Direct Mail Insights: Shift to Digital Print Requires a Different Workflow

I attended my first PODi conference in 2007. During the keynote presentation, PODi president Rab Govil said, “Companies who try to use their conventional offset workflow when they install a digital press will fail.” He went on to cite an example of one company that did it right (Vistaprint) and a few big players that were doing it wrong. The latter group was struggling to make their investment in digital profitable. Govil encouraged the audience to think of each impression on a digital press as requiring its own job ticket. Many faces turned ashen when he said that. 

Fast forward eight years, and workflow is still the biggest challenge when installing a digital press. Dave Johannes, SVP operations at IWCO Direct, has often been quoted as saying, “Buying and installing the equipment is the easy part. You just cut a purchase order and write a check. The hard part is figuring out the workflow that will optimize your investment.”

In other words, you wouldn’t buy an electric car and assume you make it run by pulling into a gas station and filling up with 87 octane fuel. If your electric car is a Tesla, you purchased it for a different experience than just getting to your destination without having to fill up. You purchased it for the excitement of great handling, great power, great design, and great space. 

Harnessing the power to excite

Digital printing gives you the power to excite on a different level by providing content creators with greater flexibility than is possible using offset printing. It’s a way to make communications more personalized, more colorful, and more relevant. Identifying the capabilities that make digital so compelling will help guide how your inputs and workflow need to change.

Like figuring out how you charge your electric car, the transition to digital requires thinking about a number of things you may now take for granted with conventional offset printing. Digital workflow means thinking about file storage, how you will enable versioning, how files will be checked in and out, and how they will be managed over time frames that will vary now more than ever. Keep in mind that your clients will likely be expecting production cycle times that are compressed compared to conventional offset. They will not provide more time for you to produce what may be hundreds of versions. In their minds, they’re no longer paying for plate changes so versions are unlimited.

One of the most important elements of digital workflow is education. In addition to training your operations, customer service, IT, and sales teams, you also need to be prepared to train your customers about how digital will impact their workflow for the art and data files they provide. Business rules will replace Excel spreadsheets and Word tables to automate job instructions to create a more robust environment to author and provide accurate content. Your digital workflow needs to be configurable to seamlessly handle variable data as well as the more complex dynamic content. 

The workflow you implement for digital must also meet security standards and requirements. This is especially important for certain verticals such as financial services and healthcare where compliance with privacy and consumer protection regulations is paramount. Your workflow must be capable of managing role and/or group-based permissions for accessing data files and create a collaborative environment for content authors and front line workers. It must be configurable for touchpoint, content and rules management. Access controls and permissions should be automated and have the ability to deliver specific tasks (e.g. approvals) to various stakeholders in your production processing.  

Ultimately your digital workflow should create a more robust content authoring environment that ensures accuracy of the final print files, optimizes production and pre-media processes, and meets all client requirements for quality and brand integrity.

Workflow is a crucial function at the heart of any print operation, whether offset, digital or a combination of both. In order to optimize the investment you make on a digital press, you need a workflow solution that provides a powerful and flexible production hub built around the technology. This allows you to offer a rich set of capabilities to achieve your clients’ goals for more personalized and relevant welcome kits, policy packages, direct mail, statements, critical communications and more. You may not be driving a Tesla, but your operators and clients should have a smooth, efficient, and exciting ride.