Welcome to this webinar archive. The live event was held on October 24, 2007, but you may still access the content with the resources below.

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Post-Session Q&A - Following questions were asked, but not addressed during the live event. We have followed up to get them answered below.

Q. What do you feel is the biggest Relationship Value Proposition that is missing between the W2P vendor and the PSP customer trying to grow their business through this service?

Drew Swankie:  Sales training. I’ve seen a number of companies who have bought a system and think it is going to run itself and start generating revenue as soon as it goes online. That is completely not true. It takes a dedicated sales effort to begin to drive revenue through the system. The system is like a car—it can’t drive itself, but once you get the wheels rolling, you can start to sit back and enjoy the ride!

Q. There is a website that is a forum for print buyers which gives print suppliers the opportunity to monitor trends and concerns among the buyers.  Do you know what the name or names of these websites are?  I am interested in seeing this...I just can't remember what the website name is.

Editor:  The two key sites are PrintBuyersOnline.com and PrintBuyersInternational.com.  Both have conferences as well.

Q. What I'm hearing is that the printing industry is cutting out the professional independent designers and writers - putting the work in the hands of the end user who uses templates - no muss no fuss. Where do the freelance writers and designers fit into this mix?

Drew Swankie:  Not true. Designers and writers are still a very necessary element. Most standard W2P users have trouble cropping an image to size much less designing a professional looking brochure. All of our work is templatized, based off quality files created by professional graphic designers, so that is the first ingredient. If anything, Web To Print has eliminated the “busy work” that designers used to do like typesetting business cards and doing imposition layout. This opens our design team to be better utilized for other creative marketing projects and endeavors. I am also seeing savvy freelance designers act as print brokers by using the Web2Print portal to generate proofs or place print orders for their clients upon which they receive a commission or mark up. This industry changes fast; if you want to stay competitive, you need to stay ahead of the learning curve. 

Cathy Skoglund:  This is not true. This actually makes the independent designer and writer work harder to know more about these technologies so it can be utilized in the customers’ best interest. The design and writing has to be accomplished first before the template is placed online. All bugs have to be worked out before the client has access to ordering. Imagine instead of designing a postcard that goes out to everyone, you have to design a postcard that means something to everyone and text fields can change on the fly. 

Q. For Martin: How much of a royalty fee did you have to pay to the hockey clubs?

Martin Richard:  None, Kids can create the cards online and print the cards from their own printer. So we offer a free template to create the cards but have no royalty if they use our printing process.

Q. Are you currently using iWay to do any inventory tracking or order placing for in-stock items or warehouse material?

Drew Swankie:  Absolutely. The inventory features are there, but are basic. This is a feature I hope to see expand in the future.

Cathy Skoglund:  No. iWay does not have this function but Press-Sense has other applications that do this and work together. It is like a modular package. You can buy different models to fit your need.

Q. Does i-way and other Web 2 Print applications provide sales & financial reporting and if not how can you create financial reporting?

Drew Swankie:  Yes, the job tracking and reporting feature is fairly robust. All the info can be packaged into Excel sheets and iWay has the capabilities to tie into other systems via XML output.

Cathy Skoglund:  yes. You can run reports such as all sales and dollars sold for this month, etc

Q. Are jobs moved from the web storefront to the production floor (i.e. printing press) in an automated fashion?  Was this part of the product set or did you develop and build it yourself?

Drew Swankie:  iWay is a complete package. Once an online user submits the order, all the necessary job info is packed and shows up in a production queue on the back-end print provider interface. You can even set it up to bypass manual approvals and have jobs directly show up at press.

Cathy Skoglund:  With a click of the button, the job is moved to any device you want it to go to. In our facility we have it set up to either go to the HP Indigo press, or the Kodak Magnus CTP. You can even combine jobs onto one sheet in about 2 minutes. Most do not use this function, but we do on most of our jobs at ASU.

Q. R and R talks about doubling their staff.  Where was the additional staff required? 

Drew Swankie:  Well, our company is diverse in that we have a design team, a print production staff, a photo studio, a large format department and a full bindery. Our # of jobs monthly increased almost 10 fold across the board, so in some sense we are lucky we only needed to double our staff to keep up with demand! Efficient workflows like iWay make growth like this possible.

Q. For Drew...How much did it cost to get your system going and how long did it take to get it where it is today?

Drew Swankie:  I believe it was around $40K to purchase. We were pushing $40K in sales a month through iWay alone within 2 years. iWay work accounts for 10% of our total revenue at this point in time.

Q. Do you have a public username that allows first time access for customers that come to you online?

Drew Swankie:  No. We deal strictly in Business to Business at this point in time.

Cathy Skoglund:  We have a link on the site that says “to create a free account.” The customer goes here, fills out their info and we assign templates to that specific client.

Q. A ? for Drew:  Do you charge your clients for setting up a Storefront and item catalog?  How do you base your charges (not how much)?

Drew Swankie:  Yes, we charge a nominal template set-up fee and a small monthly access fee. We keep our set-up fees as low as possible and they are always negotiable. Small monthly fees create initiative to use the system. You don’t want to price people out, but you want to keep them coming back.

Q. Do any of you get involved with non-business / sports cards orders; i.e. brochures, catalogs, etc.  If so, how are you proofing? Hard copy contract or online soft proofing?

Drew Swankie:  We have an enormous catalog of different items on iWay. Business cards, brochures, sell sheets, calendars, note pads, etc. iWay has very strong, “on the fly” PDF proofing. We do hard copy proofs during the pre-template production to verify color. Once approved, a sample stays at press to match to and in turn the color remains consistent for the life of the template. 

Cathy Skoglund:  All proofing is done online when the order is placed. Remember, when the template is created and before actually going live, you can hard proof it and get the customer to sign off on that. Then the signed off proof can reside in a proof book for the pressperson to pull up at anytime when running that job.

Q.  It sounds like the iWay system can set up a variety of templates that a customer can select a template and print many of that template (all the same such as a business card with one name.)  Does it have the ability to merge with a customer database so that you are producing 1 piece for each name on the list - using Variable Data --- such as a variable data postcard, mailed to multiple recipients?

Drew Swankie:  Yes. It amazes customers when they need to order business cards for their entire company, and they can simply upload a list of 200 names and can see a proof within seconds. They remember when they had to pay a graphic designer a lot of money to typeset and proof 200 different business cards. Those days are over. The variable data works great for Direct Mail campaigns as well; however, you need a well trained, savvy end user to pull it off correctly every time.

Cathy Skoglund:  Yes, you can select to upload a database and it will create all the versions on the fly. You can view them all, too. We usually have clients that are going to order a high number of business cards use this method. They just enter in each person’s info in the database and then upload it when they order that template.

Martin Richard:  We do the same with our professional clubs. The information is provided by the league (Stats, Height, weight...) via an Excel form. And then we link it to the template.

Q.  What tools are available for web-to-print? Is iWay the best? Where to buy it?

Drew Swankie:  Yes, the BEST! www.press-sense.com

Q.  What are the best industries to market to in the next year or two? The real estate, automotive and franchises have been the early adopters of web-enabled print. Who's next in line?

Drew Swankie:  Franchises. Find a new franchise group, and get them set up. They’ll be hooked on Web2Print in no time!

Cathy Skoglund:  When you figure this out, let me know! Actually I think restaurants and franchises are going to catch onto this.

Q.  iWay seems to do a wonderful job of collecting the orders. Do people use different software to manage the fulfillment process of these orders?

Drew Swankie:  No, it’s all built into one system. It is a true “end to end” system.

Cathy Skoglund:  iWay creates a job ticket for each job and you can log into iWay to see where the job is in the shop. When it is ready for shipping, our bindery person goes into iWay and passes the job through shipping. The client receives an email that says their job has shipped. It’s all included.

Q.  How can you pass the cost of setup along to your clients? Can you bypass the impositioning of the system to use an existing workflow?

Drew Swankie:  Absolutely. You can set certain jobs to drop directly into a hot folder on press, or you can easily package the files and job specs into an email to be sent to another print service provider.

Cathy Skoglund:  For the first question – you just do. You tell them there is going to be a cost of $?? For building the template and having a monthly usage charge is really smart. It forces them to use it.

Q.  Do you customize and skin this for individual client needs.  What are the costs involved in a system of this nature.  Can you define any limitations of the system?

Drew Swankie:  We have the ability to skin every account but we only do it when absolutely necessary and if the client is willing to pay for it. We charge around $500 to do it. It can be done by anyone with entry level HTML knowledge. You can basically customize the top 100 pixel “banner” and the left navigation column however you want as long as the necessary buttons are made available. The “meat” of the system only allows for cosmetic customizations.

If you have questions about this webinar, please contact Eric: eric@whattheythink.com

About Press-sense

Founded in 2001, Press-sense has rapidly evolved into one of the world’s leading developers of automated Business Flow solutions for the printing industry.

With an installed base of successful customers throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, and a dynamic team that continuously maintains a clear understanding of the printing industry’s ever expanding and evolving needs, the company’s flagship Press-sense iWay™ family of products is recognized today as the market leader for integrated Web-to-Print and business management solutions.

The company’s integrated tools provide commercial printing and digital service providers with an elegant, yet comprehensive approach to creating internet-based revenue streams, automated production workflows, and business management tools that maximize production efficiency, monitor and reduce costs, and increase profit ratios.

For more information, visit www.Press-sense.com or call 1-866-257-9792.

About WhatTheyThink.com

WhatTheyThink.com is the printing and publishing industry's leading online media organization; offering a wide range of publications delivering unbiased, real-time market intelligence, industry news, economic and trend analysis, peer-to-peer communication, and special reports on emerging technology and critical events. Serving a membership base of more than 50,000, WhatTheyThink.com also hosts webinars and live events as well as providing content through a syndication program, which delivers content directly to related websites and through RSS.

About NAPL

A not-for-profit trade association serving companies in the $100 billion+ printing and graphic communications industry, NAPL offers a comprehensive slate of business-building solutions that provides company leaders with the strategies, insights, and guidance they can use to make informed business decisions, minimize risk, anticipate change, and profitably grow their business.

For more information, visit www. NAPL.org.

About Barbara Pellow

Barbara Pellow recently assumed responsibility for the development and delivery of two new services at InfoTrends specifically focused on the evolution fo the Graphic Communications Market – The Business Development Service and Custom Communications Service. Pellow has served in a number of roles including the Chief Marketing Officer of Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group. In the role of Chief Marketing Officer, Pellow was responsible for all marketing activities for the division, including marketing communications, public relations, marketing intelligence and advertising strategy. She was an active participant in developing business strategy and helping define the group’s go-to-market organizational structure.

Prior to joining Kodak, Pellow was the Gannett chair in integrated publishing sciences in Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) School of Printing Management and Sciences (SPMS). She has also held senior marketing roles at IKON Office Solutions, InfoTrends, Xerox and IBM.