new PRINTER, the

Print Action, May 2004 by Littrell, Rick

Breaking away from traditional ideas

You have heard it before and you will hear it again: The technology transition of the graphics industry has begun. The focus of the printing workflow will become data-centric and not based on any one specific delivery format - like print. Most printing company strategies will continue to focus on getting work onto one type of printing engine or another. Regardless of what engine you might use however, a monstrous organizational disturbance is heading everyone's way because of a need to be extremely focused on data and information technology.

Even the smallest of printers must begin finding a better interface with their clients, or they will lose work to those printers that do. There is no immediate need to buy a Customer Relationship Management system worth hundreds of thousands or dollars, but there are a lot of questions today about where capital dollars should be spent. By now every printer is aware of the fact that a printing press is no longer the simple solution for a stagnant operation.

Certainly newer presses do have the advantage of automation and the ability to utilize all the incredible software that is entering the market. But there is also another side to the shift industry's shift in automation and it focuses squarely on the ability to handle data. The extreme example of printing's shift toward data, the most demanding operational shift, is in the form of variable-data printing.

Certainly a company can purchase some incredible engines for producing variable-data work like Xerox' iGen3 or HP's Indigo 5000 or Eastman Kodak's NexPress, but this does not mean that the engine-purchasing company has moved any closer to a data-centric business model. They may feel like a New Age printer but have they really broken away from any of those traditional ideas that line the graphic arts?

Before leaping into a market like variable-data printing a printer must first ask themselves if they would be better off investing money to build a digital infrastructure instead of buying a digital press. This is, in fact, a very difficult question to answer because the market is still unproven and really only ruled by innovators, along with a few early adopters. Is a company still a printer if they ignore the press and concentrate solely on building a digital room that will indeed seem empty without a press?

Whichever path a printer may follow into variable-data printing, they are likely to be hit a few major roadblocks along the way and none will be harder to overcome than the lack of properly trained staff. To enter this market, a printing company will need to stretch their ability beyond the engine and into everything that sits between developing marketing strategy and all the way to fulfillment. Of course, the smart printer will enter the market where they see a proper fit with technology, where they will not have to handle all those steps along the proper value chain needed to produce these smart documents.

It's all about the data

You will need to track every piece of data that flows into your shop, even if it may never flow out on a printed page. It is not easy to disseminate what information is the important information to keep, so you should consider all data important. This may include basic information that you have about your customer, individual job specifications, or the graphic and text elements that are used in producing the document.

You have to keep track of it all, and the good companies will, in part, standout because they thought to collect data that you did not. Of course, the challenge comes in how the data is stored so that it is readily accessible and still easy to add more collected information with it.

The ability to transform and manage different databases is the most significant skill that is now required of any printer. Data is increasingly important and what we do with it can be the difference between being competitive and growing your business to...well, you know what I mean. It's not a pleasant picture.

Digital asset management has become a core competency and your customers expect a plan and technology to be in place when an organization is implementing a digital workflow. It gets more complex when the databases are used for dynamic page production as is required in variable-data printing. Methods to manage the versioning of the graphic elements and the associated text have to be firmly established (see Printer's Digest, page 31).

It is a requirement to have data that is reliably accessible - 24/7 - and secure. Most printer sites do not have sufficient processes in place for backup, archival and disaster recovery. Remote secure access is mandatory.

Companies hiring database administrators (DBA) to maintain and manipulate the data/information is becoming more commonplace. With the pressure for us to support a cross-media production workflow and decreasing turnaround times for the job, it creates a situation where automation might as well be your only option. And you have to be extremely well organized and efficient in accessing, manipulating and delivering the required image data.