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The printing industry is undergoing fundamental
change. Institute member, Steve Whiting AIP3,
looks at the many competitive developments and examines the
use of eCommerce as a way of maintaining an advantage
It
is a fair bet that, having read this article’s title,
at least 60% of your fellow readers will have turned the page
thinking that this is a paper prophesying the demise of print
thanks to the Internet. It is not, and neither is it a review
of dotcom businesses or a recommendation to build web sites
instead of printing brochures.
What this paper sets out to do for the remaining 40 per cent
is explain, without a trace of hype, just what eCommerce is
and identify where the opportunities lie. Firstly, however,
eCommerce needs to be explored and appreciated in the context
of your print business.
Our industry is undergoing fundamental change and we are experiencing
degrees of debilitating hyper-competition. Over the past years
we have become masters of process (digital workflow) and have
invested heavily in our ability to print more, faster.
As customers have become accustomed to our ability to turn around
quality print quickly, so average run lengths have steadily
dropped yet the amount of ‘paperwork’ has not decreased.
Proportionately we are spending a greater amount of time administering
print, not producing it. Expanding this argument, let us assume
you are asked to print half a dozen copies of a 16pp brochure
digitally – there will come a point when you spend more
non-chargeable time administering the job than chargeable time
printing it.
It would seem appropriate to use IT to redress the production/administration
balance. The emerging array of technologies that are poised
to achieve this are collectively referred to as eCommerce.
Put quite
simply, eCommerce (electronic commerce) is ‘the automation
of business processes’. Cast aside notions of shopping
carts and baskets and suppliers telling you that their e-Enabled
application is all you need – one strategy and a clear
picture of your supply chain are what you need. eCommerce happens
when businesses and individuals interface and exchange data.
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The DTI defines* eCommerce as follows:
‘Electronic commerce is the exchange of information across
electronic networks, at any stage in the supply chain, whether
within an organisation, between businesses, between businesses
and consumers, or between the public and private sectors, whether
paid or unpaid.’
The key element here is that eCommerce is not limited to financial
transactions. Accepting this definition means that one comes
to regard eCommerce as being applicable to your internal IT
infrastructure, that now needs to reach into your customer and
supplier networks. This does not mean that you need to go looking
for one all-embracing ‘killer application’ but it
does mean that your business needs to become ‘connected’
by identifying the business processes that can be automated
within your business and are shared across your suppliers and
customers.
The diagram below breaks a print company into four distinct
areas of eCommerce activity:
• selling
• resourcing
• fulfilment
• capacity
Within the
activity quadrants are illustrative business processes, the
closer to the centre they are, the simpler they are likely to
be to implement. With so many different processes, what should
become apparent is that developing one application to address
everything would be crazy. Start small, think of attacking the
little things that will make a big impact on your business and
those of your customers.
You will note that what I have termed ‘pre-production’
lies closest to the centre, think of pre-production as being
processes such as digital artwork creation and file delivery.
If digital file transfer is an eCommerce process, then your
business is already very well connected, but it is not without
its problems.
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