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What VDP tools should I look for as I invest?
June 15, 2007
Sponsored by
Question: My customers are asking for variable-data printing. I’m not sure where to start. What VDP tools should I look for as I invest?
Start with these basic business questions:
• Do you have enough digital print business in the pipeline to justify the costs?
• Are there enough long term contracts to support the investment?
• Can you absorb the risk if you lose these deals?
• Are there other ways to defray the initial cost and reduce the risk?
• Can your current staff and IT infrastructure support digital print—servers, network bandwidth and applications?
Turning a buck in digital print
First, some background to help you understand how to approach this decision: Typical digital pages come from transaction-based documents, such as billing statements and direct mail. But they can also come from books—either educational or short-run—to compliment existing offerings such as large offset runs. This allows you to provide a mixed offering to your customers so they can lower inventory costs and time to market.
These offerings require different skill sets to execute as well as to sell to your customers, who are often focused on unit cost. Digital technology provides new revenue opportunities for you and new opportunities—and cost models—for your customers. You need to understand these and be able to help your customers understand them.
Start small, but make it scalable
Once you’ve made the decision to implement digital technology, you’ll probably want to start small with a digital cut-sheet device that also operates as a copier to help defray the costs of moving to digital. Devices like the InfoPrint Solutions 2090es and 2105es offer walk-up copy, scan, e-mail and digital print capabilities for cut-sheet applications. They deliver all this at an affordable price with built in scalability thanks to support for Adobe PostScript, Portable Document Format (PDF), Printer Control Language (PCL) and IBM’s Advanced Function Presentation (AFP).
Must-have software, if you’re serious
Software like Objectif Lune’s PrintShop Mail or QuarkXPress plug-ins allow you to build somewhat complex variable-data applications using familiar tools such as PDFs or Quark for page layout. PrintShop Mail also gives you the ability to cache static information to be placed on the page at the printer to present smaller file sizes and run much more efficiently. Other tools, such as PlanetPress, allow you to build more complex applications and output even more efficient datastreams as well.
Other tools such as PrintSoft PReS, GMC PrintNet and Elixir DesignPro allow you to compose applications through a simple graphical user interface (GUI) or through scripts. These applications require more skills and a better understanding of data formats—either from host systems or large databases—but these tools are capable of producing PostScript or PDF and many other datastreams as well as AFP.
Did I miss something?
These are some of the details—probably just enough so you can start asking the right questions about how VDP might fit into your business.
Posted by Mark Vruno on June 15, 2007 | Comments (2)
