Making the right choices for your business’ future

Written by Mark Rowland | 12 December 2011

Mark Rowland, country manager, UK & Ireland, HP Scitex Wide Format Industrial Printing Business provides some illuminating food for thought for the year ahead.

Making a major capital investment takes a good deal of thought in the best of times, but present conditions mean that choices are harder to make, and the danger is that no investment is made even when the evidence suggests that it would be prudent.

If your company has already identified the need for another printer to capture new business by entering a new market or offering more services, there is little reason not to proceed if your financial analysis and projections are favourable.

The challenge becomes what to invest in? Flat-bed or roll-to-roll? UV-curable, solvent, water-based? A super-wide printer that can print multiple rolls simultaneously and super-wide format applications, or a smaller one to take a more modest step?

Your existing customers may be the source of your best intelligence for some of these decisions because they will be closer to the end-use of the application and will be responding to fashion trends, commercial demands and other factors that impact on their businesses. These may include cost reduction, increased turnaround speed requirements, shorter signage life-spans, demands for colourful, printed interior décor for retail outlets and demonstrable signs of environmental initiatives.

Understanding what customers need will inform the definition of what you need; these pressures will not be unique to your customers, so use them as commercial barometers and compasses.

Today’s digital inkjet printers offer quality, reliability, versatility and productivity, so those factors no longer play the deciding role they once did. The more critical questions relate to what applications you see demand for and what your projected print volumes are.

Once you have sound answers to these questions, the selection process can become easier. Deciding whether your market is more in the flexible or rigid substrate sector will determine your next decision. You may find that a hybrid printer – one that can handle both flexible and rigid substrates – is the best choice for you, enabling applications from self-adhesive vehicle graphics to POP/POS displays to be printed on the same machine.

The following can help you to minimise risk when making buying decisions that will determine your success in the coming years, and as such here’s a short questionnaire that can help you to start thinking more objectively about your business’ future:

1. Are you keeping up with industry trends by reading the trade press, visiting exhibitions and following developments online? Services like YouTube and Linked-In provide opportunities to see new equipment and engage in conversations with other print service providers (PSPs) in similar circumstances, share best practice and test ideas.

2. Are you engaging with your customers to see what their strategies are? Do they present opportunities for you? Try writing down the top three business goals of your biggest customer. What does that tell you?

3. Are you talking to the people whom you would like to be your customers? How can you attract them without understanding them and the issues they face?

4. What are your markets like: The market you’re in and the market you’d like to be in?

5. Consider your competencies. What skills do you need to become more competitive, or enter new markets?

6. Are your technologies ones that are part of a growing or declining trend? For example, the demand for solvent-based prints is declining while customers increasingly have a “green” agenda. How can you make the most of this trend?

7. Where are your revenues coming from? Surprisingly, few companies do a thorough analysis of what products and printers are generating the most revenue. Does your analysis tell you anything about needing to replace or acquire supplemental printers? What applications are delivering the best margins?

8. Have you explored web-to-print, or variable data printing services? If you have digital printers, then you are already on the way to offer them. It can add new revenue streams and attract new customers. If you aren’t a digital PSP, looking at digital printers and web-based workflows and print could be an important move for you.

9. Are you talking regularly to your suppliers to learn from them? They may be well placed to offer you a broader picture of the markets, and can tell you what other innovative and successful PSPs are doing.

10. Are you ready now to build your future?

If the answer to the last question is yes, digital wide and super-wide printers have places within the product portfolios of all leading graphic arts suppliers, demonstrating the collective belief in the future of digital as a technology that offers distinct advantages.

Mark Rowland
mark.rowland@hp.com