It may sound obvious, but digital prints are made from digital data, and digital data is very different to artists drawings,
films, and wet proofs. Firstly it can be changed, with ease, anywhere in the process, thus allowing for really feasible late changes and corrections, but also on occasion showing the results of the gremlins when the
final print is not quite the same as the proof!
Secondly digital data can also be manipulated very easily, making extremely short runs not only feasible but cost effective and profitable. Using a fully digital set-up
there is no difference between printing the same image many times and a whole series of slightly, or even totally different images.
As a result, the products produced by digital printing will tend to be shorter run,
often one-off, and subject to changes all the way along the process. As well as opening up new markets, especially for one-off very fast run around orders (for example a set of shop window adverts for a sports product
incorporating the result of the previous night's international football match) new customers can be gained, and current customer's expectations expanded. However the administration cost per job will increase, so it is
essential to price per whole job and not per print.
Human Resources
The potential new products and markets which can be gained will require different sales skills, in particular a high level
of computer literacy, perhaps even in preference to any knowledge about print. Also important will be the ability to put together and manage a whole service package for customers rather than providing just the print
operation. Some of the potential new customers will know nothing of print, and, will not even want to know anything about it. They will just want their own set of after-the-match posters for their window. There will be
real benefit having staff who can organise such a one-stop service - design, data handling (finding out the match result and adding it to the poster data), print production (the right number of posters of the right size
for the client's windows), and delivery - the posters ready and waiting at the shop when it opens the next day. Maybe even a 'mounting and taking away yesterday's posters' service too. Communication and project
management skills we be the key to making such business profitable.
Money
Digital printing equipment is very difficult to cost on the basis of running time; such equipment does not take well to
maximising throughput as do traditional presses and maintenance times are higher. The value added to a digitally printed product will come as much, if not more, from the manipulation of the digital; putting ink on paper
is the stage at which the value added becomes apparent but not where the work is done. The implications are therefore that costing needs to be done on a value-added basis and not on a time-taken basis.
Computers,
networks, and digital printers do not have the long life expectancy of traditional print equipment. One of the major implications of investing in digital technologies that depreciation times are much shorter giving a
comparatively higher utilisation cost. In practice, equipment for digital pre-press and digital print will eventually become partly capital and partly consumable.
