E-Production Is E-Volving

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 2000 by Bert Langford

As it does, a new Web-hosted business may help streamline production workflow-- but first it must win an audience, and that will be difficult.

Over the last few months, a new form of Web-hosted, business-to-business e-commerce company, commonly referred to as "e-production," has emerged. The many software applications to be offered will, by-and-large, be hosted on the e-production company's Web site, where publishers and vendors will transact business.

There are over 60 firms attempting to enter this market in various forms of graphic arts interaction, but the business models portending the greatest impact on the way publishers interact with their suppliers are e-procurement and e-processes.

E-procurement: This is the buying and selling of print-related services/products over the Web through an intermediary source. It includes the ability to browse through a database of vendors filtering on location and capabilities; submitting a request for quotation based on your criteria; receiving one or several bids; executing an order; tracking the order's production, shipping and receiving; and the billing and payment for the order.

E-procurement does not preclude human contact with vendors; rather, it is meant to offer more choices while streamlining procurement processes.

For publishers, e-procurement's strongest merits are in the commercial printing of ancillary production--i.e., any kind of printing-related product or service not under a magazine contract such as inserts, brochures, media kits and stationery. Therein lies its strength, as traditional ancillary procurement is very time-intensive.

E-processes: With e-processes, you use planning and management software products hosted on your e-production vendor's Web site. In reality, it is the same as outsourcing software that perhaps you use internally.

E-process categories can include project management (for example, ancillary inserts); process management (book planning and transmittal of issue specs to printer, ancillary or magazine); paper and other material management; schedule management; digital asset management (archiving content into digital form); and other facilities management.

The financial merits of e-processes include the ability to "rent," at a fraction of the cost of owning, all such software through transaction, subscription or contract fees. The potential downside is that you don't own the software, and transaction/subscription fees could add up to much larger dollars than anticipated. In examining this possibility, however, also compare e-production fees to software licenses and their annual upgrade/support fees.

Perhaps the best feature of e-process companies is that they will ultimately offer full integration between software products, as well as between the buyer and vendor. (I've heard that it will be from two to 10 years for a completely integrated stream.) And this means considerable streamlining of printer and publisher operations.

E-numerating the e-players

I had the opportunity to moderate a roundtable on e-production for FOLIO: West with representatives from Noosh, Impresse and PrintCafe--three key players that are among the most aggressive companies entering the publishing market.

Impresse (Impresse.com) and Noosh (Noosh.com) are pushing the corporate marketplace--aggregately a much larger market for print-related vendors than all of publishing combined--and not shying away from publications. Both companies are talking to and signing up publishers and vendors for e-procurement. With regard to e-processes, I expect to see both companies sign up independent software vendors who currently license to printing and publishing clients, completing the Web-hosted business model through further integration development.

The business model for PrintCafe (PrintCafe.com) is decidedly different. It is focused mainly on graphic arts, not the corporate marketplace--for now. However, I believe that if the business model will work for graphic arts companies, it will work for anyone.

What really makes PrintCafe unique is that it acquired a number of existing software vendors already serving the printing marketplace and is currently working to fully integrate all product lines as covered above for e-processes. The jury is out on how well this will work. For example, if you like Vendor A's scheduling software, will PrintCafe enable you to continue with that while using other PrintCafe modules that you prefer? Also, PrintCafe will in future versions support only Web-hosted applications, leaving out the desirable option of buying licenses as an alternative.

Further, while PrintCafe has developed a new data exchange protocol of its own known as PCX (based on XML, extended markup language), it is not public domain. In one form or another, you have to do business with PrintCafe to use it. Independently, Impoze Systems, based in Mukwonago, Wisconsin, has developed a public domain XML standard. Both are intended to replace PROSE as a better integration tool for passing information between publishers and printers.