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Five ways post-composition can drive success in 2021

Printers are on a mission to find better ways to win more business and operate more efficiently. Their experience from last year is driving a renewed energy across the printing industry, as they embrace the continued variability of print markets and its impact on how print production environments receive, produce, and deliver work.

The bottom line is that the print industry continues to evolve—a notion confirmed in the latest market study from Madison Advisors (January 2021). Madison Advisors’ research focused on post-composition solutions for volume print production environments.

Why is post-composition important for the future success of volume print production industries? “Even if some of the functionality of a post-composition solution overlaps that of the core document composition solution(s), the cost benefit of considering post-composition to address rapidly changing customer expectations more easily is worthy of serious consideration,” said Keith Woedy, vice-president of Research and Practice Lead, Madison Advisors. “We believe that, to stay competitive, companies need to take a hard look at including post-composition into the workflow to support the ability to deliver highly personalized, efficient, cost-effective communications.”

Jonathan Malone-McGrew

As Woedy mentions, the need to deliver what print buyers and customers require is key to the value of post-composition in 2021. Jonathan Malone-McGrew, senior director of engagement at Solimar Systems, sees five ways in which post-composition can help print production workflows handle more business, more efficiently.

1. Handle a larger number of smaller quantity orders

Around the world, printers of all types talk to us about the challenge of more orders coming in but for lower quantities per order. Post-composition print workflow solutions are critical here. Optimizing print orders as they come in, commingling or batching them with like print jobs and automating the process with visible, trackable and reportable processes or workflows is crucial. Customers tell us this capability can save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in printing and process costs annually while opening the door to new revenue opportunities.

2. Fulfil the requirement for personalization

The idea of personalization isn’t new, but the need for it continues to grow. Personalization isn’t just about applying a name to a printed product. Regionalization is a key component to personalization and delivers unique experiences for recipients in different geographies. Using variable data printing (VDP) techniques, printers can offer data-driven content that makes each piece more relevant and valuable to the recipient. That relevance can be driven by the user’s own preferences revealed by past purchasing behaviours or interests. Given the long timeframes associated with implementing composition workflows, personalization is often added in a timely manner with a post-composition solution. By adding these tools in print environments, organizations have the opportunity to offer customers extended services and grow their business overall.

3. Meet the demands for fast production and delivery

Rapidly changing expectations are pressuring printers to become more agile in meeting faster turnaround times. To do this, the critical processes within a volume print production environment need to be efficient. Automation is vital, leaving manual tasks for only those orders that have special needs or exceptions. Post-composition solutions can reduce production overhead, time-to-complete, and manual labour across all types of jobs. At the same time, these solutions tend to improve accuracy and create new revenue opportunities.

4. Enable competitive pricing

Competitive pricing is based on both business and market factors. While businesses can build a competitive pricing strategy by adjusting profit margins or by bundling unique offers, a more sustainable approach is reducing structural overhead. Post-composition can provide the critical path to giving high-volume print shops the ability to reduce operational expenses. Through hands-off, automated and templatized processes, organizations can streamline and drive costs down. The benefit is flexibility in maintaining profit margins while offering more competitive pricing to customers.

5. Leverage all destination devices and channels

The fifth consideration for how post-composition easily drives success for volume PSPs is the ability to load balance or redirect work to the devices or channels available. Simply put, some operational decisions are best done after composition. With the right workflows, PSPs can drive significant benefit by digitally diverting jobs for e-delivery or by batching and segmenting content to optimize both printer and inserter utilization. Additionally, such post-composition workflows tend to leverage postal discounts. No matter the need, post-composition print workflow solutions can help PSPs leverage the equipment they have and optimize the work they do.

Jonathan’s advice to influencers in in-plant or PSP businesses is to take a closer look at their current processes. Make sure to walk the workflow from order or job receipt to the delivery of the finished product. If bottlenecks or slowdowns in the five areas mentioned above are witnessed, you are on the right path to discovering a plan to improve your print business through post-composition software solutions.