White Paper charts the future of digital production and in-plant printing

According to author Richard Vines, there is a revolution occurring in the way in which knowledge and information are produced, evaluated, communicated, managed and used. He bases his analysis on certain aspects of this change, especially the role of print and copy shops embedded within organization that have a different core business – inplant printers.

The wide-ranging investigation www.nippa.com.au comes to the conclusion that in-plants are the centres of the changes that are transforming the printing and publishing industries. Mainly precipitated by the adoption of digital technologies, it is fuelled by the replacement of workflows based on the physical exchange of goods and services with workflows structured around online transactions. This is a move towards use, users and user environments as compared to the traditional focus on products, consumers and consumer behaviour.

The White Paper was presented to NIPPA members at this week’s Darwin conference by David Harrison, president, who encouraged the industry to take up its findings and gain a clearer understanding of where the value lies in the new relationships between printing and publishing. “It is a very valuable study and reinforces the key role and the opportunities that face our members in the transformation of the industry. Digital processes have changed everything and we are the sector that has the skills to help manage the new ways of producing information for clients.”

He paid tribute to the funding and organising role of Canon in the creation of the White Paper. “We asked them how they could contribute to our industry and to their credit they came up with this key initiative.”

Steve Brown, marketing manager Canon Production, was adamant that he did not want the White Paper to be seen as a company branded exercise. “This is not about Canon, this is an independent report on a vital sector by a professional industry analyst. We want to ensure that the White Paper is of value to the whole industry and its adoption and circulation is not limited by any perception that it is the work of one supplier.”


What is effective and what is valuable?

The 55-page document draws a key distinction between effective and valuable in-plant facilities, contrasting the essential but limited ambition of an in-plant operation that concentrates solely on the delivery of printed products using its own equipment, with the more fundamentally valuable role of an integrated knowledge and alliance focused operation. A valuable in-plant becomes entwined in the product-service system that makes up the host organization’s core business. . . . the inplant forms organization-wide alliances with a wide range of divisions such as the library, the finance, information and IT departments, the bookshop and the data processing centre. Innovation flourishes, and the in-plant becomes enmeshed with the infrastructure of enterprise publishing, marketing, and information and knowledge management. There is a shift in the plant’s focus from print alone towards all types of output management, especially digital imaging.

Vines identifies facilities management (FM) as a threat to the in-plant sector and blames the current lack of understanding of convergence, digital imaging and the development of appropriate user environments for many of the problems that confront the sector. He points out that other professional groups, such as librarians in the higher education sector for instance, are being vested with major reform agendas, without necessarily having the core competencies and understanding of digital workflows and imaging solutions.

Failure to address these strategic issues is likely to exacerbate the trend towards pillarisation (sic) of workflow. This has the potential to encourage the further outsourcing or FM of multiple functional areas such as office printing equipment, photocopier fleets, offset printing and IT functions.

He clearly states that the decision by an organization to outsource or FM could prove short sighted at a time when communications are rapidly converging, with may opportunities emerging for enterprises t leverage competitiveness across the board by having a valuable in-plant printing facility.