“I spent thousands of dollars on web-to-print software and lots of my team’s time and effort and we have almost nothing to show for it in the form of business being transacted through our web-to-print solutions.”
Here are some typical reactions from printers in this predicament:
1. I just need to hire the right person.
2. I’m shopping for a different web-to-print technology
3. I have to get my web-to-print solution to integrate with my Print MIS
4. I plan to throw everything out and start over
STAFFING
E-commerce is hot and a known skill set that many aspiring employees would want to put on their resume, web-to-print confines them to this industry and is less understood outside the print industry.
Staffing is of course tricky but when asked what the #1 attribute is; it would be a positive, solutions oriented mindset. The worst possibly resource for helping you make a cultural change in your organization is someone who only sees challenges, talks about challenges, dwells on the challenges, and is paralyzed by the challenges. There are hundreds of web-to-print initiatives stuck under staff members who only see barriers to success rather than finding innovative ways to succeed in spite of all the challenges. You can’t get rid of the challenges but you can succeed in spite of them!
What kinds of people make good staff members for running your web-to-print program? First and foremost, consider where you are in your web-to-print journey. Are you just beginning? Meaning you need to drive adoption, innovate, work around challenges, jump on a steep learning curve? This is where many printers find themselves even though they may have invested in web-to-print years ago, it still hasn’t truly been embedded into their culture, it’s still an exception rather than normal operating procedures. This is the building process, establishing a change in your culture to assess every customer, every job on whether they are a good fit for self-service order entry. This takes innovation, it takes someone who can work under the support of leadership to steer your culture in the direction of embedding the idea of self-service into your culture. Most importantly it takes your participation and support as the leader. Moving your business online is strategic and many of your employees will need your help in understanding why this is necessary to remain competitive.
TECHNOLOGY
The most common reaction to a failed web-to-print initiative is to blame the technology. The technology is rarely the primary cause of the failed initiative but technology is a target rich environment to find reasons to blame it for everything. The most active proponents of blaming the failed technology are the staff members referenced above who are focused on why things won’t work rather than focusing on how to get them to work in spite of the known flaws, weaknesses, etc.
When you blame the technology you start seeing the world through a very biased lens. The technology you have can’t do anything right and other solutions (of which you’re getting sales demonstrations on) seem to be perfect in every way imaginable. When you’ve starting down the path of alternatives, you have already made a decision, you’re simply looking for evidence to support that decision. You will fail to see all the shortcomings of the new solutions with this biased perspective – setting yourself up to make the same mistakes again and again.
The primary reason web-to-print technology gets thrown out is because nobody at the printer has “adopted the technology as their own” they still see it as belonging to the vendor and they are waiting for the vendor to make it successful for them. This will never happen. Someone who has taken a deep dive learning approach into what the technology can do and then how to best apply that technology to your business? This is what you need to be successful and the onus is more on you than it is the vendor.
When you dive deep into a solution its typically a self-learning exercise. You might call support but you always validate what they tell you on the system because you know not all support people know the whole system. The other key to being a true expert at the technology is that you’ve found peers who are like-minded experts whom you can go to when you really get stuck. This is a proactive approach to OWNING your web-to-print initiative; the alternative is a reactive approach where you rely on the vendor to make you successful which rarely if ever produces the results you desire.
INTEGRATION
When you talk about giving your customers the ability to submit orders into your business, you want those orders to enter all your systems without having to manually intervene. This is probably one of the best ways to drive internal adoption – automation of jobs. You are simplifying the lives off all the employees in those departments. When a web-to-print solution forces customer service to manually enter the order into the Print MIS, then you’re working uphill for adoption as internal staff might see customer order entry as causing them more work, not less.
Ideally you have some integration between your web-to-print and your Print MIS. The reasons for going online are first and foremost about your customer (NOT ABOUT YOU). So integration is important but the most important part of web-to-print is providing your customer with a self-service, convenient, way to do business with you. You can be successful with web-to-print even if for whatever reason integration isn’t possible at this time. The more your web-to-print volumes scale, the more automation/integration becomes vital to the overall success. Don’t make web-to-print or Print MIS decisions in isolation, integration should be the top or near the top of priorities when making technology decisions. You always have to think about how a technology purchase is going to impact both upstream and downstream in your workflow.
LEADERSHIP
Where does the buck stop? It stops at the very top. If you’re web-to-print initiative has been a failure, then you (as the leader) need to take a good hard look at your role in it before you make any changes. Web-to-print is not a technology project, it’s a strategic shift in direction to go online because that’s where customers are expecting to find you. This strategic shift requires leadership at the highest level, you are the only one that can assure its success because it requires mindset change in every functional area of your business.
Start with the end in mind, what are you trying to accomplish, how will you know you’re heading in the right direction? What will be the indicators that you’ve achieved your goals? The entire culture assesses the business at hand by what portion warrants full-service and what portion should be handled via self-service. This means that pre-press operators are bringing jobs to your sales team that would be a good fit for a web-to-print program. The press operators are making suggestions for how files flowing from the web-to-print system could be routed to hot folders for automatic imposition. Your sales team is constantly collaborating with your E-commerce manager about prospects and current customers who are good fits for a web-to-print program. You are keeping metrics for the % of work coming through self-service channels (web-to-print) and you have established a goal that is reviewed monthly with the team.
If you are looking at best-fit services in terms of technology & marketing, we at Pixopa Web-to-Print are glad to assist you with your needs. Contact us today with your objectives & let us get the ball rolling.