Aug 5, 2008
The Broadhurst Report:
The Right Solutions at the Right Time
By Guy Broadhurst, Océ
So it's over. Drupa, that is. How do you feel? Exhausted, smarter, feeling better about the future of print? Hopefully the fatigue has passed and you're much more informed about all that's happening in our industry. And if you're from the States, I hope you managed to handle the shocking dollar-to-euro exchange rate without too much checkbook trauma. But after this drupa it's entirely understandable if you feel as if you just fell, like Alice, into the rabbit hole to a land of promises and futures that may not line up with the reality of the world outside.
Because the show was so big, I always asked people what they were seeing as they walked the other halls. By far the most important comment we heard was that many stands showed a lot about the future but that Océ was one of a few that actually had the booth of today. Hearing that, I recalled what I pointed out in this column before drupa --that a lot of vendors would show you things that would be coming in a year or two because they felt it necessary to show off these devices. But for many educated consumers it showed that technology is changing faster than vendors can show products. This is a fundamental problem, and I simply don’t support the "Show it Now" syndrome: unveiling a machine that won't be available for two years, based on the premise that customers just can't wait. Sometimes this approach is used to fill real or imagined gaps in product lines, but some of it is simply grandstanding with the intent of sowing seeds of FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
I thought about this as I walked the many halls and considered it as I listened to visitors to our stand describe the current challenges in their operations. One of the leading topics, as it has been for some time, was the burgeoning interest in color, which was available at drupa in every shape, form and technology. Different types of print providers were all looking for the best ways to address their business needs.
¨ Transactional print providers are still concerned about the best ways to make the migration from monochrome to color and are becoming interested in being able to add marketing offers --where color is essential-- to bills and statements.
¨ Direct mailers are looking for ways to produce full color mailpieces with rich variable content, mailing less but getting a better response.
¨ Others see bringing color to digitally printed books as a new profit opportunity but are unsure of the best ways to approach this challenge.
Another recurrent theme was, 'Printing is the easy part. Most of my costs are up front and in the finishing.' So while customers were happy to see powerful new printing solutions, it was workflow software and pre/post systems that often took center stage and spawned some of the issues that keep them awake at night.
Finally, tighter economic conditions everywhere have resulted in a increased interest in how to do more with less equipment. What's interesting is that it's not that printers are less willing to invest in new machines, but that they want to ensure the ones they do buy have the flexibility and long-term value their businesses demand. This line of thinking gave way to discussions about how our field upgradeable printing systems provide a secure upgrade path and how most of our machines have the flexibility to run a very wide range of applications, effectively reducing the number of machines required to be profitable and productive.
What was clear every day of the show, was that whether it's color, workflow or pre- and post-processing, print providers want solutions now, not in 2010. Because their concerns mirror the changes in our industry we showed solutions for book production, transactional printing, direct mail, and other key areas for profitable printing today. We demonstrated systems that span toner and ink jet print engines, use workflows designed to help master the applications of today (and can scale to those of tomorrow), and incorporate pre- and post-processing offerings that maximize operational efficiency. Yet even as we showed what we offer today, we learned more. We learned about unique applications that use our technology in ways we hadn't expected. This is not only exciting, but it helps us and our customers learn new things and we all get better and smarter.
We were certainly busy at Drupa and busy is always good. While the predictions of half a million visitors didn’t happen, nearly four hundred thousand did come. The average visitor to our booth stayed for about three hours, a sign of having the right solutions for the right time!