Innovation in the Printing and Publishing Industry
submitted by Luca Leonardini on September 2011
Proposal for innovative services in the graphic arts industry
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An innovative proposal to face today’s most crucial challenge for the industry of the Graphic Arts (Printing & Publishing).
What tools are we going to need to guide the transformation process of the company from being a “technological productive unit” to become a true “modern business”? It’s a change management process divided into two major steps:
- The objective in the first step is to focus on maximise efficiency, quality and process stability through system automation and system integration. Very useful tools in this step are the Lean Six Sigma methodology and the JDF technology.
- In the second step the focus is how to effectively communicate what has been done and what will be realized, through the most appropriate web marketing strategy. In this second step, the change management process becomes much more complex: it’s during this phase that the company business will be transformed from a “production company” to a “service oriented company” in which the selected content management technology platform, plays a primary role.
During the first step, the production part of the company will inevitably free some resources that - in the second step of the change management process - will be made available in the new strategic area (advanced services) of the company. Here these resources could have the great opportunity to develop new competences and skills that facilitate their personal growth as well as the company growth and development.
The future of the graphic arts, the printing industry, the media services has never been so hard to foreseen. It’s not just about the rapid technology development, the global economy situation, the deep social and cultural changes and many others valid factors. For a number of companies I think there is a factor playing an important role: many of them are simply missing a vision on fundamental strategic issues. Currently the discussion about how long the paper will survive the new technology is very active on online and printed articles, events, round tables. I personally hate this kind of useless discussions which are reminding me something very similar about the “supposed death of paper” when the web exploded some 15 years ago. I believe the challenge here is different: it’s not about how long the paper will survive, but rather how many companies will close down before the paper - lets suppose for one second - will disappear. We will still need paper for a while as we have needed until today, with the exeption of printed newspapers and magazines because news and information have become a new experience which goes beyond the printed page. Starting from a truly customer oriented vision, there are in my opinion few strategic issues that could be helpful to a graphic industry, a printing company or a book or magazine publisher. Lets try to summarize:
Do You Know What The Job Definition Format Is? [POLL]
Why a poll on the Job Definition Format (JDF)?
Because the JDF it’s a process automation enabler for the printing industry and for the graphic arts which helps companies in this market to work smartly, to reduce wastes, costs, to develop a culture of continuous improvement.
What does it mean JDF in business terms?
It means that the average ROI of a JDF enabled process automation project is 277% and that 4 months after the implementation is completed, the company reaches the breakeven.
What is the link between the JDF and the current market situation?
The printing and publishing business have been so hardly hit by the explosion of new technologies (tablets, smartphones, HTML5, CSS3, JS, XML, social media platforms, ...) in the last couple of years: I do believe the reduction of wastes and costs, the increase of efficiency should be a must to adopt in order to remain in business today. In the last 10 years (think for a minute what has been the last decade for the world!) the JDF has been successfully adopted by a large number of printing industries around the world. Truth to be told, the general feeling about the JDF is that its market spread could be much larger and that its huge business potential hasn’t been fully discovered (maybe understood!) yet.
So these are my questions.
Trying to understand “why” such a smart technology hasn’t been adopted by the vast majority of the market. Trying to understand “what” can still be done to help entrepreneurs and managing directors approaching the JDF primarily as a business strategy, not as “just a technical issue”. There are many other questions of course: the purpose of the poll is to provide the community with a useful opportunity to think about the many possible questions and answers. The discussion will be extremely valuable for the community of customers, of technology suppliers and for the CIP4 Institute (the creator and the developer): it can help to better focus on mutual expectations in the future of the business. I invite you to use DISQUS (below the post) to add any comment or to suggest new options you would add to the menu list. As soon as there will be enough data for the statistics, I will publish a new post with the results. Thank you for taking your time and for participating!