Examining the past dot com craze to predict the future of workflow. Plus, a special look at R.R. Donnelley and Quad/Graphics.

Remember that paperless economy we were all speaking of just a few years ago? Offices would operate effectively and efficiently using just their computers, email and the web. For some industries this has become reality, but I would bet that most reading this article are still surrounded by file cabinets holding thousands of pounds of paper. Our wonderful industry does not only produce printed product, it thrives on it.

Workflows are normally geared to job jackets and each job jacket is chocked full of print orders, estimates, book maps and any other documentation relevant to a specific project. We collaborate using a combination of phone, email and fax. Our supporting operations (finance, logistics, etc.) are equally tied to paper. What this distills down to is a system that is inherently inefficient from a time standpoint, but is used, nonetheless, because of its familiarity and the lack of a "better mousetrap".

Some companies have made strides to provide online workflow solutions within their organizations and to their clients. These pioneers in what I term ‘Online Workflow Facilitation", are the focus of this month’s article.

Where were we?

Online facilitation where print is concerned is not a new concept. For many years individual companies have dipped their proverbial toes into the pool that was e-commerce, even before the phrase was coined. Companies like K/P Corporation were offering an online ordering service for business cards. The site, if my memory holds true, offered templates designed specifically for their clients that could be filled out and sent via the web along with their order. Pretty space age for the time. Although the aspects of this sort of service had their limitations, it was the beginning of a wave of new concepts concerning how we as an industry could use this new medium that dared infer that "print was dead".

Next came the concept of online print procurement through web based requests for estimates. These new online services were many and some, although innovative for the transactional market, were short lived. It was a tough sale. For the host companies to be profitable they had to set up a business model that not only served the needs of the printer and the client, but one that brought income into their own biskit barrels. That was a hard sale. If anything - printers are slow to embrace new ideas, and as John Parsons of Seybold Publications so wonderfully put it, printers by their very nature are not as concerned with innovation as they are with efficiency...if it doesn’t make money, it doesn’t make sense.

Much of the e-commerce target market already had very long standing relationships with their clients and they did not take very warmly to a third party coming along and in a sense saying, "Hi guys. Can we play too? Oh, it will cost ya!"

Online Workflow Solutions

Approximately 4+ years ago some very innovative individuals from several companies struck on the concept of not only offering virtual bids and orders, but also offering actual workflow solutions online. These solutions varied from company to company, but for the most part contained the elements that I liked to call at the time"the virtual job folder". One could communicate between client and vendor, including or excluding other team members as needed. One could bid, select vendors, place orders, track those orders through their lives in the plants, and confirm delivery.

The entire history of the job and all its elements were at your fingertips via a secure online link. It was a very good concept that was not very well received by the world I live in...contract publishing. The "big" players (multi divisional corporations) saw no advantage to paying a third party part of what they saw as hard won profits, for a service that may have been a benefit to their clients, but offered them, as a company, very little. In fact they saw any change in business as a complication.

An added challenge would have been trying to get all plants in a particular company on board with the same workflow. It’s very difficult to imagine these companies switching their entire means of communication inside and outside the plant to a single third party solution. It wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Two companies I’d like to mention that were real innovators in these early attempts at Internet workflow facilitation were Printcafe and Noosh. Both developed great products based on customer input and are, I’m happy to say, still doing business.

The "Big Boys" get it

Although the models for early e-commerce did not meld well with some large multi divisional companies, it did not inhibit those same companies from embracing the concept. R.R. Donnelley invested heavily in a specific e-commerce provider and even looked at producing their own solution for a time. Quad/Graphics was quick to understand the value added importance of offering an Internet based facilitation solution to their clients.

Quad/Graphics versions were unveiled as Smart Tools and DBL Online. Both solutions empower their clients to track jobs within the plant, look into shipping and inventory and approve PDFs posted on DBL Online prior to plating. The client has the option of using each solution as much or as little as they please and having worked with both I can say they are quite impressive and offer real value as needed information is literally as far away as your monitor.

Last week, R.R. Donnelley announced "Digital Solution Centers". Mary Lee Schneider, president of Premedia Technologies said, "R.R. Donnelley's Digital Solution Centers will provide customers with the versatility and convenience to access their pages anytime, anywhere. This will give customers greater control over their schedules and make file processing more streamlined and accurate."

Following on what looks in print to be a similar model to Quad/Graphics’ Smart Tools, R.R. Donnelly will offer online job information and online proofing using, in part, a third party Creo system. As an added value, they report that customers will have use of:

- AdSpring for online advertising archiving, assignment and management,
- PubSpring for online editorial content and related information management,
- ImageMerchant for online digital asset management for purposing and repurposing, including use of XML tags for that information.

What will the future hold?

Both Quad/Graphics and R.R. Donnelley are on the leading edge of online facilitation to enhance the efficiency of both their and the customer’s workflow. Although not truly e-commerce solutions, these workflows were driven by the development of e-commerce and owe, in part, their conceptual existence to the early pioneers mentioned above.

What will the future hold for similar solutions? I see more large firms developing their own solutions. Other third party systems could be developed for sale as packages to printers who might not see the need to invest in producing their own proprietary solutions (similar to what R.R. Donnelley has done). I also see current systems expanding as a communication means for ordering print and project management collaboration, allowing communication via online forums specifically developed for a client and their projects.

These online print orders could in some way flow into a CIP4 driven workflow at the printer, effectively cutting down the time needed for information exchange and input. Eventually much of the information currently exchanged in that trinity of voice, email and fax, will flow into one integrated system allowing for a smooth and seamless exchange of information and data. These systems may evolve into a true "industry" driven solution that could interface with various systems used at a number of printers.

If the past has shown us anything with regards to our industry, it’s that change is always with us and sometimes reality is much more than we could have ever imagined. I’m excited.