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When booking that last-minute weekend break, do you spend an afternoon trawling up and down the high street, visiting travel agent after travel agent for the best deal? Or do you do a quick scan across the many online travel websites from the comfort of your office chair?
The convenience of buying flights and accommodation online comes so naturally these days, it's difficult to remember a time when it wasn't possible. And what's good for holidays, can be good for print purchasing as well.
"The high street travel agency is a defunct business model," says Peter Lancaster, managing director of consultants W2P. "No one sits in a travel agent, negotiating a holiday to Majorca for two hours these days, so why should print buyers be expected to put up with the hassle of ringing a number of different printers and explaining the job spec each time, when it can all be done online?"
Web-to-print (W2P) may not be a new concept, but interest in the technology, even in these straitened times, is at an all-time high. With customers increasingly wanting to do business via the web rather than face-to-face, printers who don't have a W2P offering could be losing out on a massive revenue stream.
Interest in W2P is such that 30%-40% of UK printers will "seriously consider" investing in a W2P product over the next 12 to 18 months, according to Gareth Parker, production print solutions marketing manager at Ricoh UK.
Improvements in the technology have helped remove many of the IT challenges that setting up W2P in a business are perceived to bring, says Parker.
"The key thing about today's technology is its simplicity," he adds. "W2P has moved on so radically from the days when it was nothing more than an FTP site. People think W2P is hard to set up, but there are certain products available today that can be installed and up and running in literally 30 minutes. That's how easy it can be."
Imaginary obstacles
Trevor Dodsworth, head of product marketing at Canon UK, agrees the IT challenges a printer faces when setting up W2P are more perceptual than real. Even when opting for software run on a server within the print company, as opposed to the software-as-a-service (SAAS) model hosted by the vendor, W2P is not as daunting as is often imagined.
"If your business already has a web presence, then you're already halfway there," says Dodsworth. "All you're looking to do with W2P is to turn your online presence into a transactional platform, rather than just a marketing one."
A greater challenge seems to be finding the right W2P system among the dizzying array of products available. Experts agree that before any decision is made, a printer must have a sound strategy in place and an understanding of exactly what they want to achieve from their W2P offering.
"The general rule is fail to plan, plan to fail," says Lancaster. "Don't buy the product just because it happens to be the best demo. You've got to first understand what your business needs, and what your clients need. Only when you have a full appreciation of that, should you even start to consider looking at what W2P system to buy."
For those who do make the investment, the benefits of W2P are substantial. Aside from the obvious advantage of convenience - a W2P system is open 24-hours a day so a printer essentially extends its hours of service - it can also free up sales reps to concentrate on developing new clients.
"W2P is great if you have a lot of short-run work that could not be managed efficiently by a salesperson," says John Davies, business strategy manager for Fujifilm Europe. "Sales people need to spend most of their time on higher-value print work, where relationship building is required."
Davies breaks down the types of printing best suited to W2P ordering into three main groups: template printing, where the buyer enters text and images into predefined templates for items such as brochures and flyers; job re-ordering, where the buyer selects more copies of a previously run job; and ad hoc printing, for new and unique jobs where a file is submitted with printing instructions.
Experts agree that for a W2P service to be successful, printers need to have an easy-to-use storefront that simplifies the ordering process, and an effective workflow to produce and deliver the products. In this situation automation is vital and the traditional ‘job bag' approach does not work.
"As soon as printers have to manually intervene with the job, whether to make a correction or impose the job for printing, it starts costing money and introduces bottlenecks," says Robert Stabler, UK and Ireland manager for HP Indigo. "This is a key area overlooked by many W2P systems, which often only make a PDF available that then has to be downloaded along with the order details, before being prepared for print."
Some W2P systems on the market today have been developed by MIS vendors and provide an alternative front-end to their MIS systems. However, in most cases it's straightforward enough to link the two together.
"Even without JDF integration, W2P systems are capable of exporting information about the jobs ordered into an MIS," says Davies. "This could be as simple as exporting an Excel spreadsheet."
Added options
Linking to MIS is just one of a growing number of features that have evolved with W2P systems over time. Another popular feature is branded storefronts, ideal when the printer is servicing a small number of customers with a large number of accounts. "You can brand the storefront for them, and at the same time have a generic one for ad hoc customers," says Ricoh's Parker.
"Interactive user experiences are also becoming more important," he adds. "For example, a print buyer can change variables, such as page colours or tints, when going through the order process. They can then immediately bring up a soft proof to see the changes made. This obviously speeds up the whole proofing process and cuts down on waste."
Variable data printing is one of the most widely recognised features of W2P and, today, it's less about just printing business cards, and more about sophisticated marketing campaigns. CSV files with customer details, such as postcodes and email addresses, can be incorporated into any online marketing strategy, for instance.
"Companies are running marketing campaigns using personalised URLs, paper-based direct mail, and physical items such as freebies and teasers, all through W2P system," says Canon's Dodsworth. "I think it's important to look at this technology as not just purely and simply related to print. It opens up things like cross-media marketing activity to a printer in a way that conventional business models just wouldn't readily allow them to do."
Investing in W2P is an important strategic decision for any printer, one which involves careful consideration of your business and customer needs. But get it right, and extra revenue is there for the taking. You may be able to afford a few more holidays in the future too.
CASE STUDY: ProCo
Sheffield-based ProCo has never been slow to change with the times. The digital printer first took up W2P as early as 2002 and, like many others at the time, decided to build its own platform. However, the move wasn't without its problems.
"Apart from the technical difficulties and costs, we realised our initiative - however good - was company-driven, rather than customer-driven," says sales director Jon Bailey. "Still, we saw the web was becoming an integral business tool so we adapted our strategy and began to educate our customers about the benefits of W2P."
And it's been an evolutionary process all the way through to last year when ProCo invested in HP's SmartStream Director, linking it directly to its three HP Indigo presses, its Agfa Apogee X PDF workflow and its MIS. "Integration is key - it streamlines our operations, enables the creation of job bags and tickets without duplication and ensures the integrity of specifications," Bailey explains.
The importance of streamlining is apparent when 50% of all ProCo's W2P orders cost less than £300. There are customer benefits as well, including better brand control, tighter budget control, quicker turnarounds and less wastage. Customers can track jobs, allowing them to monitor progress and plan deliveries more accurately.
"W2P has definitely made us more competitive," Bailey adds. "We're in the position of being able to help our customers reduce costs without having a negative impact on our margins."
Some printers fear W2P will reduce their contact with customers, but according to Bailey that has not been ProCo's experience. "W2P has enabled us to focus on working proactively with customers, building new templates and working on applications."
