Danwood is a relative newcomer to the printing industry having built an £85 million business in supplying offices with copiers and printers and backed by high service levels. Gerry Mulvaney, the head of its print division, in contrast has a lifetime’s experience in the industry, selling on behalf of Litho Supplies. It makes for a dynamic combination, one that has expanded Danwood beyond corporate reprographic departments and print rooms into inplant and those commercial printers who are moving into digital. The advent of so-called light production digital presses from suppliers including KonicaMinolta and Sharp has gone hand in hand with Danwood’s expansion. And while this core market is still growing, Mulvaney believes that there are two sectors where growth rates are higher still, one of which points to a new development for the industry as a whole.

The first of these sectors is a no-frills printer supply business, where clients treat the engines as disposable petty cash purchases and do not seek service agreements. The requirement here is to have a ‘pile them high, sell them cheap’ strategy Danwood and has a telesales operation partly aimed at this type of customer. It has now purchased a specialist, Printware, which is a fast growing company selling Xerox Phaser desktop printers, among others, by phone and through the internet.

There are a good number of customers wanting to buy at the lowest price says Mulvaney. This, though, is not the most intriguing development. This comes at the opposite end of the spectrum where, after many predictions over the years, companies are starting to welcome strategic thinking about their print spend and how they might achieve savings. The UK’s largest companies have accepted this argument and work with the likes of Williams Lea and Donnelley as a result.

Danwood wants to be in this space. “Many companies and organisations have reached the point where they don’t want the hassle of looking after the different print technology they need,” says Mulvaney. “As a concept this is wider than us taking over the print room and managing the inplant. It’s coming up with overall solutions to manage the fleet of printers and the printroom and gaining control over print costs.” Including, he might add, print that is placed externally.

Typically, Mulvaney continues, a company will be spending 2-7% of its turnover on print; for a £100 million business, this is a spend of at least £2 million. When deploying the kind of strategic approach that Danwood is proposing, savings can be 25-30%. This is music to a financial director’s ears.

However, to implement this fully Danwood is going to need partners from the commercial printing industry. There are talks going on with some companies already as Danwood begins to promote the concept. It is working with partners with specialist expertise in areas like healthcare, and where there is a strong emphasis on service and fulfilment. “We want people who understand the concept of partnership. It’s not about getting the cheapest price,” he says.

What this approach does is bring a much greater element of control to the spending on print, much of which remains outside the grip of a company’s accountants. Departments will print on whatever device they want without being aware of the cost and will often place outside jobs with ‘suppliers who are easy to work with’ whose prices have not been benchmarked.

How this might be implemented comes from work that Danwood has been doing at Lancashire County Council. “In the public sector there is a big drive towards making savings following the Gershon Report,” Mulvaney says. “Working with Lancashire it was clear that they wanted to make these savings, so we came up with an approach using rules based printing, so fewer than five copies could be printed at the desktop, up to 50 on the multifunction device in the department and more than that had to go to the print room. We put an Efi DigitalStorefront on their intranet to be accessed by the 4,600 staff and put in 14 new print engines across three print rooms. Other companies might have just offered cheaper print engines to cut the customer’s costs, but we feel that it’s only by listening and understanding what the customer is really saying that we can put together the right strategy to deliver what they want.”