When jobs flow smooth for us, it saves you money.The easiest orders for us to write up, and the ones with the least chance of mistakes are orders that come in over our Internet storefront.  When we can do something in a lot less time with less of a chance for mistakes, it ends up costing the customer less. So why don’t all of our customers have storefront catalogs set up with us? That’s a good question for 2010. Actually, there’s a fair amount of work on the front end and certain parameters that need to be met, so lets explore the costs and the barriers holding us back.

First, lets look at one basic example of what a catalog on our Internet store front does.When we have a customer that orders certain items a lot, say business cards, that is a good candidate. And with business cards, where certain elements like names, phone numbers and emails change from card to card, they are still perfect. So after we identify the items that you order a regular basis, we make a catalog of them, say business cards, letterheads and envelopes. Then we identify the parameters of the job (ink colors,  correct paper and the usual quantities you order).  After we have identified all of the specifications we apply a cost to the different quantities and now we have a catalog with 3 items in it (letterheads, Envelopes and Business Cards), with the option to order different quantities at different prices.

Next comes the more difficult part of it, adding the variable data (if your product requires it). On your business cards, we will have a part of the page where you can type out the name of the person you want to order the cards for, along with any other variables that we have determined would change on your companies cards. These will usually be things like the phone number and extension, email and title. Of course, since you want your companies business cards to appear consistent, things like the logo and it’s placement, the fonts used are all pre-programed to look the way they always do.After we get it all set up, it’s very easy to order these cards; you open your catalog, pick out business cards, type in the name and variable information, push view proof. You can print out the proof if need be or just approve it from the screen, and then just push place order and fill in where you want them shipped to and how you want to pay for it.

Back at the shop, we receive the order with all the important information, a print file that’s already been proofed, and we just take it right to production. That’s why we can afford to discount these items more than if we had all the order writing and typesetting and proofing to do. Now that said, this is a fairly simple scenario but it really stands as a good example of how these catalogs work. One other cool feature of these catalogs is that you can see a history of what you have ordered. That makes re-orders very simple and if you re-order contains something variable like a business card, you don’t have to re-set and re-proof the information…It’s all there from last time.

Our push for 2010 is to figure out what customer’s catalogs make sense for and talk to them about setting one up. In a very competitive print market, there are 2 things we can control with these catalogs…getting things done correct and offering the best value we each dollar spent. In many cases, there is no better way to achieve that than a catalog on our internet Store Front. Call us and talk about it if we don’t call you first.

Before I get into this subject, I want to tell you that the objective of a new campaign we are starting is to work with and educate our customers on some fairly new tools that will speed up the print process, make it more accurate and less expensive.

Over that last couple of months we have been very busy working in the “Back Room” here at Oregon. By Back Room, I mean the part of our process that you really don’t see, but is a huge bottleneck in any printing company. Thats called the Workflow, or in other words how we handle your print file once you hand it over to us untill it actually prints. That area includes:

• Pre-flighting (making sure your file is built correctly)
• Proofing (Sending the customer either a hard copy or a soft PDF proof)
• Imposition (putting the job on the sheet correctly, putting books in right page order and so on)
• Trapping, Postscript generation (and a bunch of other technically boring stuff)
• Sending on to Plate Making or Digital printing, confident that everything is correct

Traditionally, these processes were performed step by step, which was time consuming and left plenty of room for errors. But as things have become more digital, a lot of printers are using software packages called “Workflows” that automate the whole process. These are incredible software packages (and expensive) that perform all of these processes, but they really streamline getting a job to print.

So why is this so important? The biggest challenge(s) we face today is have 3 parts

1. How can we get jobs done quicker?
2. How can we maintain accuracy (Don’t make mistakes)?
3. How can we cut the cost of your print job?

Good questions and I have 1 good answer. Work with us to learn to maker proper Print Ready PDF’s. If we can work with and teach our customers to provide us with correct PDF files, we can seriously work on the 3 above mentioned items. It’s just incredible how much easier and faster a job that originates from a Print Ready PDF goes through the shop.

Creating a PDF (Portable Document Format) is relatively simple and the best type of file to send to us. A well prepared PDF file will overcome many of the traditional problems we face with native files (the files generated by whatever program you are designing in). Native files tend to be large and cumbersome and often are missing fonts or graphics. This creates all sorts of printing problems and delays. PDF files avoid these concerns as they contain all the necessary fonts and graphics, are smaller files, and are platform, application and device independent.

The important part  was the “work with us” part. Here are a couple of resources on on PDF creation:

• We have our own guidelines on our website under  Expert Advice
• And straight from Adobe Press (A little more technical)

As I stated in the beginning, we will be working hard over the next couple of months to take this message to our customers. The biggest challenge we face today is that Speed, Cost and Accuracy thing, and with the latest & greatest workflow in place, sending us a well built Print Ready PDF will go a long way to getting there.

As we dive deeper into Web-to-Print, we are learning a lot along the way. The first thing I’ve learned is that there are a lot of “Experts” out there (the salespeople & technicians who help us behind the scenes) that can talk a lot about the benefits of Web-to-Print, but when it comes down to actually understanding the fine details and making it work, there’s a lot to be desired. In a lot of ways we are self taught because it is such a developing market.

Since Web-to-Print is a rather generic term, I’m going to talk about what it means in our world. Oregon’s Web-to-Print is an Internet store front for customers that order the same “products” that they tend to use a lot. Sometimes there are certain areas of these “products” that need to change, like names, titles & emails on business cards, but in many cases, the same products will be ordered again and again. That’s the real beauty here is that in these 2 cases, it takes a routine process and automates it. That’s where the accuracy and cost savings come from.

So, let’s describe a customer that uses our Web-to-Print system regularly and is what I would call a success story. This customer has facilities around Ohio (7 to be exact), so they all need supplies (Letterheads, 6 different envelopes, business cards + more) that are consistent with their brand, but have variable information for their specific location.

This customer will log into their catalog with their user name and password and then pull up their online catalog for the division they want to order for. On their business cards product, after naming the order and choosing the qty they want (price for each qty is listed) they will have an area to type in their variable information and then see a live proof. If it is OK, they press OK and the order automatically comes to us with the same print file they approved. This eliminates the going back and forth with proofs that sometimes can take days.

The ame thing applies with all of their other products some of which have no information that changes between locations. We call those products static. The great thing is we get an approved print file in PDF form right from the system, and the order is written up with pre-defined information. These 2 things alone eliminate so many mistakes and save so much time that this customer never wants tpo go anywhere else.

We have another customer that uses this system just to order forms on demand, so that they don’t have to inventory them there. This customer sets a good example of mixing Print-on-Demand and Web-to-Print technologies to reduce inventories and costs (see inventory reduction stratigies for more on this), which is very much what more people are doing. But going back to what I had originally said, we put a lot of work into figuring out how to apply this technology to different customers. And the great thing is that with every new customer we put onto the system, we can custom build a solution for them while automating more of the process.