THE PRINTER AND THE INTERNET

It's a fair bet that, having read this paper's title, at least 60% of your fellow readers will have turned the page thinking that this is a paper prophesising the demise of print thanks to the Internet. It isn't 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 40% 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 heavily invested in our ability to print more, faster.

As customers have become accustomed to our ability to turnaround quality print quickly so average run lengths have steadily dropped yet the amount of 'paperwork' has not decreased. Therefore we are proportionately spending a greater amount of time administering print not producing it. Stretching this argument out, let’s assume you are asked to digitally print half a dozen copies of a 16pp brochure – there will come a point when you spend more non-chargeable time administering the job than chargeable time printing it.

To bring back some order 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.

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 to your customer and supplier networks. This doesn't 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'll note that what I've 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's not without it's problems.

With so much preparatory work taking place before digital artwork files arrive within your 'premises' we often find ourselves cleaning and correcting files in order to get them through pre-press. A printer in the US is said to use online pre-flight checking tools to check the integrity of the file before it's delivered. If it's incorrect the customer decides whether to send the file or abort the transfer, thus giving them the opportunity to remedy the problem and save a premium being charged by the printer for sorting the problem. This is but one example of how you can extend your business processes into your client base, adding value and reducing administration cost.

Trading electronically is about your business reaching out to your clients so it's easier for them to trade with you but who’s responsibility is it anyway? Isn't it up to the client to get their files right in the first place?

How many times have you had a difference of opinion with a customer concerning where the responsibility lies for something like artwork trapping? Surely if you offered your client a web page for artwork delivery the use of which was conditional to acceptance of your terms of business that would clear up any potential misunderstanding.

The Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002# makes it clear that "...a service provider shall, prior to an order being placed by the recipient of the service, provide to that recipient in a clear, comprehensible and unambiguous manner...(a) the different technical steps to follow to conclude the contract;...(c) the technical means for identifying and correcting input errors prior to the placing of the order;...". Therefore, when used as a platform for business the Web can not only enforce your terms of business but can also resolve problems before they are currently picked-up.

Supplier deployed eCommerce is a must. As an industry we tend to deploy technology once there is a clearly expressed need for it (take ISDN and digital print as examples). Buck the trend, make your company easier to do business with and make certain that when your customers wish to begin trading electronically with your business, you have a clear strategic path along which you can lead them. The strategy that permits them to trade on your terms, send you the data you need and in the format you want will save you administrative or repetitive work that’s invariably difficult to charge for.

There are plenty of case studies and examples in the public domain about supplier deployed eCommerce in retail, finance and banking and it is easy to see why these supplier-managed systems succeed (I mean, would you want to bank over the Internet using a system you built yourself?). There is one sector of print that eCommerce has saturated; print management.

Whilst I marketed printChannel.com here in the UK, I saw print management companies invest a great deal of effort into eCommerce, seeing it as a means of simplifying their administration of print jobs. With account handlers on-site as the sole point of contact, eCommerce opened a direct connection to remote print site(s) for delivering correct job specifications along with robust artwork files. The print management philosophy is fine tuned to service provision and business process management, not just provision of print.

So, eCommerce can formalise ordering processes and the transfer of data between two or more parties. The two parties need not have a buyer or supplier relationship, they may be colleagues within the same company. Recalling the DTIs definition of eCommerce you'll appreciate that eCommerce is just as likely to be an email or a text message as it is a request posted on an Intranet or web page.

Your customers and, perhaps more importantly, your customer's customers are willing citizens of the information society and the challenge for print is to offer simple, efficient print solutions.

eCommerce is, by definition, a term that relates to integrated transactional business processes. Exchanges of electronic information can be managed, monitored, tracked, filed and recalled far more effectively than their paper counterparts. eCommerce is not just a trendy buzzword for the transference of the aforementioned paperwork to a computer; the benefit is that eCommerce can offer an audit trail of activity meaning that operations can be measured, timed and costed far more efficiently.

Invoicing, payments, stock management and call offs, soft proofing, document and image management, estimates, price benchmarking, file delivery and remote print, collaboration and project management and one to one marketing are but some of the easy wins.

Whilst we have invested in order to print more and print faster, print consumers' comfort with IT and the ease and variety of communication channels open to them has grown. The next phase of your development will be to connect your business processes, releasing data and generating knowledge throughout the supply-chain so we can continue to deliver competitive, timely, quality printed products in the face of alternative media.

Most print businesses manufacture bespoke printed pieces and although size, shape may be broadly similar both the specification and origination will differ with every single order. Our terminology and processes confuse and even frustrate many a print buyer, after all, they know how to print; they just select File then Print from the menu bar. In today's computer literate society printing needs to be this simple and it's up to us to make it so.

When orders go wrong, the cause is often a breakdown in communication or record keeping and the hunt for the smoking gun (the Post-It-Note on the job docket) is the only way proof can be offered that an instruction was not given, received or followed. Electronic audit trails can make the process somewhat easier. The heavy administrative part of our printing businesses is understanding and interpreting what our customers want and offering it to them at a price they're happy to accept. If, through our use of eCommerce, we can demystify the black art of print by clearly communicating our needs and make sending us work simple, we will save ourselves plenty of administration cost and time.

For a number of years there have been systems in existence that can automatically generate estimates for customers without the need for your estimator's involvement. Does this signal the end of the Estimator as we know it? Of course not. What it does signal though is a refocusing of the Estimator's activity, maintaining the system rather than being a slave to it in order to raise your competitiveness. Benchmarking your prices within your marketplace, devoting time to pricing higher value work, jobs with numerous components, with high degrees of complexity or special finishes that an online system doesn't presently cater for.

If certain estimates can be self generated online then does this mean that the salesperson will spend less time in front of the customer? Perhaps, but this also means that the salesperson can focus a larger part of their day onto breaking new accounts or managing key accounts.

Think about eCommerce not as an isolated breed of technology but as a strategic approach to business, one where administration and process efficiency are increased through the connection of IT and mining the value from the data so exchanged.

The solutions that you adopt and offer will largely depend on your market needs. For instance a copy shop will need to offer wildly different online capabilities to a web offset printer or a carton printer. However, it's not just the interface between your business and your customer that is about to undergo change. eCommerce is the connection of business processes within supply chains so, if you're not being offered them already, you should look to be opening a dialogue with your suppliers concerning their eCommerce approach.

Naturally, I don't expect you to have to develop these yourself (because eCommerce should be supplier deployed) but you're bound to have an opinion on how you could effectively order paper, inks, chemistry, toner and other consumables. Larger printers have for a long time had their paper and ink levels managed by their suppliers and it's becoming increasingly common for presses, processors and setters to be linked for remote diagnostic capability.

You will not be able to buy one e-Enabled killer software application that will "do all your eCommerce for you" just in the same way as you do not have one Mac application that composes artwork, gives hi-res scans, builds quotes and makes your press ready. Just like your print success has come from your mix of presses and finishing kit, your eCommerce success will come from your unique mix of value added connected technologies that you offer to your market.