We've been working with Adobe PDF and the internet for the last 15 years. In fact PDF and the net started around the same time in the early nineties. The first practical integration of the two technologies I witnessed was an online business card ordering system developed specifically for CocaCola back in 1995.

It cost them over US$250,000 to build and took 6 months of work. The payback came within a year.

It eliminated errors, admin overheads and reduced their card ordering times from 4 weeks to a week - All this when the pressroom was still using film, meaning that the delays (and many costs) were all at the customer front-end, not with production - which is still somewhat true today.

The question is, if online print ordering was viable for big companies back in 1995, now that it's under a tenth the cost and much easier to use, why have so few printers or their customers embraced it? Our poor telecoms internet infrastructure and high costs has certainly been a factor here, but now this is improving, there seems little reason to hold back.

An industry colleague, Heidi Tolliver-Nigro recently produced some great reports on the issues.

Costs obviously can't the only reason, since to setup an online ordering system for just one client is now cheap, just NZ$5,000-$10,000 and good internet broadband for business is now under $100/mth.

It's a question of finding the pain point. For Cocacola, the admin costs, delays and errors around business cards were causing immense grief within the company and management would have been under pressure from their own salespeople to fix it. The pain and desire to do something about it came from the customer, not the printer.

Local Examples tell a story

A small project I had last month was building online personalisation templates for a small Quickprinter in Adelaide. But the similarities with CocaCola were obvious.

Their key client has offices across the country, lots of staff and variations of product. It's a perfect match for web-to-print / e-procurement technology. But I think the real secret to making it work is to focus on the technology one client at a time. Some have tried to bring the tools in for all their customers at once and market it as a new service to everyone. It's usually a painful and costly exercise. Like everything in life, start small, keep it simple. 

What have we learned?

I've often remarked to industry colleagues of our local hesitancy to embrace web-to-print and other online customer support tools. A recent survey discussed by Barb Pellow (right) confirms where the huge US market is headed, and yes, it seems we are several years behind.

However when it comes to new technology and web-to-print implementation, it's mainly the market leaders that are doing it. (Perhaps that's why they're the market leaders). As Dr Joe has pointed out, it's the top 10% of the industry that's taking ALL of the industry profits. 

But it's not a race. It's about doing what's most appropriate for each marketplace. We're not the same as the US or Europe, our clients are smaller and our poor internet infrastructure doesn't help. But the US does provide ideas of what we could offer if we happen to stumble across that attractive multi-national client with many offices. The convenience and cost savings are certainly there for all parties to enjoy. 

The Hidden Costs

It also appears the major cost of web-to-print now is not the initial software or setup costs. It's ensuring you have someone on staff (or contract) to keep the system up to date and running well.  Those who have implemented these systems tell us how important it is to budget for this. Customer needs and Web technologies are constantly changing and you'll need someone to help keep it all on track - And unfortunately, very few Mac designpeople want to do it.

Why is this? Simply it's not a creative chore, but a technological one. Small offset and digital printers in the US will quite often outsource this aspect, eliminating the need to hire specialist IT staff. The neat thing is that you're not restricted to the local market. As we showed with the Adelaide printer, the support provider can be almost anywhere on earth.

Should Printers get involved?

We could sit back and just let the customers do it themselves as CocaCola did. In the big US market there's plenty of developers pandering to the buying needs of big corporates, not their suppliers.

But the downside of this for Printers is the loss of control. The client is then in control of where jobs are printed and inevitably turns it into a lowest tender situation. However if Printers set it up for their key clients, they maintain more control of the jobs and margins, whilst improving customer service and turnaround times, which means far happier, immensely loyal customers.

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