Recently, OnDemand Publishing.Com co-produced a comprehensive market study about the DocuTech™ customer base.* Aside from an obvious goal of capturing volumes of usage, consumables and billing data, Changing Requirements for On-Demand Printing and Related Services’ main purpose was to find out how much four-color work was being produced. The survey, functioning like a ship’s on-board navigation system, would provide us with a basis for forecasting the future direction of digital color output.

With more than 20,000 DocuTech systems distributed throughout the world—eighty five percent surveyed are networked—in both commercial and in-plant corporate reprographic department settings, it made sense to seek opinions from these digital work flow pioneers. As the early adopters of digital workflow, this group is a bellwether for predicting the use of color in business communications—45% of all respondent’s ‘clicks’ are for communication related documents.

"Nearly two thirds (72%) of [our] survey respondents are in the same physical location as their customers." A statement in itself; the reason for this should become clear as you read on. Our survey also found that color pages are incorporated into 74% of our respondent’s DocuTech jobs. Corporate reproduction facilities used color 67% and printers used color on 79% of the jobs. A majority of color work consisted of overprinting onto pre-printed spot or process color shells. Many of these color pieces are produced in-house at the DocuTech site itself—55% of the sites surveyed had their own conventional presses, and 36% had digital color production printers/ presses already installed. This equipment included digital devices such as the Heidelberg-DI, Xeikon, Indigo, DocuColor and CLC 1000.

Here’s the survey’s breakdown of installed-digital color production printers by business type:
All respondents 36%
Corporate 35%
Gov./Ed 19%
Printers 38%
Quick Print/Copy 69%
Other 20%

At Print ‘01, on the occasion of Xerox’s introduction of the iGen3, I had the pleasure of meeting with Gerhard Moll, the Sr. VP and General Manager for Xerox’s Color Solutions Business Unit. We traded our opinions about color usage and shared details of each others survey results. Gerhard told me that DocuTech owners had given Xerox a mandate: "Give us a color DocuTech". As a result, the DocuColor line is selling very well. At the time of our meeting, Gerhard was forecasting an installed population of 5,000 units for the DocuColor 2XXX family, by the end of 2001. According to Gerhard, "Sixty percent of new installations are not replacing any other Xerox product." The Digipath 3.0 front-end provides these DocuTech sites with a controller that handles both color and B&W and allows the color box to be upgraded to the iGen3s, once they begin shipping. This approach provides a follow-the-cookie-crum, migration path for these early digital-workflow adopters to follow. Certainly smart marketing, and a sure-fire way of promoting more color in business documents.

Further conversation with Gerhard centered on business communications, variable data and individualized documents. I gave Gerhard my opinion of where I thought corporations would be driving their future communications—"they will be in color, personalized and data mining will be extensively used to construct highly-individualized four-color communication pieces". Gerhard concurred. This notion is also supported by the large sites (three or more DocuTechs) surveyed in our study—these sites expect to see annual color growth in the 17% range. Where is this growth for color in business communications likely to occur? "It’s much easier to hang a big printer onto a big IT computer than it is to attach a big IT computer onto a commercial print shop’s printer," I said. Translation: large corporations have big IT departments and know how to manipulate data; printers are not IT people—they know how to print. Managing an IT infrastructure and manipulating data bases present a much larger learning curve than running a digital printer (perhaps this is why 72% are located with customers). Therefore, we are likely to see data centers and corporations buying digital color printers in the future. Gerhard concurred: "You are right on!"

Business communication is about customer retention (CRM) and lowering the cost of sales. Now that we have high quality digital color devices, anticipated 5 to 8 cent per color page costs will lead to an explosion of color documents. Corporations and service providers with well managed databases and CRM initiatives in place are well positioned to make use of color technology. We see in color, why not read in color? Does anyone want to buy a B&W television? Just as ship navigation systems have been upgraded from the venerable compass to modern GPS (Global Positioning System) technology, you can be sure modern business communications will be upgraded to individualized full-living color documents. Expect color to fill up your mailbox very soon!