In the context of continuing shocks to the economy it can be worrying to hear that you should be spending more money on technology.
Some people are quite rightly nervous about investing heavily in new systems which could potentially prove obsolete in a few years.
However, the reality is that your biggest fear should be left behind. Companies which show a desire to innovate and work with others in order to launch new products and services are the most likely to pass safely through these difficult economic waters.
Clever partnerships with service providers should help you gain customers during these tricky days, and as well as being an important part of successfully growing your business, they well might prove the difference between sinking and swimming.
Success is about offering more to your customers for less, to ensure that they keep coming back to you. Jouve’s range of services from editorial and IT solutions and business process outsourcing, through to print and print on demand, are designed to help all businesses, from major clients like Renault through to innovative start-ups.
Print on demand is an extremely interesting area, and a technology that has been receiving an increasing number of headlines for a long time. It’s clear that localised digital printing of newspapers and business publications is likely to become a major growth area, and one which also offers serious opportunities to help the environment and reduce costs.
In a recent example of the application of print on demand technology, latest editions of ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’ can now be printed at Heathrow airport, a service used by airline Quantas to provide their passengers with the most up to date newspapers from the other side of the world.
Previously customers would have to wait 24 hours for Australian newspapers. Developments like these will help print-based publications catch up with the unprecedented speed of information in the internet age.
There is even major scope for growth in domestic markets – shipping and flying print products to the Channel Islands or poorly connected parts of the UK mainland might soon disappear with the targeted use of print on demand.
As the costs of these technologies fall at the same time as logistics and fuel costs rise, print on demand will become the obvious way to put your product in your customers’ hands.
With Print on Demand digital files can be transferred at lightning speeds, ready for local production sites to produce the final copies and distribute in your vicinity
It’s clear that customers are still eager for beautifully designed and bound print products, and the possibilities for personalisation are endless.
For example, Jouve is working with the Emotion Company to produce customisable print-on-demand photo-books, and also provides European print on demand and logistics services for Lulu.com, the self-publishing platform.
Lulu clients can design their books online, and Jouve produces and delivers a fully bound copy within 24-48 hours of the order being placed.
These sorts of technologies allow new stock management possibilities to help deal with changing demand for products, and to ensure that items never go out of stock, with ‘print to stock’ working as a back office version of print on demand.
This helps to optimise product flow in a B2B model and allows customers to reduce costs relating to logistics and warehousing. The ability to print products on demand is one of the facets of the so called ‘long tail’ allowing you target the final client (B2B2C), with a direct impact on your turnover.
So while it might be tempting to focus on tried and tested formulae, it’s clear that value-added solutions will emerge from innovative partnerships, and that those who dare to try new solutions are the most likely to succeed.
