Easing Into E-commerce

At least 60 print-related Internet companies offer services in-plants can use. Find out how they can help your operation.

The Internet has changed much more than the way we tell jokes, spread rumors and waste time at work. It's also reformulated the speed at which businesses must operate.

New companies used to take years to work up business models, secure funding, market themselves, hire a staff and enter the market. Now that whole process has to happen within months—even weeks.

The ability to transmit messages, text, graphics and more instantaneously has also created new business operations—operations that can help businesses squeeze the potholes and speed bumps out of their crusty old 1995-style operations and boost themselves up to Internet speed.

The printing industry hasn't been left out of this explosion of Internet companies, or "dotcoms." There are at least 60 print-related Internet firms. Most of them didn't exist a year ago.

To give you an idea of the services these dotcoms provide, we'll look at three different types:

• Procurement and job management sites, which allow printers and buyers to easily share jobs and information to help automate workflow.

• Auction and bid sites, where print buyers can put jobs up for bid and then choose a printer from the offers they receive.

• Supply sites, where printers can purchase equipment, paper and consumables.

In-plants: Part Printer, Part Buyer

Since in-plants, unlike standard commercial print shops, function as both printers and print buyers, they have the potential to use most of these sites from both sides. As printers, for example, they can insource jobs by visiting auction sites and bidding on jobs outside their parent organizations. When they need print services for jobs they can't do in-house, they can auction these jobs off.

One caveat: Although this wealth of print-related sites offers in-plants great possibilities for improving and streamlining their operations, most of the sites have been in business for less than a year and are relying on funding from venture capitalists and other financial resources to fuel their growth. If this seed money was taken away, many of them would collapse for lack of customers. This doesn't mean you should avoid using these sites, but be aware of this limitation.

Another difficulty—one not limited to these print sites but certainly exemplified by them—is their tendency to rely on "Netspeak" when talking about their services: "We provide an end-to-end e-commerce solution to reconstruct your efficiency paradigms." All too often, you're left in the dark as to what services they provide and what benefits you're going to get.

Online Job Management

The job management sites don't sell paper or consumables, don't locate outside printers to handle tough jobs and don't help you find print work to fill an empty schedule. So what can they help you with? Just about everything else. Depending on the site you choose, you can transfer content files, archive jobs and do online and remote proofing.

The main focus of job management sites is to help you improve communications and work patterns with your established customers, which in most cases means your parent company.

"What are the two biggest pains that in-plants have in a day?" asks Joseph Pargola, Collabria's vice-president for corporate print sales. "Number one is managing their in-house production and those jobs that they broker to outside print facilities. The second, and probably more time-consuming duty, is communicating with their in-house customers."

Collabria offers PrintCommerce eTracker, an online ordering and tracking system, along with eCatalog, which helps track online orders, creates job dockets and aids in billing.

"What PrintCommerce can do for in-plant managers is alleviate most of that communication between them, their customer service reps and the end users within the company," he adds.

Pargola estimates that 35 to 40 percent of an in-plant manager's day is spent communicating with end users: taking jobs in, understanding them, proofing them and answering questions about when a job will be finished.

"With PrintCommerce, most of that goes away," he says. Each job submitted through Collabria's system is tracked from start to finish so the end user can monitor the progress. Any time a change takes place, an e-mail is sent to all involved parties simultaneously. This lets users know whether changes in job specifications were carried out and how these changes have affected the schedule.

Ned Gibbons, of Noosh, says in addition to allowing everyone involved to monitor jobs in progress, Noosh's collaborative management tool also gives in-plants more control over their print schedules.

"Because of the unique relationship between printer and buyer, a lot of times in-plants probably aren't aware of projects until they're dumped on their laps. There's no bidding process," he says. "Now you become part of a job team. Whether you're the customer service rep, estimator or manager, you're part of this job progress with the people on the buying side of the organization. So in-plants can improve their scheduling and demand forecasts."

As print buyers, in-plants can use these management sites to more easily share and send jobs to outside printers, as well as monitor their progress.

Like Noosh and Collabria, Impresse provides in-plants with a communications tool that places all information about jobs in one location that is accessible to everyone who needs to see it, whether at a buyer, budget or departmental level. Jobs are archived so they can be referenced and adjusted as needed for future work. This archive helps managers see where business is coming from, follow their turnaround cycle and build an estimate base for future quotes.

In addition to their management systems, each site offers special features, sometimes resulting from alliances with other online companies. Noosh, for example, has teamed up with PaperExchange.com to let users locate deals on paper while they price jobs.

Collabria offers additional proofing and digital asset management options through an alliance with Imation. It also offers production tools that deliver files directly to Xerox DocuTechs or Xeikon color engines so no one needs to touch them until the job comes off the press.

Impresse offers such extras as Smartforms and Smartflows. Rather than working with one of the nine default templates Impresse has for newsletters, data sheets and so forth, Smartforms lets in-plants use their normal processes and forms so they can specify the parameters. Smartflows lets the printer or buyer change employee access to jobs on a project-by-project basis so only the people allowed to approve quotes or proofs on a particular job are able to do so.

Another site, printCafe.com, also helps integrate and automate printing. Clients can pick a printer and spec every aspect of a job from prepress to fulfillment. Printers can receive orders and quote prices. The site tracks job status in real time.

These dotcom services all have their own payment plans: Collabria charges a licensing fee to the print provider; Noosh has a service fee for the buyer and a transaction fee for each completed job for the printer; Impresse asks for a one percent commission from the printer for all completed jobs. What works best for you obviously depends on how useful the system proves to be.

It's hard to imagine how many e-commerce print sites will survive, but the sites we spoke with were hard at work on numerous changes and new services for their customers. They're not waiting for the market to beat them down; instead they're doing whatever they can to lure new customers to their sites and keep their "old" customers coming back.

Bidding For Business

Mention online auctions and eBay will likely come to mind. But online auctions can handle more than just Beanie Babies and sports collectibles. They are just as effective for finding printers.

Print auctions can allow in-plants to get additional work during slow periods, and to find printers to handle complicated jobs. David Robb, vice-president of 58K.com—which gives buyers access to 58,000 U.S. printers in an auction format—says when he owned a finishing plant in North Carolina, his entire market was within 150 miles of his plant.

"That was as far as my salesmen could go in a day and still get home for dinner. Occasionally I'd get a job in Nebraska or Arizona, and when they found me they were delighted because I could do so many different things," says Robb.

"With the Internet and 58K.com, printers benefit by finding new customers that never would have found them otherwise," Robb continues. "They can fill up their capacities and capitalize on what they do well. If someone in Nebraska wants to have postcards printed, for example, there may not a lot of postcard printers to choose from." By posting the details of their job on an auction site, they might hook up with a printer in California who does a ton of postcards.

58K.com uses a feedback system like eBay's so buyers and sellers can rate one another on how well they manage transactions. If a buyer continually submits jobs without executing them, his rating will drop and sellers will know to avoid him. If a printer underbids the competition but can't keep its promises, other buyers will learn not to accept its bids.

58K.com launched in Europe recently (www.58k.co.uk), and while an international presence isn't something most in-plants dream about, being able to locate printers overseas has its benefits. If your organization wants literature for a trade show in Germany, you can place the job up for bid and find a printer in the same town as the show.

58K.com, which launched in October 1999, receives a two percent commission from the printer on each sale. In-plants looking to outsource pay nothing for the site's services.

The commission, Robb says, "is certainly more cost effective than bringing in a salesperson to compete with everyone else in the community. We see ourselves as the sales force for in-plants. Plant managers can find work that's appealing, that fits their equipment and schedule, and bring in work from the outside that they would not have otherwise had."

58k.com isn't alone. Another print auction site, Printbid.com, holds a database of more than 62,000 U.S. printing firms that buyers can search by locality, equipment, capabilities or name. Once they select printers, they can create a detailed Request For Quote and send it off to them.

Getting The Goods

No matter how smoothly you manage jobs, you can't accomplish anything without the right equipment and materials. Naturally, online suppliers offer a range of products.

One such site is PrintNation.com, which offers consumables, paper, ink, pre- and post-press equipment, plates and chemistry. To help you decide on new equipment, the site offers product reviews and side-by-side comparisons of the products' specifications. It also provides printing industry news, bulletin boards, chat rooms, used equipment auctions and research on services like leasing and financing.

"Our business model is based on serving the small- to medium-sized printer, which we feel is an underserved market," says David Steinhardt, vice-president of industry relations. "We're providing a full array of service from store to auction to community, rather than only selling product. We also produce a daily newsletter that's sent out to thousands of printers, keeping them abreast of what's happening in the industry and providing them with the information they need to become more profitable."

A more specialized site is PaperExchange.com, the first online exchange in the paper industry.

"We are a site where you can source any kind of paper you want," says Ray Funderburk, director of marketing. "And not only can you buy paper on our site, but once you're a member, you can take extra paper that you have, go on our site and sell it."

If you can't find the grade you're looking for, fill out a request and send it to everyone who previously purchased or sold that paper. There's no cost for browsing or buying paper. A three percent commission is paid by the seller.

Other supply sites include:

• GoPrinter.com, which offers 3,500 products from over 25 suppliers.

• prepressmall.com, a source for scanners, workstations, servers, imagesetters, software, color copiers and RIPs.

• paperdeals.com, a paper auction site to match buyers with sellers.

by Eric Martin