Inplants a go-go

There are over 44,000 worldwide, and they account for around half of the global sales of production-level digital printers. Despite this, developments in the corporate reprographic department (CRD – aka the inplant) rarely come under the spotlight.

This low profile is understandable, since what, and how, an inplant prints is obscured by the business of its host organisation. Over the years, however, CRDs, some of which are at the centre of market convergence trends between graphic arts and data processing, have played a leading role in technology adoption. CRDs established the print-on-demand monochrome digital printing market (they were, in fact, on-demand before the concept existed), and in the last decade the sector has seen a digital revolution every bit as fundamental as that which has transformed commercial printing.

New research sponsored by Canon Europe sheds the brightest light yet on what’s happening in the CRD. Under the guidance of Professor Emeritus Frank Romano, a team of print media graduates from the Rochester Institute of Technology conducted almost 700 interviews with CRD/inplant managers, print buyers and industry observers. The result – Corporate Reprographics: Trends and Opportunities - is a comprehensive freeze-frame of the corporate reprographics market as it is today, and the researchers’ predictions based on trend analysis and computer modelling.

The Romano team defines corporate reprographics as encompassing all an organisation’s paper-based communication “and the services necessary to create, disseminate and archive that communication.” Company-wide, this can involve a variety of departments besides the CRD, including mail centres offering copying or printing, walk-up and workgroup printers, data centres and creative design departments. The major benefits CRDs offer continue to be cost-savings (on average, 15% over commercial printers), security, convenience and control. With the exception of the CRD, which usually combines offset and digital equipment, all the print locations are digital. It’s no surprise, then, that the report finds that digital has been the principal agent of change for inplant printing.

Starting with monochrome and graduating to colour, the digital has usurped offset volume. Today’s typical inplant is an enthusiastic convert to digital printing, increasingly in full-colour, integrating with sophisticated workflow solutions and implementing web-to-print. In 1998, 93.7% of CRDs offered offset and just 6.3% did not; ten years later, the figures are 64% and 36% and by 2012 the report expects under one-third of inplant operations will use offset.

Digital printers now provide many of the benefits of offset without the operator skills and costs that offset demands, and with the added benefits of automated workflows and integrated finishing.

CRDs are printing more of everything, from books and booklets, through technical documentation, to direct mail and promotional print. More pages – 44.7% – are full-colour, almost exactly as many as are monochrome (44.8%). Driving the growth is small and medium-sized businesses’ realisation that colour confers a business advantage, a point made by 75% of respondents. Among the top uses for colour are business presentations (83%), sales material (71%), key reports (76%), proposals (84%) and display materials (97%). On the subject of display graphics, wide-format inkjet printing of posters, exhibition graphics, banners and other signage has seen startling growth. In 1998, not a single CRD offered this; in 2008, 65.8% did.

Digital is impacting on run-lengths too. Runs of less than 100 have risen from 7% in 1998 to 11% in 2008, and are predicted to reach 16% by 2012. While the short run remains the staple of the CRD, the latest digital printers are enabling departments to handle longer short runs, as it were: respondents reported growth in the 101-500 and 501-2,000 categories.

When it comes to digital’s ‘killer application’, variable data printing (VDP), CRDs are moving more cautiously. True, 94.1% of the survey had a VDP solution, but in most cases it had come as part of the package with the digital front end, and many respondents commented that VDP was more complicated than it needed to be. There was a noticeable difference in VDP adoption between regions: in North America, 65.2% ‘often’ print variable data, compared to 36.2% in Western Europe and a trifling 3.3% in Eastern Europe.

Web-to-print (W2P) emerges as a ‘must have’ service provided by ‘best in class’ CRDs. The 31% of departments with a web storefront, had by far the highest customer satisfaction levels: 55.3% were rated as ‘excellent’, 39.2% as ‘satisfactory and just 5.5% as ‘poor’’. This compares with scores of 22.5%, 46.4% and 31.1% respectively for CRDs without storefronts. The department’s internal customers appreciate the ease of re-ordering print via web-to-pint, while the CRDs themselves identify reduced errors as the major benefit.

The report concludes that future developments in digital printing are central to the growth of CRDs. Departments, after all, are created because the cost of outsourced print reaches a critical mass and so comes to the attention of senior management. As digital printers advance, this decision becomes easier to make, and payback becomes faster. So long as CRDs offer financial benefits to their host organisations, they will grow.

The general mood of CRD management is optimistic. They feel that their departments are well-positioned to capitalise on new ideas and systems, and most are confident that even with the economic downturn the CRD will be able to meet its customers’ needs while providing realistic cost benefits.