competitive, so anyone offering to get under the bonnet and give your business a tune-up should be a godsend. “Over the last 10 years, there’s been a gradual acceptance from the print community that, because most of them operate relatively small companies, they can’t have all the expertise in-house that they need,” says Richard Gray, BPIF South managing director and director of Vision in Print (VIP). Hence the burgeoning market for ‘business development (BD) tools’.

The print community has long had a bevy of options to help it understand and expand operations. A few equipment suppliers historically backed up their prerequisite operator training and after-sales care with business-centric support, but this was very much secondary to selling heavy metal. Xerox UK marketing manager colour products Kevin O’Donnell admits: “Going back a while, once we’d sold the hardware, it was the end of our job. But our culture has changed. Our job really begins when we sell the hardware – our job is to fill that machine up.”

Around the early 2000s, the BD sector was formalised by digital press vendors looking to add value to the sales proposition and foster healthy customers, ones that would then go on to make future kit investments. Each vendor has since taken its own angle on what constitutes BD; tools can include anything from printed or CD-based training manuals, Quark or Adobe InDesign templates to produce marketing literature, ROI calculators, training days in a workshop environment, face-to-face consultancy onsite, or even online networks for users of similar equipment.

Setting the trend
Xerox was an early pioneer and has taken a leading role ever since. Its ProfitAccelerator programme, which was conceived through market research in the US prior to launching the iGen3 in 2002, came to the UK in 2003. It has since grown to carry a portfolio of around 100 tools across digital-specific sales and marketing, case studies, and price matrices, to name but a few. A basic pack costs £500, while the Gold bundle, which includes this pack plus a ‘training needs analysis’ and three days’ training, costs around £6,000. O’Donnell believes Xerox set a trend that has been proven by five years of BD growth across the entire digital supplier community.

However, graphic communications consultant Chris Jordan raises one potential snag with the Xerox model. When Jordan goes into a print firm, the first thing he wants to know is whether management are any good at their business. “They don’t like being asked those types of questions. That’s what makes the Xerox model difficult [to sell],” Jordan says. “If you’re a salesman, the last thing you want to do is start asking your prospect negative questions.”

Jordan says Canon has avoided such a scenario by turning to a network of third-party consultants to both deliver its workshops, and “ask the difficult questions”. Canon launched its Business Builder programme in 2003, using the UK as the proving ground. Former quick printer Geoff Hobbin says: “In 1998, I received a [Profit Builder] pack from Canon on how to better my business. It was one of the most valuable things a supplier ever gave me.”

Hobbin went on to join Canon in 2002, and is now European business development manager, in charge of growing Business Builder across Europe. While Canon’s programme includes a hard-copy kit, Hobbin is well aware of that format’s limitations. “Where printers are quite busy, that pack of information could quite easily disappear on the top of a shelf somewhere. So that’s why we started to initiate single-day workshops,” he says. Both the pack and the workshops are bundled into a press investment, and Canon has expanded Business Builder to include paid-for consultancy.

Another printer well versed in some of Canon’s BD portfolio is Kerry Button, sales and marketing manager at seven-site commercial print operation Press to Print. Button used to work for Canon as marketing operations manager for Graphic Industries and knows the limitations of hard-copy kits. “One of the first things I did there was put together a programme called Profit Builder, which was a CD-based marketing support tool. It came with wonderful bells and whistles and was given away free of charge,” says Button. “I think the majority of them were holding doors open in various factories.”

He says that in the early days of BD, manufacturers rushed to market with tools to differentiate themselves, but forgot that the majority of printers don’t have the time or inclination to read a handbook or browse a CD-ROM. Button recently bought a Konica Minolta Bizhub Pro C6500 colour printer, and Konica approached him with its own take on BD: Customer Academy training. According to Konica: “We wanted to set up something more hands-on interactive and customised. The Customer Academy has a basic structure, but it can be tailored to the individual customer’s needs.”

HP opted for a mix of customised and off-the-shelf BD with its Capture programme, which launched in 2006 as a relative newcomer. The scheme, which includes marketing templates, educational tools and training, has found its footing among Indigo users and was ramped up this year with the Capture online portal. With business development intrinsically linked to workflow, uptake could well go hand-in-hand with HP’s recently unveiled SmartStream system.

Strategic planning
One BD brand gaining a good reputation for its emphasis on face-to-face interaction is Kodak MarketMover for Nexpress and Versamark users. Kodak UK business development manager Chris Martin says: “In the early stages of a sale, and even pre-sale, we will sit down with the senior people and discuss the strategy our customer’s business is going to use: what markets do they want to target; where do they work now; where does their experience lie; where can we develop an effective sales and marketing strategy.” Kodak uses this feedback to develop a programme on how to sell or market colour digital “in all its glory”, adds Martin. The price is built into the cost of a new press, while extra consultancy is charged at a day rate of about £800. These interactive elements are backed up by resources accessed through the MarketMover website.

Kodak is now working on a uniquely useful addition to the range: MarketMover Network. The initiative, which is currently under development, is a global network of Nexpress users that not only gives printers the opportunity to share knowledge with one another, but could also be a platform for work. “We had an enquiry recently from a tyre company in the States. They wanted to print brochures in five countries in Europe through a network of presses with similar output,” he says.

Opportunities for contracts are sure to lure printers, but is the average firm actually interested in training manuals and business consultancy services? Xerox’s O’Donnell admits that while there are some “fantastic organisations out there, big and small, that invest in the development of their businesses, there are three things you’ll never get a printer to put his hand is his pocket for: one is consultancy; one is software; and one is training”. His broad brush perspective is that the industry needs to step up to its business and people development. It’s by no means an entirely altruistic idea – a healthy business with a full production schedule is much more likely to make a second or third digital press investment.

Jordan agrees that printers who treat a press purchase like buying a new Ferrari do so at their peril. Without the software and business intelligence to back up a machine’s production specs, it can be “like drip-feeding a hungry lion”, he adds.

BD tools are an attempt by the manufacturers to build a more successful future for themselves by helping the industry at large. And Jordan has a stark warning for those that ignore the rapid evolution of the digital print business: “If there’s huge growth in digital devices, which there definitely is in the UK, then the price is probably going to go down 10-15% per annum because of the competition. That means you’ll need to grow your print volume by 10-15% per year just to stay alive.” A business development MOT could be just the kind of tinkering needed to keep pace in the modern print industry.

Best of the rest
Outside the digital arena, offset manufacturers, paper and consumables suppliers, industry bodies and software developers alike have products and services to help printers. But the landmark moment came when digital vendors badged up their products and services as ‘business development (BD) tools’ under a single marketing-friendly banner, promoted them, tied them into press investments and, in some cases, charged a fee.

Richard Gray, BPIF South managing director and director of Vision in Print (VIP), says: “The concept is good regardless of the technology. The digital community was quicker to wake up to this need, and the rest of the print supplier community is waking up to it.”

Sheetfed offset firms in particular had cause to help their customers escape the commodity trap signposted with the advent of digital. In late 2004, Heidelberg brought its service and support portfolio under the umbrella brand SystemService. Along with parts and maintenance, the portfolio includes business optimisation and project management. Manroland’s PrintValue division encompasses BD, where business consultancy rests alongside process optimisation and repair. Prior to Drupa, KBA launched consultancy service KBA Complete, which provides press users with process analysis and integration through JDF.

Gray points out two more examples in Sun Chemical, which helps users boost business efficiency through better use
of inks, and Howard Smith Paper, which can offer paper cut to size or in non-standard volumes.

A third-party supplier with a strong print pedigree is Springwood UK, whose Enterprise Business Model tool has garnered praise from printers such as TJ International and Beacon Press. The CD-based resource includes a ‘System Sorter’ with solutions to 66 regular problems faced by printers, materials on ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, and a profit calculator. 

Of course, consultancy, training and support documents have long been at the heart of the BPIF, though historically in a less formal fashion. Around three years ago, the federation brought BPIF Business under the VIP umbrella and began promoting it in a more systematic way. The market has been highly receptive to this approach; as Gray points out: “We’ve doubled the turnover of that part of the BPIF in the last three years.”