When the pips have squeaked

I am officially manufacturing director,” Jasper Scott, told a seminar at mediaPro, “but this amounts to director of cost-cutting. It used to be a job working towards improving print quality, but all magazine production directors have become one-trick ponies.” And that trick is driving down the amount paid for print and repro. One of the groups he has been responsible for pays £3 a page for Wyndeham to pre-flight each PDF ahead of printing, yet Scott is under pressure to eliminate this and save the publisher £150,000 a year, small beer from a total print production budget of £100 million, but symptomatic of how every cost is under scrutiny.

From the other end of the stick, Les Pipe group development director of Wyndeham, told the same debate: “Driving cost out has become a game of Hit the Suppliers. The problem is that aren’t any left, perhaps just five suppliers in magazine repro, while the web offset sector has consolidated with more to come. Margins are non-existent so it’s difficult to see how Hit the Supplier will work.”

There is probably no way of making the ends meet. For Scott production is now perceived as a cost that has to be cut. “When I joined the industry at Condé Nast 15 years ago, repro with German or Italian suppliers was £450 a page and print prices would be £38 a thousand for a 32pp section. Now we pay about half that for a 64pp section,” he said.

The current pressure on price began about four years ago with IPC instigating a review to reduce the costs paid for repro. This has been applied differently across IPC’s five magazine groups. The ball started rolling at Inspire, the division housing the specialist magazine titles where the profile of the average designer is younger than the highly experienced art directors looking after prestigious titles in the Southbank group. Consequently the specialist titles have adopted full page creation in house to delivery of print ready PDFs. Likewise parts of TX, the listings titles division, are working in a similar way for the listing pages at least. But at Southbank the requirement for retouching and difficult cut-outs means that outside repro is still needed. Since forming part of the panel, IPC Media has reshaped its magazine portfolio into three rather than five divisions, achieving some of the financial savings that are on its mind.

The third member of the panel was Mal Skelton, production director BBC Worldwide, which has taken repro inhouse to try to solve the pain of repro bills. Three years after the decision to follow its Bristol unit, Skelton said the project is keeping to its aims. “We didn’t want to replicate a repro house inside the company. We brought in the people and expertise we needed and found that we needed fewer experts compared to the numbers of people employed in an outside repro house. The model has worked and is working for us and is helping to drive more costs out.

“The new drive is to remove hard copy proofs from the process using the appropriate on screen technology. What we want to do is deliver a file to the printer and he will run to the on screen result that he will have access to alongside the presses. If he wants he can generate his own hard copy proof. We feel there is still a need to provide the printer with a target, but ultimately to have the on screen result as that target.”

The BBC has also switched to online receipt to ads directly into its Atex booking system which automatically creates the email to say that the ad has been correctly delivered.

It has resulted in a big drop in ads sent as email attachments and first four months after introducing the system in May, the publisher is receiving 53% of all ads in this way.

This is clearly improving workflow and delivering cost savings, but it is not the end. Skelton said the idea was to be able to work smarter. “Technology is the area of development that is driving the change,” he said. There is an opportunity from spreading the publishing load across the month – “what we do at present doesn’t make for the best utilisation of resources across the production chain. Better communication reduces cost and mistakes.”

This is the mantra that as a prepress services provider Wyndeham is repeating. The group is in a unique position in having a well-developed prepress operation linking to its arsenal of web offset presses and platesetters. Through control of the prepress file from the publisher, mistakes through naming conventions are avoided and the file can move directly to imposition. But the greatest benefit can be delivered through the E-magine publishing platform that the company continues to enhance. It started as a flat planning tool and this remains its core application explained group technical director Barry Fitzpatrick, but it offers far more in terms of improving communications, automating workflows and so reducing costs. “We keep looking at the automation of workflows and we are trying to reduce duplication across the whole process, from start to finish. By working with publishers we can identify areas of duplication where clients and suppliers are doing the same things and we can eradicate some of these elements.

“Within e-magine, the publisher has full control over the flatplan in real time. It brings the technical and administration processes together in a single portal with full cost analysis and online approval, even the creation of digital versions of a magazine. It is a tool to manage the entire process, opening the way to better utilisation of staff.”

In short his message was that to drive further costs from the process, the process needs to be looked at to see where processes can be improved, a move to on screen proofing being an example.

For Pipe, concluding the session, the BBC route has some merit, though involving a hefty investment in IT. “It raises the question of what happens next for the publisher doing this?,” he said. A Wyndeham-type solution is a software way to streamline production, to allow inhouse production where appropriate or to outsource time consuming tasks like intense retouching or cut outs to India at a single click. “It’s a means to maximise internal resources and an affordable way for a publisher to take much more control over his costs.”

Ultimately that has to be the only way forward, not cutting costs indiscriminately, but gaining a greater transparency over what is being paid for.