Welcome to the holiday hangover! It’s the start of another new year, and now is the perfect time to investigate key trends and adjust your strategic plan accordingly for 2018. At the beginning of each year, the analysts at Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends (InfoTrends) take a close look at the trends shaping the industry in our Road Map documents. We set aside some time to identify kay factors that will likely make an important impact over the next year and beyond. For 2018, we believe that print service providers (PSPs) will continue to increase their software adoption and spending, particularly in the growing areas of wide format and packaging. Most of today’s printers realize that software plays a critical role in keeping operational costs down and remaining competitive.

Across the diverse range of commercial, digital, packaging, and wide format printers, there are similar workflow challenges. At the same time, each segment is also different regarding application set, equipment mix, customer focus, workflow automation, and software adoption and spending.

Multiple research studies have pinpointed the need for all PSPs to efficiently manufacture increasingly more jobs with smaller quantities. Tasks like job on-boarding, capturing the customer’s intent, and obtaining the files needed to produce the work combine to create an unwieldy bottleneck that becomes more difficult to manage as jobs and the number of applications increase. The details for producing a customer’s work (type of product, quantity, due date) can often come into a shop from multiple sources that do not necessarily capture the same information. Orders may come in online through a web shop, online through a web form, offline from outside sales, offline from a customer support representative (CSR), or in many other imaginable ways. According to InfoTrends’ research, workflow bottlenecks are a major challenge for PSPs on a global scale. For example, 28% of European PSPs consider customer onboarding to be a significant bottleneck. In North America, nearly 50% of PSPs report being challenged by dealing with a high number of small jobs.