Web-to-Print Adoption and Success

InfoTrends estimates that 46 percent of companies have adopted Web-to-print solutions and forecasts that investment will continue at 12.7 percent compound annual growth rate between 2011 and 2016. Info-Trends believes that the share of business ordered via the Internet will continue to grow in the future.

Despite the usage and growth, there are reports that not everyone is satisfied with their implementations. In the NAPL (now Epicomm) Workflow Investment Survey 2014, about 80 percent of responding companies are very successful and 20 percent are not. Why do some succeed while others fail? In our work with companies that are successful and those that are struggling, we believe there are three critical factors for success:

1. Motivating customer buy-in: Not everyone embraces change. It’s not unusual in the implementation of any new technology for customers to feel intimidated and uncomfortable with the new system. If left unchecked, this can create a climate of dissatisfaction and result in refusal to work with the new system. How do you avoid that? Engage customers with training and support. The Midwest insurance and financial services firm mentioned earlier trained staff to use WebCRD and QDirect with short instructional videos.
2. Leaders build better solutions: These are not one-size-fits-all solutions. It’s critical to customize the solution to your needs. The insurance and financial services in-house printing facility had multiple requirements, including an impact on data center printing and document customization to increase relevancy to customers. Based on their requirements, they needed to integrate several different workflows. The goal was to utilize RSA’s M.I.S. Print to convert legacy print streams in its data center, QDirect for enterprise output management, WebCRD Dynamics to customize templates, and WebCRD for ordering. Predicted savings were $250,000 per year; however, the system is now delivering $1.5 million per year in savings.
3. Leaders invest more: As reported in the NAPL Workflow Investment Survey 2014, when companies were asked how much they invested, leaders, regardless of company size, invested more time and money.