Technology and business, the two have become inseparable. In this age of instant communications and 24/7 connectivity, no business can survive without a good dose of technology. It's no longer PC's but cell phones, inter and intranets, e-mail, computer viruses, databases, and information. The question we must ask: Is technology our trusty assistant or have we become its slave?

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Biography of Leona Seufert

Print on Demand

A few years ago I attended a trade show where the keynote speaker offered each audience member a copy of his book. All we had to do was go down to the show floor and stand in line. His book was printed out and bound right there on the spot! Granted it was a paperback book, using cheap paper and the binding was poor, but it was an immediate way to get his book into our hands. What I experienced was the technology known as “Print on demand”.

The technology behind it
Conventional printing uses physically set type and an ink-to-a-plate printing process. If your materials contain color, the paper must pass over a plate numerous times. The pages must also align properly during each pass which means that any misaligned pages result in waste. Unlike a traditional press, a digital printer lays ink directly onto the pages in a pattern determined by the code sent to it by a computer (think of how your office laser printer works). In this way even color digital printers can produce a good color print without running the paper through the press more than once.

Physically, traditional printing presses are huge and the printing process takes considerable time to do print runs. Commercial digital printers are hooked up to a computer all their own, which processes the document information before feeding it into the printer. This makes the process of printing files fast and even large document files print fast when compared to setting up plates on a traditional press, and changing them every time you want to print the next section.

Getting your document to the printer is also done digitally. Either directly through e-mail, or a web interface, or copied to a transportable medium, such as a CD, the document is always dealt with in its digital form. Hence the ability to quickly edit and change the document without any need to alter the printing press itself.

History
The advent of high-quality digital printers in the late 1980s and early 1990s promised to change the economics of printing. As computers became more powerful and faster, along with the use of digital files transferred over the internet, print on demand was the logical outgrowth of the computer desktop publishing movement. 

Originally used by large corporations for creating manuals and reports, because these documents required small quantities and frequent revisions. The publishing industry jumped on to the band wagon when they realized it could be a way to open up the book market cheaply to new authors. Now one didn’t not have to wait for a publishing house to take on your book, entailing all the conventional printing hassles and inventory issues. You could go to those “vanity” presses and order short runs of your book whenever you wanted. With the maturing of the Web and widespread use of Web based ordering, service providers that weren’t in the publishing industry arose to fulfill the printing needs right from your business or home computer. This increase in volume along with technology advances meant print on demand costs dropped considerably. It now has become the desktop publishing of the 21st century.

How it can benefit your business
The technology of print-on-demand enables your business to customize collateral with a few clicks of a mouse, adapting marketing messages, graphics and other variables according to industry, product mix, previous purchasing patterns, geography and other demographics.

Many print on demand vendors provide you with the capabilities of personalization features that allows your client communications, such as letters, to be personalized with names and addresses, salutations, PIN codes, account numbers and other data. This greater degree of personalization has shown to increase response rates and customer satisfaction.

On the production side, content and document templates can be stored electronically in a central content repository, thus assuring that your content and design of your documents remain consistent with the overall marketing message and look that support your brand.

Another benefit that helps you save money is that by printing only the quantity you actually need at the time, you're eliminating the costs associated with document storage and waste due to content obsolescence. Also, you save on warehousing costs to store printed material in inventory. Inventory destruction costs needed to scrap outdated/excess inventory are greatly reduced.

Lastly, if your business needs to satisfy any Regulatory compliances, that too becomes simpler because document content can be quickly and easily updated as regulations change. Once revisions are made and approved, any new documents that use the revised sections will automatically contain the correct version.
Drawbacks

The main drawback can be cost as digitally printed materials do have a higher unit production cost than those produced in large runs the traditional way on offset presses.

Also, commercial digital printers are technically complex professional machines not like your simple desktop printers. Getting good results require that you understand how to create materials that utilize these capabilities. If you or send bad data to the printer, you’ll get an ugly output. For example if your fonts are not handled professionally, you could end up with a book printed in default courier type or if you use low-resolution graphics – that look fine on your 72 dpi screen – they can look terrible when output from a 1600 dpi printer. To begin to use this process optimally, you might need to budget dollars for a consultant who can train you in producing your materials correctly.

Moving forward

Print on demand offers your business an unmatched way to customize materials and to really connect with your customers. Be sure to determine your needs and budget beforehand in order to locate the vendor who will be a good match.

There are hundreds of vendors that offer you print on demand and act as your fulfillment company. When you have made the decision to go the print on demand route, start simple with an uncomplicated marketing piece in order to get to know your vendor’s offerings and the print on demand process.

Also make sure that what they offer is what you really need. Paying for extra bells and whistles is as much a budget waste as old fashioned inventory cluttering your shelves.

      c 2008 Leona M Seufert