AS WE start into 2012, it seems as if the printing industry, the country as a whole and even the global economy have been cast in a sequel to the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. The first draft of the script for the year ahead reads much like it did for the past two years.
At the INTERQUEST Digital Printing in Government and Higher Education Forum speakers from government and university in-plants discussed best practices at their operations. In between, principals from INTERQUEST—the market and technology research and consulting firm that organized the event—presented trends and research results.
THE GRAPHIC communications industry is in the middle of an evolution to expand services beyond print to include cross-media and marketing. Unfortunately, the in-plant market is largely absent from the move, according to an Info-Trends research study The Evolution of the Cross-Media Marketing Services Provider. The key barrier keeping in-plants from making the transformation is that they don’t understand why or how to offer cross-media marketing services.
There are some pretty large in-plants in North America. To find out who they are, we surveyed our readership. Not all of the largest in-plants replied, but most of them did, allowing us to create two lists, the largest in-plants according to the number of employees and according to sales.
Though the economy may be showing signs of improvement, the salaries of in-plant managers are still suffering. According to IPG's biennial salary survey, managers' salaries have gone down 3.17 percent in the past two years. What's more, a significant number (40 percent) received no pay raise in 2010. When we asked that question two years ago, only 17 percent said they got no raise.
The in-plant printing market segment is a critical component to the overall U.S. printing industry. In 2008, InfoTrends estimated that the overall industry had a value of shipments of $143 billion. The total in-plant printing market had just over an 18 percent share of the overall market, with $26 billion in value of shipments.
Almost 100 college and university in-plants responded to a recent IPG survey. They ranged in size from one employee to 105, with a median employee count of nine. Download the 2010_University_Inplant_Survey.pdf to read some of the interesting facts we learned.
WE LIVE in a multi-channel world where print is just one component of customer communications. As an in-plant printer in difficult economic times, you should consider how you can provide additional value to your organization. This may be through mailing and fulfillment services or a greater focus on applications that go into the mail stream—like direct mail, transaction and transpromo—using a personalized (1:1) communications strategy.
For the first time, in-plant managers are now saying they buy less paper than they bought two years ago. This was just one of the revelations that came to light in our biennial paper buying survey, which pulled in 375 responses.
A few things have changed since we last surveyed school district in-plants in 2005. Fewer of them run offset presses now. Four years ago, 90 percent had them; today just 79 percent are inking up presses. Digital color printing, on the other hand, has grown from 62 percent to 82 percent. More are likewise providing design services. About 66 percent handled design in 2005 and 80 percent offer it today.
While school district in-plants print many of the same items they did four years ago, there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of shops that produce course materials, tests, posters and direct mail. Here are some other interesting facts we learned:
