by Susan Twombly, April 2006
It only happens every four years, so when IPEX comes around – the global technology event for print, publishing and media print service providers – the industry takes notice. Whether or not you attend IPEX 2006 in Birmingham, England, you will feel the repercussions as industry leaders unite to talk about and show the latest printing technology.
High on the list of discussions and demos is digital printing technology – and how print service providers like you can leverage its opportunities to get and grow business.
As a keynote speaker, Executive Vice President of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group Vyomesh Joshi (VJ) will outline the three core tenants in the graphics industry today and how they bring new levels of simplicity and cost-efficiency to printing:
- Co-existence: Combining the strengths of analog and digital printing to expand your range of services
- Community: Leveraging the Web to build new, more profitable business relationships
- Collaboration: Bringing together business leaders across the print supply value chain
These trends bring printing traditions and progressive technology together in new ways – creating more impactful, persuasive communications for your customers and heightened revenue opportunities for you.
Today, it’s no longer a matter of offset and digital presses fighting for real estate on the production floor. It’s a matter of two co-existing business models combining their strengths to deliver real benefits: Cost and efficiencies for you and on-demand and personalized communications for your customers.
Personal and powerful communications
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RT Associates combined analog and digital printing benefits to reduce labor and time-intensive manual processes by 70 percent. The result? Faster turn-around for a variety of projects.
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Say you’re creating a promotional kit to support multiple, industry-specific events for your customer. You print 30,000 identical kits, leveraging offset presses and high volumes to reduce costs. Each kit includes a folder with multiple inserts – brochures, response cards and data sheets.
This is an ideal opportunity to blend digital and analog printing benefits. Print 30,000 folders on your offset press, just as you always have. But now you can use an HP digital press, like the new HP Indigo press w3250, to customize what’s inside – creating highly targeted, event-driven materials to switch in and out of the same folder to reach specific audiences.
This digital press eliminates labor- and time-intensive setup and produces offset quality prints at less than 3 cents a page. As a result, digital printing can make short-run, customized printing cost efficient and greatly reduce obsolescence.
With HP integrated color management applications, you get a high level of color consistency across different HP graphic printers to maintain branding standards and satisfy even the most discerning client.
Combining analog and digital workflows
New HP front-end integration solutions make it easier than ever to take advantage of a multi-press environment. The HP Indigo Production Stream Server, powered by Creo, is a digital color server that routes print jobs to both analog and digital environments.
Using Job Definition Format (JDF) standards, the solution fully integrates with popular hybrid workflows, such as Brisque, Prinergy and Synapse prepress. The unified, streamlined workflow reduces complexity while helping to increase productivity and speed turnaround time.
Just like you’ve seen in the music industry, as content becomes digital, it becomes simpler and faster to distribute, access and integrate into our lives – creating more meaningful, personal experiences.
That’s just what’s happening in the printing industry. Empowered by the Web, your digital workflows can reach beyond the walls of your press room and into a larger digitally connected print community – allowing you to take your customers to new levels of customization and personalization to increase marketing effectiveness.
Targeting Mr. Right
Imagine a national sports equipment chain that wants to maintain control over consistent logos and other brand elements on weekly flyers, while enabling regional districts to localize content. Leveraging a Web-to-print application, you work with the head office to create approved online templates. Stores around the country tap into a Web interface to select, customize and order flyers.
Multiple requests flow directly to your printing plant, where your digital HP Indigo press 5000 goes to work. You print on-demand and ship the flyers where needed to support regional marketing efforts. In Reno, it’s running shoes on sale. In Fort Lauderdale, flip-flops. In Boston, boots. With on-demand printing, it’s all about getting the right message out to the right market at the right time.
Want to kick your customer’s marketing efforts up a notch? Link a Web-to-print application with solutions for customer relationship management (CRM) and data mining. Many companies like yours are doing all this today, forging new revenue streams. As they do so, they’re maximizing their value to customers and becoming less of a print provider and more of a communications partner.
The new digitally connected print community requires a high level of integration and collaboration between everyone along the print supply value chain – from companies that provide applications, workflow and digital-front-end solutions to those that provide substrates and finishing materials.
HP builds relationships with industry leaders across these areas to bring you a broad, standards-based solutions portfolio that can integrate and streamline your entire workflow – both analog and digital.
We can help you leverage the benefits of both these worlds as offset presses continue to roll and you ease into digital printing and all its revenue potential.
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Go digital now.
HP can help you every step of the way as you maximize your Indigo digital printing investment. Learn more www.myhpindigo.com
- HP Indigo Business Development Program
- HP Digital Press Implementation and Ramp-Up Management Program
- HP Instant Support for Digital Press Solutions
HP Financial Services makes the transition to digital printing more affordable.
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