White Paper Series

Making web-to-print work

Table of Contents1. Introduction .....................................................................................3

2. Why aren’t more printers using web-to-print? .............................4

3. Mistakes to avoid in implementing web-to-print .........................6

4. Why web-to-print needs integration and automation

to succeed ........................................................................................8

5. How to integrate web-to-print into business systems

for maximum efficiency and profit ............................................... 10

6. What kind of print to offer via web-to-print and who

to offer it to ....................................................................................12

7. Exploring the difference between CRM, DAM,

ERP and MIS and why you should integrate

them with web-to-print ................................................................14

Web-to-print white paper

Web-to-print (W2P) has been heavily promoted for several years now but uptake is still lower than might be expected. This is at least partly because implementation – and specifically integration – issues have been overlooked, as a result of vendor ‘hype’ and customer ignorance or inexperience. Many potential W2P users in commercial digital and large-format print feel that is either not appropriate to their business or is too difficult and expensive to implement for an uncertain result; the marketing of some W2P solutions appeared to require a complete re-focusing of the printer’s business toward consumer sales, which is unfamiliar territory for the majority of commercial printers who operate in a business-to-business environment.

This white paper aims to present a more balanced and realistic view of W2P, comparing the early promises with market experience in order to explain why uptake has been slow and why integration for automation is essential for a successful W2P implementation. It will also touch on the importance of marketing W2P services to both existing and new customers.

1. Introduction

Web-to-print (W2P) has been heavily promoted for several years but uptake is still lower than might be expected, especially in the wide- format sector. Many potential W2P users in commercial digital and large-format print feel that it is either not relevant to their business or is too difficult and expensive to implement. Why do they think that, and are they right?

The benefits of W2P as it was initially promoted were largely focused on an enormous expansion of the sales opportunity via an online print shop that was always open for business from anywhere in the world. The success of online-only print services targeted at consumers, such as Vistaprint, PhotoBox and Moonpig, was used to suggest that printers could tap a vast new consumer market that could not only fill any spare capacity on their presses but also provide a route for significant expansion.

This led to many printers forming the impression that W2P was not suitable for business-to-business sales or for use with existing customers – two categories that between them cover most printers’ customer bases.

Market forcesIn reality, current W2P solutions are very well-suited to serving existing business-to-business customers and this is actually the best place for most printers to start. Following the move online of sales transactions of all kinds, it is a logical progression for printers to offer their customers e-commerce options. As this trend continues, it will look increasingly odd for a printer not to have some kind of online sales portal, even if only for existing customers.

For simple repeat and stock item transactions, ordering online can be more convenient for customers than having to phone, fax or email. W2P also provides a closed or guided environment for ordering, which avoids the omissions or ambiguities that can arise from unstructured email, fax or phone orders. Template-based W2P also ensures printability of the job without further checking.

There are also competitive factors that are pushing printers towards implementing W2P. New entrants to print market sectors who are using newer, more productive or more flexible technologies can put price pressure on established print service providers. The latter can only respond by cutting prices and looking for ways to recoup the lost revenue or by investing in the competing technologies themselves.

Looking to capture a larger part of their customers’ print spend, for example, some offset printers have also invested in large-format print services, often starting with the inkjet printers they use for proofing.

As well as generally raising the level of competition for specialist large-format print service providers, this trend has led to them being undercut by litho printers offering prices based on offset printing cost models that did not allow for the more complex finishing and shipping/installation that are frequently required with large-format work. Even if the under-pricing litho printers subsequently exit the large-format market, once rates have been depressed it is difficult for surviving print service providers to raise them again.

2. Why aren’t more printers using web-to-print?

Slow uptakeGiven these reasons to implement W2P, it might seem reason-able to expect the majority of printers to be offering it already. While figures from InfoTrends’ 2012 European Production Soft-ware Investment Outlook predict a healthy 71 per cent growth in the volume of work submitted via website or dedicated portal between 2011 and 2014, the average percentage of work that they estimate will be submitted online in 2014 will still be just under 18 per cent, with a quarter of printers still receiving no work at all via this route and more than half of them receiving less than 15 per cent.

There have been a number of reasons for printers not to try to implement W2P. Lack of customer demand is often cited, though this may just reflect lack of awareness on the customers’ part. Some customers are reluctant to change from familiar behaviour; they be uncomfortable with the technology, perceive a loss of personal relationships or be concerned that it is a change designed to lock them in.

Perceived cost and difficulty of implementation are also barriers. ‘Software as a service’ (SaaS) pricing models are not always well- understood, with some prospective users believing that although the software is ‘rented’, they still have to provide and maintain the hardware and network infrastructure on which to run it.

Supporting a wide mix of job types via W2P is seen as difficult, particularly in wide-format work. Linked to this are lingering perceptions that dedicated software to meet these needs does not exist, is insufficiently flexible or is prohibitively expensive. Based on earlier experience or anecdotal evidence, potential W2P users may think that the only route to successful implementation is via bespoke software development, which cannot be done in-house by most print companies and which would be expensive to commission and maintain externally.

However, these perceptions are out-of-date. Provided that it is correctly planned and promoted, W2P is a viable and valuable addition to most printers’ existing sales channels.

If you’re looking to implement web-to-print, whether as a means of opening up new sales opportunities or to broaden your service offer-ing to existing customers, there are a number of potential pitfalls that you’ll need to avoid in order to make the investment deliver the ben-efits of customer acquisition or retention and improved production efficiencies.

With the advent of hosted or ‘software as a service’ options for web- to-print (W2P), many of the financial and technical obstacles that may have discouraged smaller print service providers have been removed. But W2P implementations can still fail, for a variety of business-related reasons that have nothing to do with the technology or its pricing.

Now that W2P has been around for a number of years, the experience of those early adopters who tried but failed with W2P can be put to your advantage. Of those who have attempted to add W2P but were not able to make it a success, the failure can usually be traced to one or more common errors or oversights.

Inadequate development and marketingThe adage ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’ is entirely appropriate to web-to-print. Three reasons for implementing W2P are to win new customers, to retain existing customers and to improve internal production efficiency. The first two of these relate directly to customers and so must involve the sales function within the print service provider’s organisation. Implementing W2P therefore requires more than managing the technical aspects of an online job creation or file receipt portal.

As a sales tool, W2P is qualitatively different to any other because it can bring the work directly into the production system, so its planning requires input and commitment from management, sales and production staff. However, management may view W2P installation as a purely technical or software issue, while sales staff may see it as a threat to their jobs and so fail to promote or even mention it to their customers.

As well as needing to be ‘sold’ within the print service provider’s organisation, a W2P service needs to be marketed to customers, both new and existing. ‘Build it and they will come’ does not work; the internet is crowded and customers will need a good reason to even look at a W2P portal, let alone buy from it.

Wrong type of customerMany print service providers operate in a business-to-business environment with regular returning customers. One of the early lures of W2P was the possibility of attracting consumer business, which would require a re-focusing of the printer’s business toward consumer sales, unfamiliar territory for the majority of printers. While there have been some spectacular success stories in that sector, business- to-business orientated print service providers need to understand that consumers mostly make one-off impulse purchases and will typically buy on price or speed of turnaround only.

3. Mistakes to avoid in implementing web-to-print

Wrong type of workEven in a business-to-business environment and with comparatively experienced print buyers, simple stock items and template-based jobs are the easiest to manage successfully via W2P. Ad-hoc customer uploads are the most likely to need additional manual intervention, which means lost margin for the printer as this extra work is often not correctly accounted-for.

Even template-based W2P with fixed format and production specifications and only text or image content varying may need careful set-up and possibly integrating with existing digital asset management (DAM) systems or pre-flighting tools to ensure that jobs created via a W2P portal can progress through to production with minimal manual intervention.

‘Web to nowhere’If there is no integration between the W2P portal, the printer’s MIS/ERP and production workflow then manual procedures will be required to fetch jobs, log and schedule them and progress them into pre-flighting, proofing and production. Since it is necessary to establish all the key production parameters of a job at the point of ordering, an inability to pass this information automatically into the printer’s management and production systems allows delays to arise and errors to be made, as well as adding the costs of manual order processing and job progression.

Some W2P products provide only the customer-facing online ‘shop’, leaving the back-office integration to the customer. Many small- to medium-sized printers’ internal IT resources are inadequate to tackle bespoke integration of this kind and they will often lack either budget or confidence to hire consultants. Experience has also shown that the do-it-yourself route imposes a considerable on-going maintenance and development burden.

Having an online print shop that takes orders, accepts or generates print-ready artwork and perhaps even collects an up-front payment is all to the good, but it is only part of what can be achieved with W2P in terms of streamlining production, maximising press capacity and minimising production costs. By linking the W2P portal with production and MIS at the print service provider’s site, the full benefits to both printers and their customers of electronic job capture can be realised.

Most of the essential production and management information relating to any print job has to be defined at the ordering stage, however the order is taken. This includes pagination or size, number and type of inks, substrate, finishing, quantity, delivery and/or installation and billing addresses or pre-payment options.

A correctly configured and integrated W2P system can ensure that all this information is both collected at the point of order and passed on. Depending on the type of job, the customer may have to manually enter much of it, or may be restricted to a few simple choices via drop-down menus; when planning a W2P portal, the development of the customer interface so that all the necessary production details are captured is an essential task.

Robust and automated pre-flighting is essential and soft-proofing will be needed for anything other than stock call-off. In established business-to-business relationships it may be possible to agree terms with customers for submitting ‘fit-for-purpose’ files, and cut out the approval step, by following the PDF/X standards, for example. This approach is also applicable to regular repeating work such as wide-format franchise or retail POS/display where format, inks, substrates and finishing processes conform to pre-defined templates.

There and back againHowever the job parameters are established, they must be passed on to other systems within the printing business. If the necessary information already exists in digital form and has been validated by the W2P software it is most efficient to pass it on automatically. Doing this manually reduces productivity. Jobs that are potentially problematic – because of the customer’s credit history, for example, not only for production-related reasons – may not be identified and addressed in a timely manner; errors or further delays may occur if production and management data are mis-entered or omitted.

Different items of information need to be sent to one or more different destinations. Artwork files should go into the production workflow and job information to MIS (management Information Systems) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software. It may be useful to log the order in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system too.

The W2P software not only needs to send information to other systems but may need to be able to receive it from them too. This applies particularly to scheduling and status reporting, but may also include pricing, pre-flighting, soft-proofing review and approval functions, if those capabilities are not provided within the W2P software.

In the business-to-business context it is likely that the customer’s shipping and billing details will already be held by the printer in an MIS, CRM or finance system and so can be filled in auto-matically, requiring only confirmation that they are still current.

4. Why web-to-print needs integration and automation to succeed

To support template-based job creation, there may also need to be links into existing digital asset management (DAM) software to fetch templates and high resolution versions of stored images or other graphical elements, though in many cases the W2P portal in effect becomes the DAM system for template-based work. A further dimension to this, and one of growing importance, is the ability for a W2P portal to connect with free Cloud-based storage services such as DropBox, SkyDrive or GoogleDrive or to paid-for services such as box.net which offer more structured storage and transfer facilities.

A minimum requirement for a W2P portal is therefore the ability to pass digital data – including both artwork and production specifications – to other systems. One-way communication may

be adequate for simple reprint or stock call-off work, but ideally a W2P system will be able to communicate bi-directionally to provide ‘live’ pricing and quoting, production turnaround times, job and shipping status information, as well as access to customers’ order history and other account information.

Further options could include the ability to generate email or SMS messages to customers to notify them when specific milestones are reached, such as finished work being ready for dispatch. The W2P portal should also be able to create or access digital ‘job bags’ so that there is a consistent reference for each job in all systems within the printer’s business and possibly beyond, if third-party shipping or installation services are used, for example.

By linking a web-to-print (W2P) portal with in-house MIS and production systems, print service providers can realise the full benefits of electronic job capture, using job data defined by the customer at the ordering stage to drive the production and management functions automatically. But how exactly is this linking and automation done?

There are three fundamental approaches to integrating online print sales portals to printers’ MIS/ERP, production, financial or CRM systems in order to automate job information transfer:

Bespoke software developmentDeveloping a unique tailored system should in theory give the best match to a printer’s exact requirements but typically requires IT skills not usually found in smaller and mid-sized printing companies. Many W2P and MIS solutions offer APIs (application programming interfaces), for example, but specialist programming knowledge is required to use them. The alternative is to out-source the development, which may be expensive and would need to allow for ongoing maintenance and development, a hidden cost which may amount to more than 50 per cent of the initial development budget over a three- to five-year period.

Wherever the development is done, it will be necessary to keep documentation up-to-date should the system upkeep responsi-bilities be transferred. In addition to adding functionality to the W2P system as required by a changing market, there is also the constant evolution of web browsers and support for new platforms such as tablets and smartphones to consider.

Single-vendor solutionsSome vendors offer complete solutions from the W2P portal software through to MIS/ERP and prepress/production systems for digital, offset or wide-format presses and in some cases, they can supply the presses too. To provide the necessary communications and integration they may use proprietary technology, which may limit future integration with third-party products, though there is a small but growing category of suppliers of integration solutions that specifically aim to address this.

Solutions like this may command a premium for the added value of the integration and may not always be first to implement novel new features or types of functionality, though having a single point for support may more than compensate for this.

Connecting multi-vendor systems via open standardsIn the same way that PDF provided a common format for job hand-off, it was envisaged that JDF (Job Definition Format) would provide a standardised way to communicate job details, initially between prepress, press and finishing systems. Although there is support for JDF among prepress system, litho press and finishing equipment vendors, it is less widely used in digital print and largely unheard- of in wide-format work.

One of the criticisms of JDF is that its specification is not tight enough and that JDF-compliant files from different vendors may contain quite different levels and types of information, including proprietary vendor-specific tags, and so do not interoperate well enough; another, paradoxically, is that it is too print-specific and therefore does not explicitly support the information types necessary for management and financial aspects of W2P.

5. How to integrate web-to-print into business systems for maximum efficiency and profit

In the web development community, generic XML (eXtensible Markup Language, also the basis for JDF) is a popular choice for handling metadata but this format is much less production-specific than JDF and so requires more development work and is even more open to different implementations.

Route plannerIn the real world, most W2P installations are a combination of these approaches. The state of current standards is such that there is no ‘plug-and-play’ solution that can combine a variety of vendors’ products without further integration work calling for specialist IT and print production expertise, though single-vendor systems do generally use existing standards as far as they are appropriate.

Choosing which route to take should be approached in the same way as any major long-term investment plan. In addition to a calculation of return on investment, printers need to consider which suppliers will have the experience, resources and longevity to provide ongoing support and development, or in the case of bespoke development projects, consider bringing those skills in-house over time to control costs.

Whichever route is taken it needs to be understood that it will take sustained effort on the part of the printer. Implementing

W2P is not a case of business as usual while someone else takes care of the online portal. Understanding, support and commitment will be needed from management, production and sales staff. It may be appropriate to form a W2P team that is charged with responsibility for success of the project as a whole, with representatives from or access to each discipline to address the technical and organisational challenges.

An appropriate minimum roster might include a sales specialist who would focus on the customer experience and its connection into production, thus helping to identify the integration require-ments, plus a technical staff member who understands both the production processes and IT, who would be able to suggest solutions or frame the requirements in technical terms for suppliers or consultants.

Experience suggests that the full benefits of integration are not always apparent until after it has been achieved. Production staff can be reluctant to trust the automation, especially in the wide- format sector where the typical operator’s experience is still of a largely manual craft-based process. Given the penalties for failure, this attitude is unsurprising and there is not always a substitute for printers other than seeing it work, so seeking out reference sites will be an important part of the pre-purchase research.

As well as addressing the technical needs and internal championing issues that a web-to-print implementation requires, printers must define the business model that the online sales portal is meant to serve and market the new service appropriately.

Web-to-print (W2P) is most applicable to general commercial digital and wide-format production where there are many short- run jobs. In this environment, job acquisition and management account for a relatively higher proportion of total production costs, while machine time and consumables may be relatively small contributors. Quite apart from the value of the convenience to customers, automating these job management processes through integrated W2P may well bring greater improvements in overall efficiency than investing in a faster RIP or printer.

W2P is a natural partner for variable data printing (VDP), whether at the simple business card and stationery level or in high-end one-to- one personalised marketing campaigns. An often-over-looked benefit of template-based W2P production of any kind is that it enforces style and branding guidelines in a way that disparate users within large organisations or multiple external agencies often do not.

Larger print service providers, especially those with both offset and digital presses, often focus on automated production via MIS and sophisticated prepress workflows with advanced pre-flight-ing and soft-proofing capabilities, so integrating W2P to further exploit these capabilities is a logical progression for them.

Set the business goalsWhen embarking on a W2P installation, some fundamental questions must be answered. W2P should be viewed as much as a sales tool as a production one, so printers need to decide what percentage of the business they are aiming to acquire this way. What type of customers and what type of work are they looking to attract? How will those sales be supported? What marketing will be done?

Printers should start by reviewing their current work to assess how much is reprint, stock call-off or minor updates to existing pieces, all of which are ideal candidates for W2P ordering. The potential value of simple template-based jobs, such as product brochures with local dealer/agent personalisation, or the ubiquitous business cards and stationery, should not be underestimated, especially as this kind of work can be ganged and used to fill press capacity during idle periods. It may also be worth investigating partnering opportunities, sharing a W2P portal and its costs with other print services providers whose facilities and expertise are complementary.

If taking in ad-hoc work via an online portal is being contemplated, there will need to be an automated pre-flighting capability that identifies problems and ideally is able to fix them too, or at least ensures that a ‘customer accepts responsibility’ check box is ticked before proceeding. With regular business-to-business customers, or where there is adequate margin, existing pre-flighting and job preparation process can continue to be used.

6. What kind of print to offer via web-to-print and who to offer it to

Win existing customers firstBefore attempting to win new business via W2P it is logical to introduce it to existing customers as an alternative way of working that expands their choices and offers greater convenience, perhaps beginning with simple stock item ordering. Key to this is giving customers a familiar ordering environment, possibly branded to the customer, and as simple an ordering experience as possible.

Younger print buyers may know less about print production than their predecessors but they are very familiar with online ordering and will expect similar convenience. Less technically confident customers may appreciate a guided ordering option, perhaps free of charge as an initial inducement to use W2P, or via a differently-priced menu. The guided ordering option is also potentially an opportunity to demonstrate some of the ‘hidden’ extra work that otherwise goes unnoticed by the customer and often unbilled by the printer.

Over time, as both printer and customers gain experience and confidence, more complex options can be offered. Stock or catalogue- based ordering could be complemented by fulfilment and non-print items, for example. The ability to accept ad-hoc work via W2P – backed by suitable pre-flighting and soft-proofing as discussed above – may help win new customers, especially in specialist or niche applications.

When planning for the costs of a W2P implementation, it is useful to compare them with the cost of adding sales staff, bearing in mind that W2P should also free existing staff to pursue work of higher value, and once implemented, automation will offer new opportunities to develop the business.

Well-implemented W2P does not just reduce costs and increase productivity for the printer, it is also a ‘customer binding’ tool that makes it easier for customers to continue to place work than to take it elsewhere.

In an industry already awash with three-letter acronyms there are four that are particularly pertinent to printers who want to automate management of their operations, especially when planning to integrate web-to-print portals with their businesses. Here’s a guide to the differences between them and how they can work in conjunction with a W2P portal.

For maximum productivity in web-to-print (W2P) it is necessary to integrate the online sales portal with other business manage-ment systems. In some cases these will already exist within the print service provider’s business, and in others they may be added subsequently, but either way, it is valuable to understand how they function and what benefits integration with W2P could achieve.

CRMCustomer Relationship Management tools support the sales role by recording all customer contact whether it is sales or service related. From this information a CRM system can prompt follow-up calls or other contacts and generate promotional offers for both existing and prospective customers, backed by a record of previous purchase history and notes on any problems.

Feeding web-to-print (W2P) activity information into a CRM system is an obvious move as it is important that all customer interaction and purchasing activity should be visible within the print service provider’s organisation. This not only gives sales and management staff a more complete view of how much business a customer is doing with the printer, and when, but also a sense of how they prefer to interact – do W2P sales follow sales visits, calls or email promotions, for example, or do they tend to occur independently of them?

This information can also provide pointers for the maintenance and development of the W2P portal itself. If initial W2P orders are followed by a reversion to phone, fax or email ordering , for example, this may mean that the portal is not sufficiently easy to use or doesn’t support the type of work that the customer wants to place.

DAMDigital Asset Management systems have been around for a while, pre- dating widespread broadband internet, and were often used to provide access to hi-res picture libraries for graphic designers, ad agencies and magazine or catalogue publishers, with on-line interfaces for image selection. Nowadays they may also store master layout documents, images and graphics that are frequently used by customers of template-based W2P.

A DAM system integrated with a W2P portal can also provide customers with a value-added service by offering the construction of template based jobs while enforcing brand guidelines using the correct templates, images and graphics. For speed of display, often low resolution RGB images are used to provide the customer preview; when the job is approved for print, these are replaced with high resolution print-ready CMYK versions, a task that can be automated with the correct integration between W2P portal and DAM.

7. Exploring the difference between CRM, DAM, ERP and MIS and why you should integrate them with web-to-print

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Any W2P system that includes template-based job creation will by default have some degree of DAM functionality, which should be sufficient if you’re starting from scratch. If there’s an existing DAM system, integration with the W2P portal may be possible to save duplication, or it may be simpler to transfer the relevant files into the W2P system.

ERP and MISOften used interchangeably, Enterprise Resource Planning and Management Information Systems largely overlap in planning and executing jobs more efficiently, managing quoting, job numbering, planning and scheduling, allocation and use of resources – both mechanical and human – and consumables and stock replenishment, finishing, shipping and invoicing. In addition to improving customer service through more accurate quoting and job tracking, ERP and MIS help printers gather business intelligence via analysis of customer data and can play a useful role in achieving compliance with quality and environmental standards.

MIS solutions, the type more familiar to most printers, provide analysis of costs based on ink usage, production time,

media use and wastage. This analysis may extend to material, equipment and operator performance, in addition to stock management and generation of invoices and delivery notes. Some MIS vendors provide CRM functionality as a module. Sales staff are also supported via mobile access to MIS, making it possible to quote and book jobs from the customer’s site.

While MIS offerings generally provide outputs that can be used with financial systems, ERP solutions differ in that they generally provide the financial tools as well, which may include CRM, human resources and payroll. ERP proponents point out that this all-in-one approach avoids the potential difficulties inherent in connecting disparate systems from multiple vendors and can avoid problems by alerting users to situations such as customers having exceeded their credit limits or payment terms before further jobs are accepted, for example.

Close integration of either MIS or ERP systems with W2P allows online customers to benefit from automated pricing, ordering, job scheduling and status visibility, while giving the printer reliable information about work in progress for production control, profitability analysis and cashflow planning.