The Click Of Convenience

If you want to keep your customers, you'd better make life easy for them. Many in-plants say online job submission is the answer.

by Mike Llewellyn

Just try telling a Los Angeles city employee he's got to get in his car, drive across town during rush hour and drop off a print order at the municipal in-plant when there's a quick printer right next door. Great price or no, he's not going to do it.

"One of the challenges for in-plants is to offer the most convenient service possible," says Mike Leighton, director of Publishing Services for the City of Los Angeles. "Customers are more likely to use something when it's made easy."

That's why Leighton and the 50-employee in-plant decided to upgrade from an older Hagen OA Internet job submission system to one from Printable Technologies. The in-plant launched the new software to the fanfare of a late-January open house.

"Commercial shops are already doing this," notes Leighton. "We must compete with Kinko's and the quick printers. L.A. is widely dispersed, and you have to take away every reason not to use the in-plant."

Web-based ordering, Internet job submission, call it what you will, it's attracting the attention of a lot of in-plant managers. Sending jobs to an in-plant electronically appeals to the couch potato in every customer. And when customers can just kick back and click, in-plants can cash in.

A Two-year Search

Up the California coast in San Francisco, David German, manager of the city's Reproduction and Mail Services department, says his 46-employee facility has been looking for nearly two years at ways to get jobs into the shop over the Internet. The in-plant chose PrinterPresence.

"PrinterPresence is dirt-cheap and flexible," says German. "Our customers have been asking for faster and faster turnaround. This takes a few hours off the front end."

On the other side of the country, at Maury Kane's eight-shop copy center network at Temple University, a PagePath system stands poised to accept any job that might come over the Web. Using PagePath's "MyOrderDesk" software, the offset-free Philadelphia in-plant has posted a link on its Web site that transports customers to a hypertext work order. First-time users must download a software package, but once that's done the rest is easy, says Kane.

While there is convenience in not having to walk a job down to the in-plant (or guilt in making an overworked student temp do it), Kane says there are greater benefits to using the MyOrderDesk system.

"Most of the customers on campus don't have access to color printers, and if they have an 11x17˝ job, many times their printer can't print that out," he explains. "With MyOrderDesk, they don't have to print it out themselves."

PDF Converter Makes Proof PDQ

With MyOrderDesk, Kane's customers fill out the order form and upload a file. The software transports the file to PagePath's server, which then converts it into a PDF. Almost immediately an electronic proof, or "soft proof," is e-mailed back to the customer, with a request for approval. Once the customer gives a thumbs-up, all is sent to Duplicating Services for production.

This automatic PDF conversion is also an integral part of T/R Systems' Digital StoreFront, currently being used by both Villanova University and the University of Missouri-Columbia. Customers get a digital proof, and once they approve it the job gets printed.

Temple's Kane says the PDF conversion is an essential component of the process. Without it, the appearance of a job can be altered as it travels between platforms and programs. As a bonus, Kane says, a PDF conversion often reduces the size of a file, which keeps Temple's network administrators in a good mood.

A System Made For Technophobes

The software, says Kane, works great. But there is a problem: The in-plant is having a very difficult time convincing the campus to get on board. The initial software download, he believes, scares off a number of potential users.

"So far, we've had the system for a year and three months. We're just exceeding 50 users," he says. "That's less than half a percent using MyOrderDesk."

And it isn't a lack of effort on the in-plant's part that keeps customers addicted to hard copy.

To rally some interest in the service, Kane has put together a back-to-basics marketing program. The in-plant distributes magnets, note pads and thank-you cards, all trumpeting the value and ease of the system.

"You really have to put a lot out there to get a little back," he says. But Kane is not discouraged. Although very slow at first, system usage is picking up. Eventually, says Kane, the ivory tower old-timers will warm to the new technology.

Fortunately, he explains, the PagePath system is designed for this trend. The software is inexpensive, and the fee for using PagePath's server is charged in proportion to the volume of usage coming into the Temple in-plant. So when the first few intrepid users logged on to the system, duplicating services was charged $3 per day, with $7 charged for each new user. As preset user-volume thresholds are crossed, the per diem increases.

Kane says the pricing structure is ideal for Duplicating Services because it ensures a safe investment.

"If you don't have a locked-in user group, or if you don't have a high demand already, you've got to minimize your cost." This, he contends, is the way to do it.

Software From Scratch

With 15 months under its belt, Temple University's in-plant is relatively new to the online job submission game. At the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champaign, Technical Analyst Dan Harding has overseen Printing Services' online job submission software since 1997. In computer years, that's ages ago. His secret? The in-plant designed its own system.

"Back in '97, a large portion of our clients were grad students and professors who kept odd hours," says Harding. "We wanted to allow them to get their jobs into us at any time."

For those grad students tapping away in the library at two in the morning, the first idea was to have them e-mail their jobs to the in-plant.

"But that was too primitive," he says. Not satisfied with that clunky system, Harding enlisted the help of some resident programmers, and they set to work building a better system using a computer language known as PERL. For those who haven't kept up with the information age cognoscenti, Harding explains the benefits of PERL this way:

"It's a scripting, or programming, language that's platform-independent. So if the powers-that-be decide to migrate [the school's main computer platform] from Windows to Linux, for instance, there won't be any problem."

Harding and his team had their work cut out for them, but they were not about to sign on for a vendor-designed system.

"At the time we started doing this, vendors weren't offering what we wanted at the right price," he says.

DIY: A Do Or A Don't?

At root, Harding's software is an Internet form. Users select the type of job they'd like to submit from a drop-down menu and then enter all the necessary information. But unlike the non-offset Temple in-plant, things get a little more complicated in Urbana-Champaign.

"Offset jobs tend to be more complex. An offset job has to be broken down into color separations which means you may have to go in and edit the job file on your own," he says. "For most [digital] color printing jobs, we can just get a PDF file and print that."

Of course, the print shop's customers don't see all the messy details, and the software has been a hit. Harding reports 33 percent of all offset jobs coming into the in-plant arrive over the Internet. Half of all digital jobs and a whopping 80 percent of large-format jobs are submitted online, as well.

But as always there have been the stalwart proponents of hard copy submission.

"There are always going to be those customers who want face-to-face interaction in our department. Some people are intimidated by submitting an order form online. But when customers have brought jobs in in person, we just tell them that they can do it online," says Harding, adding that word-of-mouth has been, and continues to be, the best marketing tool.

A System Search

He says that for the in-plant manager who still may be an Internet rookie, it's best to check out the vendors' ready-made systems, which have dropped in price substantially over the past few years.

"Whether or not you design your own system depends on whether or not you have a staff that knows how to do it," he says.

Lacking an on-staff programmer, that's exactly what Los Angeles' Mike Leighton did.

The west coast in-plant landed the Printable software because it provided what Leighton says are a number of great added values for the shop's customers.

"There's a shopping cart order manager that allows you to view your order, and using their server you can upload large files," he says.

Additionally, Leighton notes, the product is intended to integrate with pre-existing job tickets from the in-plant's previous system, made by Hagen OA .

"We just don't want to end up maintaining two inventories of job tickets," he explains.

"What we're doing here is basically creating an added value," he adds, "and if you don't do that, you make yourself vulnerable." IPG

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Sidebar: Pick A Card

"I wanted out of the business card business," says Cindy Owen, manager of Communications Services at Duke Energy. She says the 33-employee Houston in-plant was devoting far too much time to this high-demand stationery product.

"And to me, stationery is a low-value priority," she says.

So the shop started looking for a way out. The challenge for Owens was to find the most economical way to provide the service (she didn't really want to drop that business) without compromising the in-plant's time, which is always in short supply.

The answer came in the form of Lojx online job submission software.

"What Lojx delivered was my perfect world," she says.

For Owen, what was once a time-consuming headache—the layout of business cards—is now a virtually hands-free process.

"The cards come to prepress already typeset. That has completely eliminated desktop publishing," she says.

It works like this: By logging onto the in-plant's Web site, customers can access a series of business card templates. They plug in or change their information, they click submit et voila!—Communications Services has the proof.

Additionally, customers can check an electronic proof for errors before sending off an order. Now responsibility for any inaccuracies in the finished product lands squarely in the lap of the buyer. Owens says this feature is a godsend and helps keep things congenial between in-plant and customer.

The in-plant also uses the Lojx system for other kinds of stationery such as envelopes, note paper and telephone number cards.

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