FREQUENTLY MADE ERRORS THAT SHOULD BE AVOIDED WHEN IMPLEMENTING WEB-TO-PRINT

Several of the financial and technological constraints that may have prevented smaller print service providers have been addressed as a result of the introduction of hosted or’software as a service’ solutions for web-to-print (w2p) printing. However, there are still a number of business-related factors that might cause w2p deployments to fail, and these reasons have nothing to do with the technology or the price of the system. With the passage of time, the experience of early adopters who attempted to use w2p but were unsuccessful may be used to your benefit. This is because w2p has been operating for a number of years. When it comes to those individuals who have sought to add w2p but have not been successful in doing so, the failure can often be traced back to one or more frequent faults or oversights. a lack of proper marketing and development: The proverb “fail to plan, plan to fail” is perfectly applicable to the process of web-to-print conversion. Implementing w2p is done for three reasons: to acquire new consumers, to keep the clients you already have, and to enhance the efficiency of the manufacturing process inside the company. As a result of the fact that the first two of these are directly related to clients, the sales function within the organization of the print service provider is required to be involved. It is consequently necessary to manage more than just the technical features of an online job creation or file reception site in order to successfully deploy work-to-project. Due to the fact that it is able to transfer the work directly into the production system, work-to-product (w2p) is qualitatively distinct from any other sales tool. As a result, its preparation demands input and commitment from management, sales staff, and production staff and employees. Nevertheless, management can consider the installation of W2P to be a purely technical or software problem, whilst sales personnel would consider it to be a danger to their careers, and as a result, they might not market it to their clients or even mention it to them. A web-to-print (W2P) service must not only be “sold” within the organization of the print service provider, but it must also be marketed to customers, both new and existing. The phrase “build it and they will come” does not work because the internet is crowded, and customers will need a good reason to even look at a W2P portal, let alone buy from it. Not the right kind of customer: the majority of print service providers work in a business-to-business setting, and their clients are repeat customers at regular intervals. One of the early allures of work-to-pay was the promise of luring consumer business. This would need a reorientation of the printer’s business toward consumer sales, which is an area that the majority of printers are not acquainted with. Business-to-business print service providers need to be aware of the fact that customers typically make one-time impulse purchases and will typically base their purchases solely on price or the speed of turnaround, despite the fact that there have been some spectacular success stories in that sector. When there is little to no understanding of manufacturing, it is quite probable that any files that customers supply will need to be manually corrected for production reasons. This may rapidly erode the small margins that are essential for competitive pricing. For the same reason, customers are very impatient of printers that raise questions, ask for artwork to be fixed, or seek to charge additional fees for modifications. Wrong kind of work: even in a business-to-business setting and with quite experienced print purchasers, basic stock items and template-based tasks are the simplest to handle effectively via w2p. This is because they are the most straightforward. Customers that upload files on an ad hoc basis are the ones who are most likely to need additional human intervention. This results in a loss of margin for the printer since the additional effort is often not properly accounted for. Even template-based work-to-product (W2P) with fixed format and production specifications and only text or image content that can vary may require careful setup and possibly integration with pre-flighting tools or digital asset management (dam) systems that are already in place. This is done to ensure that jobs created through a W2P portal can be put into production with minimal manual intervention. “web to nowhere”: if there is no integration between the w2p portal, the printer’s mis/erp, and the production process, then manual procedures will be necessary to get jobs, record and schedule them, and then push them through the pre-flighting, proofing, and production stages. The inability to automatically pass this information into the management and production systems of the printer may result in delays and errors, as well as an increase in the costs associated with manual order processing and job progression. This is due to the fact that it is necessary to establish all of the key production parameters of a job at the point of ordering. There are some wholly-owned-and-operated products that just provide the consumer-facing online “store,” leaving the back-office connectivity up to the customer. A great number of small to medium-sized printers do not have the internal information technology capabilities to deal with unique integration of this sort, and they often do not have the financial means or the self-assurance to invest in consultants. In addition, the experience that has been gained has shown that the do-it-yourself approach imposes a significant load of ongoing maintenance and development. The integration of work-to-play (W2P) with production and management information systems will be covered in more depth in subsequent articles in this series. However, before delving into that topic in more depth, it is important to spend some time evaluating how and where an online sales portal might be integrated into a current or projected firm. This will allow for the avoidance of the kind of strategic blunders that are detailed in this article. This article is an excerpt from “making web-to-print work,” a free white paper from efi written by a technology writer from the United Kingdom named Michael Walker. The paper outlines the mistakes that were made by early users of web-to-print technology and explains how this experience can be used to ensure that current implementations maximize the potential of online sales and job capture through automation and integration.