DIGITAL PRINTING IS NO LONGER THE NEW kid on the block; it is now a series of maturing technologies which can be relied upon to work. The question is whether the technology has convinced enough printers to reach the tipping point where it can oust offset. For Robert Stabler, UK and Ireland country manager for HP Indigo, the answer would be: ‘Not yet, but things are getting closer.’

The increasing productivity of digital printing, where HP is playing a leading role with the introduction of the Scaleable Print Technology inkjet head, is one issue; another is the increasing importance of the environment as a factor in decision making and third is the change in the way that companies are using print, making it a more intelligent channel for marketing. All these will boost digital printing further and strengthen HP’s hand.

This makes Stabler happy: “We are in a very privileged competitive position right now. Very rarely do companies have such a strong competitive edge as HP has in terms of quality and productivity.”

Consequently HP is seeing greater take-up for industrial-level work using the print engines for personalised products, but also for increasing applications in labels and flexible packaging and, with the arrival of the 7200 twin-engined web press next year, in books as well.

The impact in labels has started to transform the way that marketing departments think and react. “A lot of brand owners like the ability of producing a label simultaneously with the product so that there’s no waste and no excess inventory. This is in line with a lot of green thinking that is taking place,” Stabler says.

“Green’ is also going to be the stick that really makes book publishers look at inventory management,” he adds. Under conventional thinking as many as 30% of books will remain unsold, while traditional thinking means that other books fail to achieve their full sales potential, going out of print before demand is exhausted. The new Indigo will tip the balance to make it possible to print colour books on demand at runs of 5-6,000, he says. “We have been seeing people use the Indigo for covers or perhaps for journal printing; now they can print educational books with some spot colour as well as other STM and trade books.”

The appeal is all about eliminating waste from the supply chain while not depriving publishers of the control that they require. With growing environmental pressure this is something that will become more spread across many sectors. “Every business is going to have to ask if they are operating as efficiently as they can. This is evident for retailers who want to call off stock with a couple of days’ notice rather than replenish from their own warehouse,” he says.

The opportunity is there for printers to work with this trend, rather than resist it by continuing to base business models around the idea of attractive pricing for run-ons. Some still “do not get it”, he says, even where they are using digital presses. How else can the huge gap between the lowest price per page that some customers report and the highest price per page that others can achieve be explained?

At heart is the ability to work closely with the customer and come up with proper solutions to problems. “A good print service provider can add a huge amount of value to a brand owner in either industrial or commercial applicatons,” Stabler argues, referring back to the label market. “If your business is making baked beans, you don’t wake up in the morning thinking of ways to make the label more effectively, but the good print provider is always looking to do things better, because this is the core business.

“In other sectors, the print service provider knows how the printed page should look because this is a core competence that can be very difficult for a marketing agency to understand. I have great admiration for brands that go to their printer and say ‘I have a problem: how can you help me solve it?’ rather than ‘Here, print this 24-page brochure.’ That’s the difference a good printer can have.”

Arriving at this happy state is not a matter of luck. It takes hard work and investment in people and the IT to back up the proposition of being more than the ink on paper provider.

The IT side must almost certainly include a web to print offering. “I do not understand it if, as a commercial printer doing general print work, you don’t have web to print now or are not thinking of having it in the next couple of years. It’s not expensive and it’s not rocket science to set up and run.

“You have to make it easier for customers to order print from you.”

This is taking place against a background of the industry polarising and consolidating. “Do I think that there will be more printers in five years time? Absolutely not!” he says. “With a commodity approach there will always be someone willing to do the job cheaper, so the future will lie with the large companies who have the scale and data handling capability and those smaller companies that are customer-intimate and tend to be local providers. Being the same as another printer is not an answer.

“The amount printed digitally will increase as the market becomes much, much bigger; as technology improves; and as printers understand the margins they can get from digital printing. Our competition is litho printing. Litho has improved, but these are marginal and incremental gains. In digital printing there are going to be step changes. There are no limits and barriers to where digital can go.”