In-Plants and POD: Ahead of the Curve

ACCORDING TO acronymfinder.com there are 89 published definitions for POD. “Print On Demand” ranks number 7 in popularity. (For what it’s worth, #6 is “Probability Of Damage” and #8 is “Payable On Death.” Number one, not surprisingly, is “Proof Of Delivery.”)

As to the On Demand part, everything is OD these days: movies, music, weather, news, banking, and yes, there’s even Howard Stern On Demand (this author has restrained himself from commentary). Though the term is overused, it denotes anything immediately accessible.

Our now-omnipresent resource library Wikipedia states; “Print on demand or publish on demand (POD) is a publishing methodology in which a copy is not created until after an order is received. While POD may use any printing technology, digital printing is so often employed that the terms are often used interchangeably.”

Therefore anything “published” (that term becoming looser every day) through virtually any print medium at the time of need then becomes POD. The key is how production is triggered, not the production method itself.

For our purposes I propose the core definition of POD is a convergence of technologies that allows us to push time and resource-consuming administrative tasks by using metadata. Many complex, customized and repetitious processes are thus removed from the “human-stream,” allowing for greater productivity and less waste.

What’s It All About?

For some it’s about short-run publishing; for others it’s a faster way to order standardized, customized or personalized material though a Web-based storefront or catalog; and for still others it’s a templated, repeatable process for throughput that is searchable, variable and easily updateable.

What POD means from an in-plant perspective is summed up aptly by Larry Clements, of Redlands Community College: “Print On Demand means that we don’t have to keep as much inventory on such things as catalogs, student handbooks, brochures. In the past when most everything was done on the press it didn’t make sense to print 100 copies of a document when you knew that within a couple of weeks we would have to put the job back on the press to print an additional 100 copies. It’s a bit of a no brainier, with digital technology, not to keep lower inventories.”

Likewise, Auburn University’s Glenda Miley has a similar perspective: “Print-On-Demand means that we can offer our customers the luxury of printing only the number of prints they need for a certain time frame. It also means being able to offer them the opportunity to have their publications as current as they can be.”

So really, POD is about using technology to put constituent’s needs’ first. In-plants serve their institutions. That’s one big reason why they’ve been ahead of the POD curve.

It’s All About the Customer

“True print on demand is a solution built to suit a specific customer problem,” explains Jeff Lazerus, fellow Mountain States Printing Education Foundation board member, and director of Annex Print and Mail Solutions. “Maybe it’s customized, maybe not. In my mind POD is starting the fulfillment process for a print request at the precise moment it is ordered, in the precise amount the customer requires, eliminating the slowdowns and waste inherent in a traditional workflow.”

POD then is not dissimilar to what other industries have been defining and refining for decades through programs such as ISO, ANSI, Six Sigma and other lean manufacturing certification programs under the moniker JIT (Just-In-Time).

POD has five major benefits:

1. Reduction in order introduction time

2. Reduction of administrative tasks

3. Improved customer service

4. Ease of use and customization

5. Increased processing and delivery speed

JIT manufacturing (the end-to-end process) is a big part of what POD represents. Many in-plants have been early adopters of various flavors of JIT. In part, because of the availability of existing IT departments for deep-pocketed expertise and support, in-plants have been perfectly poised to dive into the POD waters.

‘A Cultural Change’

“Our success and client support for this effort has been a cultural change,” says Mike Michener, who manages TIAA-CREF’s in-plants in New York, Charlotte, and Denver. “Without central control of print, copy and mail, departments will go the way of least resistance, call a vendor and hand it off. If we are being passive, the client orders materials produced, and they determine what is to be archived. If we are aggressive or proactive, we archive any materials we think might be reordered. We also solicit input from across the organization to find and archive new materials.”

So for those who already have a dynamic POD program in place, kudos! For those that don’t, it’s time to start. There are myriad products on the market with which to streamline your operation. From Web-to-print, to JDF, to fully integrated MIS and I-COM systems, there’s a product to fit every budget. Evaluate your bottlenecks to determine where to start, or where to concentrate your next efforts.

POD is all about process automation. It’s all about being competitive. It’s all about survival. IPG

Vic Nathan Barkin has more than 30 years of experience in the printing industry. He was the manager of Northern Arizona University’s Printing Services department for 12 years and recently served as solutions sales manager, digital printing, for Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group. A Certified Graphic Communications Manager with IPMA, he is also a past president of the IPMA’s Arizona chapter, and has been a presenter at ACUP and SUPDMC. Barkin is currently serving as “Digital Printing Evangelist” and business development consultant for Spectro, a Denver-based marketing services firm specializing in Web-to-print hosting, digital and conventional offset printing, and collateral fulfillment. In addition, Barkin serves as an executive board member of the Mountain States Printing Education Foundation, and is an active associate member of the IPMA Rocky Mountain chapter. You can contact him at: vicbarkin@netscape.net