One of the aspects of print manufacturing that is transparent to most customers is the processing of the order. Customers understand prepress. Customers understand printing, binding, and mailing — all of the tangible services that go into the cost of a job. But processing is intangible. As far as customers know, it’s like making a retail purchase. Someone takes the order, punches a few buttons, and it’s done. It doesn’t take any time and it doesn’t cost anything to do.

Print manufacturers and distributors know better. Job specing, estimating, and processing is time consuming and costly. For complicated products, all of the steps across the entire workflow, from order entry to shipping, can add hours to the job. Not to mention the time spent communicating between vendors and transmitting documents, such as estimates, order acknowledgement, shipping notices, invoices, account statements, and so on.

In a traditional print manufacturing environment, pricing is fairly straightforward — cost plus. How much money you can make often depends on how well you know your costs and how much “plus” you can get out of your customers, which in today’s environment is increasingly slim. But when it comes to variable data jobs, pricing is entirely different.

VDP projects can require large upfront time commitments in program development, working with databases, and creative and design, as well as any Web development and programming for personalized URLs (PURLs) if you offer them. The actual printing of the job is the smallest component. Thus, pricing requires that you look at VDP not as a complex printing job, but as a marketing program with a printing component.

As you’ve progressed in your career and grown your company, you’ve learned a great deal. You’ve seen change in the industry, and you’ve grown with it. Here are six things that you should know in order to compete in today’s print world:

The manufacturer/distributor model our readership has been engaged in for 40+ years can be characterized as a traditional channel partner model.  That said, it has evolved over the years into a price-sensitive, demand aggregation model, where most interactions between the “partners” involve quoting the best price on a print piece that is being shopped around to several suppliers.  This is the ultimate broker model, which in an industry with excess capacity is good for the broker but almost always bad for the supplier. Or as one former Moore Business Forms executive quipped, “The broker model works really well…for brokers.”