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The show was built around a trio of themes: personalization, the Internet and outsourcing. This last theme, however, may have proved a bit overbearing. As Barbara Pellow put it in the opening minutes of the 1998 On Demand Digital Printing & Publishing Strategy Conference and Exposition, "The digital opportunity isn't coming; it's here, it's today and it's now." Certainly that was not headline news to printers, who have been hearing about—and practicing—printing on demand for years. Nevertheless, more than 18,700 people jammed the Javits Convention Center in New York recently to learn about the latest print-on-demand developments. Pello's consulting firm, CAP Ventures, the

In-plants know the benefits of print on demand; customers need some coaching. You must demonstrate the advantages if you want to win them over. TRADITIONAL PRINTING is like a buy-three-get-one-free special: It's a great deal—if you needed 400 documents; it's not really so great if you only needed 100, because now you have 300 you probably can't use, and you still have to store and manage them. In-plants know the advantages of print on demand (POD) by heart: more timely information, lower storage expenses and drastically reduced waste. Customers are not quite as well versed in these matters. It's up to in-plants to

Australian in-plant managers joined with quick printers for the first conference of its kind in Australia. Some things are the same everywhere. One can travel halfway around the world, for example, and still hear about the importance of good service and good communication in a printing operation. Those two themes popped up repeatedly at Pacific Print Congress 98, held recently in Melbourne, Australia. Speakers, both American and Australian, stressed that, in a sea of competition, customers are looking for vendors they can trust; vendors who will go that extra step for them. "Become consultants to these people, not just order takers,"

Four-color jobs, both offset and digital, make up half of the Exxon in-plant's workload. AFTER THE Valdez oil spill leaked almost 11 million gallons of North Slope crude oil onto the Alaska coastline in early 1989, Exxon admirably wasted no time diving into the cleanup and recovery effort. During that process, communicating with government agencies and other outside interests was of crucial importance. Houston's Exxon Print Center was the ready for the task. Boasting 27 employees and a wealth of sheetfed presses, digital printers and bindery equipment, the in-plant printed manuals and brochures filled with four-color pictures chronicling the three-year

By championing the move to integrate in-plant and data center printing, an in-plant can expand its services while boosting its presence and prestige. Consider this scenario: two departments operate similar equipment. One runs a day shift. The other functions primarily at night. By sharing equipment, the two departments could institute an efficient, two-shift operation, cutting equipment costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars. What manager in his or her right mind wouldn't want to integrate the two departments? In many organizations, however, the two departments still function separately. Those departments, if you haven't guessed, are the data center and in-plant printing departments.

Don't be afraid of electronic distribution. Let a document's content and intended audience determine how it gets delivered. Will new electronic distribution methods diminish your position within the organization? The answer depends on your response. New forms of delivery can actually make an in-plant more tightly integrated into an organization's workflow. In-plant managers are in the best position to determine the most efficient methods for document delivery, based on a document's content, timeliness and readership base. In most cases, documents will be delivered in several formats to provide convenient access to all users. Expanded delivery choices create a greater need to manage the

Dallas was cold, but the topics were hot at Xplor's 18th annual document systems conference. Have you gotten any advertising postcards in the mail lately? Any brochures or newsletters? Bet you have. And I bet you tossed some of them with barely a glance. But what if, during that glance, you spotted your name? And what if, instead of useless, generic topics, the copy was about one of your main interests? You'd read it, wouldn't you? We're talking about targeted marketing, using variable data. It's nothing new. Nothing profound. But it may be something you hadn't thought your shop could provide.

By helping to plan your organization's document strategy, you can create a strong future for your in-plant. Creating a document strategy is a popular topic at seminars and trade shows these days. But what, exactly, is a document strategy? And why should you have one? Basically, a document strategy defines an organization's method of capturing, storing, managing and distributing documents. It may exist on either a departmental or enterprise-wide basis. Not having a document strategy presupposes that operations will continue in a linear fashion. Though copying or printing a document and mailing it may be the way things have been done in the