Workflow automation is probably the most important IT investment that a printing company can make, yet few printers put this high on their shopping lists, according to the latest drupa report.
Workflow automation is probably the most important IT investment that a printing company can make, yet few printers put this high on their shopping lists, according to the latest drupa report.
The 2nd drupa Global Insights Report – titled “Touch the future – Applications that can create growth” - is based on a survey of 741 printers from around the world that examined 4 markets: commercial, publishing, packaging and functional with a total of 26 different applications.
All printers and suppliers must understand that at its heart print is another form of manufacturing and that manufacturing is undergoing fast and fundamental changes driven by digital technology. Being digital requires a re-examination of your entire way of doing business and understanding where new value can be created, which could be from new automated and integrated production, new markets, new products or new customers.
Whilst in volume terms analogue print will continue to dominate for many years, (and therefore replacement capacity will be of keen interest at drupa 2016); it will be digital print combined with workflow automation that increases reliability and product quality, and makes it easier to create flexible production processes that can add value to the product lifecycle. Workflow automation is probably the most important IT investment a company can make, yet few printers will put this high on their shopping lists. The success of different printing sectors and their applications will depend on the integration of printed products with web and mobile communication platforms that are underpinned by data services and automated workflows.
Making Print Applications Succeed
What is striking is regardless of how efficiently printers implemented new applications, some applications offered a quicker payback on average than others and the differences were not explained by the size of the original investment. For example, short-run batch book production had on average over double the payback period than that of on-demand book production. Similarly, business stationery applications had over double the payback period of multichannel marketing applications, and digitally printed corrugated applications had a payback four times longer than that for digitally printed flexibles.
We have heard of many success stories and included a few of these in the report, but many respondents were honest and reported failures or least major setbacks on the road to implementation. Such disappointments are not surprising when you hear of the casual manner in which many applications were implemented, with little advance planning, modest integration and only basic conventional marketing applied. We asked what were the key challenges faced and the panel told us it was poor market pricing and a lack of effective sales staff. Those were standard explanations masking the uncomfortable truth, as evident by the more detailed examination of how the panel tackled planning, integration and marketing.
The 2nd drupa Global Insights Report is available now. The Executive Summary is available as a free download in seven languages and the entire version is available for EUR 249.00 online at www.drupa.com.
