Good Morning

Ever get the feeling you're the last printer standing without a Web2Print internet presence? Relax! That train is a good year or two away from leaving the station. Find out why in Stuck in the Middle with Web2Print.

In our last FlyBy, I said that when it comes to information technology tools like your MIS, ease of use was everything. Today, we'll look at why investing in those tools practically guarantees to save you money. How do we know? I'll give you a hint: Nobody's that perfect!

Hal Heindel
Unitac International Inc.

When Benjamin Franklin wrote and published Way to Wealth in 1758, his aim was to help people live frugal lives. Had the computer been invented then, Ben's discovery that "a penny saved is a penny earned" might quite possibly have percolated up while he was using his MIS.

I say this because saving pennies by cutting down on waste and mistakes is what a competent Management Information System is particularly good at. Lots of pennies. Ben was a frugal, sharp-witted printer.

Minimizing human error is just the most visible way your MIS can generate savings. Its greatest talent may easily be to keep your office staff from doing too much work for too little business. Like pricing and manually writing up $50 business card orders that could be processed in an MIS with a couple of keystrokes.

Then there's the often hidden ability to generate savings by guiding you to the cheapest solution. Take the selection of parent paper sizes. When an order comes in for a 14 x 18" foldout and your vendor stocks the paper in three different sheet sizes, which size will cut with the least waste? The Best-Cut app in your Morning Flight MIS can tell you that in an instant.

FYI, while you do need to buy either the $445.00 Gold or the digital-only $345.00 Pixelblitz to get order processing, the Best-Cut app? That comes as standard equipment even with our Forever-Free Edition.

But you knew that!

Web2Print has been the talk of Printville for some years now, but if you exclude notable examples like Vistaprint, you'll be hard pressed to find shops making any real money with it. Why hasn't it taken off?

As I see it, the reason is simple. Print service providers - small to medium sized shops in particular - are just that: providers of print services, of non-inventoried, individually priced work. They're not miniature Walmarts or even baby Vistaprints.

Putting up a website that lets your customers ask for a quote or submit files or check the status of an order, that's relatively easy to do but doesn't fully qualify as Web2Print.

You can go one step further and price a few stationery items and things in a choice of predefined quantities, then upload them into an on-line shopping cart. Now you're getting closer, provided your profit margins allow you to go head to head with Vistaprint.

Realistically though, for Web2Print to become more than a pricey novelty, what's needed is a behind the scenes wizard offering do-it-yourself pricing for any kind of custom print service, 24/7, where that service can then be placed in a shopping cart and paid for with a credit card.

We will see it happen. Probably long before we'll see it happen for home remodeling or getting your car fixed, two service industries with the same "knowing how to price" requirements. In due time, the Web2Print train will be getting its locomotive.