The eight-staff Leicester-based business said that, leveraging its nationwide roster of print fulfillers, it will now offer the PaaS platform to printers as a means to outsource from the national printing supply chain.
John Roche, chief executive of Haybrooke, told Printweek that Haybrooke’s own estimates have found that around 10% of industry print work is thought to be outsourced, and that the new PaaS for Printers option, which was fully launched earlier this month, can help to connect printers to the trade.
“Printers have always been fulfillers in the system, so effectively they would provide us with the basis of the pricing, namely the machinery that they had etc, and we would then connect them with the buyers by giving pricing to the buyers, and then when a printer won a job they would effectively become the recipient of said job,” he explained.
“It had of course occurred to us before that printers do outsource, but there wasn’t a mechanism built into our system that allowed them to be both a buyer and a supplier in a fluid way.
“But then a few weeks ago we had a couple of interesting conversations with a few printers who asked if they could use the system for outsourcing themselves and we thought ‘why not, they’re a customer – printers buy from printers’.
“So we soft-launched it around eight weeks ago – there were certain things we wanted to do to make it work and flow better for printers and to make the environment a bit more intuitive for printers to use from a buying perspective – but before we made those changes we gave a small group of printers access as a buyer to see how they got on. They loved it and found it great that they could access the print marketplace themselves.”
He added: “As far as printers are concerned, if your customer comes to you and asks if you can do a job and you don’t have the kit or you’re too busy, the last thing you should say is no – you should not turn away business because the customer goes somewhere else, and the place they go to may also do what you do and you end up losing the custom.
“So you can now outsource it through the portal, and you’ll certainly find somebody who can do it as every genre of print is accommodated.”
Roche said there are some differences between what is being shown to the printer and what is being shown to the reseller – the other customer of the system.
“We’re effectively showing the printer a scaled down version of what we show a reseller – which is why we had to do a little bit of development – to make it more appropriate for printers’ needs, as it didn’t need as many bells and whistles.
“They still get access to the entire marketplace, see the most competitive price, and can place orders in the system, and once they place an order in the system they will have transparent access to who the fulfiller is, can communicate directly with them, and can have a relationship with them.”
As is the case for other PaaS users, Roche said there would be no cost to printers to use the service.
Roche added that Haybrooke now has hundreds of printers in the PaaS system, with access to a total of 1,528 printing machines, which includes 68 different types of machine.
PaaS was initially launched in January 2021 as a trade-only outsourcing service that connects print buyers with printers.
Last year Haybrooke added two major new features to PaaS: built-in instant messaging between customers and suppliers, and a module for supplier ratings by customers.
Haybrooke subsequently won an unnamed large new client for PaaS in January that it said alone would add a further £1m to the company’s turnover – it is expecting revenues of £2m for next year.
Earlier this year Haybrooke also went live with a new feature in its PDQ print buying platform that allows printers to automatically match the price of their competitors.
