November 13, 2003 -- PrintCity, the strategic alliance of best-in-class suppliers to the graphic arts industry, is giving printers the opportunity to make a real difference in the industry through a new survey about the effectiveness of their relationships with industry suppliers. The results will be announced at drupa 2004. The survey, which can be downloaded right now from the organisation’s website seeks to study in detail the dynamic between suppliers and printers, and to discover how effectively printers rate their suppliers at meeting their needs. Rainer Kuhn, Managing Director of PrintCity, explains that it is an issue that has come to PrintCity’s notice through dialogue with printing companies at previous PrintCity events. He says: “We know, because printers have told us, that the printer-supplier nexus doesn’t always work to its highest efficiency, in spite of the vast sales, service and support structures of many industry suppliers. This was a key finding from our Studientag forum last year. Printers feel that there is a requirement for a greater level of dialogue between printers and suppliers. “This survey will allow us to get deeper into the processes involved, and the dissatisfactions that many printers are currently feeling. We want to find out what is making them unhappy, and what aspect of service suppliers need to improve. It’s an opportunity for printers across Europe to make their voices heard above the din of printing presses as the industry goes about its remorseless business.” The survey is available in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, and takes just a couple of minutes to complete. Questions relate to the whole gamut of areas in which there is interaction between suppliers and printers. These range from general questions about the level of dialogue between the two parties, and areas where service can be improved, to more specific questions about things such as user groups, trade exhibitions, the level of specialist technical knowledge that suppliers display, and even the usefulness of the trade press as a method of keeping informed. Five questions deal with more general industry trends. Results from the survey will be communicated within PrintCity to the member companies and to PrintCity’s Activity Groups, and could be used by these parties to genuinely influence policy and practices. PrintCity is offering a prize of a magnum of champagne to a winning company that completes the survey, and ten runners-up will receive PrintCity’s Competence Interface CD, a problem-solving tool created from the combined expertise of PrintCity member companies. Several thousand copies of the survey will initially be sent out to readers of PrintCity’s Webline publication in November. In addition, the survey will be emailed to many more contacts of PrintCity member companies in the near future and is also available to download from the PrintCity website in any of the five languages.