Reprographics 101

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  • GPO Work: Worth The Competitive Bidding (???)

    Here’s an article I found on myprintresource.com about GPO (U.S. Government Printing Office) jobs. Early on in my career in the reprographics business, our company was based in Silver Spring, MD (a suburb of Washington, DC), and, although we did not win many GPO bid jobs, we did win several – – – and we did, routinely, research which jobs might be down our alley. I can still remember a large-format print job we bid through the GPO, back in the late 1970’s, for a training department of the IRS. That job consisted of a series of poster size prints, (size around 30 x 40), that the IRS was going to use for training IRS auditing agents at different IRS offices around the U.S. We used our diazo machine – and blackline paper – to produce the order (if I’m recalling this correctly, we did either 100 or 200 sets of the series of posters.) It was a very simple job to produce, it was profitable, and I’m pretty sure we got that GPO job because others who bid were basing their bids on large-format offset printing.

    Okay, here’s the beginning of the article:

    GPO Work: Worth The Competitive Bidding

    By Deborah Snider, e-LYNXX Corporation

    Created: February 15, 2012

    The United States Government Printing Office (GPO) awarded more than 16,000 jobs (also called jackets) in the $1,000 to $10,000 per job range in 2011 totaling almost $30 million to private sector printers. Close to 2,000 jobs in the $10,001 to $100,000 per job range totaling more than $50 million were awarded per data from the largest database of GPO job records which is at e-LYNXX Corporation. The majority of printers that win these jobs are small to mid-size businesses, many with 20 employees or fewer, according to the GPO.

    There also is tremendous opportunity for printers capable of handling GPO’s million dollar plus jobs – often ulti-year programs. Examining GPO data back to 2006, on jobs won at the $1,000,000 or more level, there has been an average of only four bidders per job. These jobs averaged $3,004,000.

    Although the GPO has more than 10,000 printers that have been qualified for its print supplier network, fewer than a couple thousand win any work whatsoever during the course of the year. This past year, more than 1,770 print suppliers obtained at least one GPO job. However, the majority of the $305 million in GPO work awarded in 2011 was to several hundred printers.

    Here’s a link to the complete article:

    http://www.myprintresource.com/blog/10629990/gpo-work-worth-the-competitive-bidding

  • Vester Kopi of Denmark acquires largest reprographics chain in Germany

    News from Vester Kopi, the leading reprographics enterprise in Denmark

    PRESS RELEASE – BREAKING NEWS !!!

    Copenhagen, 05.03.2012 (March 5, 2012)

    Vester Kopi has in Leipzig, Germany, today at 15:00 pm, acquired RT Reprotechnik, which is Germany’s largest repro digital printing chain with approx. 220 employees and 26 branches throughout Germany.

    Vester Kopi’s CEO William Schulin-Zeuthen says about the purchase:

’”The acquisition of the RT Group is a direct extension of Vester Kopi’s overall strategic starting point: if we must develop ourselves both climate friendly and competitive at once, we must be innovative. This acquisition helps us to innovate in three key points:

    A merger of Vester Kopi with RT Group represents an opportunity to markedly reduce both our common costs, but also our unit costs. It gives room for our fundamental ambition to continuously lower our own and our customers’ environmental impact while it increases our competitiveness. The German market is paying increased attention to environmental certification and Vester Kopi’s pioneering work in this area will be possible to transfer directly on to the RT Group. Simultaneously, both Vester Kopi and RT Group have built up years of experience and skills to provide great and prompt service at competitive prices. The service market – as we see it – is growing, and the challenge is to offer our clients the right mix of human communication and guidance, coupled with the latest technology. In this area, both Vester Kopi and RT Group have a very, very strong platform to develop on.

An increased volume will also provide critical mass to move forward on developing easy, software-based support solutions that ‘bundle’ many services in a convenient way for our customers. A market leader, Vester Kopi has already experienced significant growth within, and within which we expect to develop even stronger concepts in the coming years – both in Germany and Denmark.”



    RT Group / Vester Kopi’s total annual turnover is estimated to be approx. 33 million Euro in the new financial year 2012/13 employing 345 people in total 43 branches in Germany and Denmark.

    http://www.vesterkopi.dk

    Additional Information:

    Please contact CEO William Schulin-Zeuthen

    Vester Kopi as & RT Group

    Cell: +45 2022 1262

  • Tablets and Print: Underappreciated Cannibalization Story

    By Greg Walters (from “The Imaging of Greg”)

    Posted on 02/21/2012

    Here’s the beginning of Greg’s article:

    This past Valentine’s Day, Morgan Stanley released a 96-page study titled “Tablet Demand and Disruption – Mobile Users Come of Age.” The study was dated February 14, 2011, so the report is technically a year old. Most of the content is around the development and distribution of tablets globally and their disruptive effect on different technologies. There are only three pages dedicated to the impact of tablets on print, but the findings are stunning. One particular line caught my eye: “Tablet impact on pages printed is the most underappreciated cannibalization story.”

    Click on this link to read the full article:

    http://theimagingchannel.com/blogs/the-imaging-of-greg/2012/02/tablets-and-print.aspx

  • 8 Guaranteed Ways to Drive Customers Away

    Article by Jeff Haden, March 1, 2012, found in Inc. Magazine (on-line edition)

    If your long-term customers are leaving–and not coming back–you’re probably making one of these mistakes.

    Your most profitable customers are almost always long-term customers.

    Don’t lose them by making any of the following mistakes:

    1. Change too many players. It’s tempting to assume long-term customers love your brand. More often than not they love your employees.

    Customers don’t buy from companies. They buy from people—your people.

    Since relationships are the lifeblood of a small business, don’t rotate salespeople, customer service reps, or key contacts unless you have to. Do everything possible to protect and foster the relationships your employees forge. Employees are rarely interchangeable where strong business relationships with customers are concerned.

    2. Treat new and existing customers too differently. Offering discounts or incentives to land new customers is often necessary, but existing customers can quickly resent the fact their loyalty is not rewarded.

    Think hard about the carrots you offer new customers and make sure you “reward” existing customers just as much—if not more. Never forget that while new customers create an immediate top-line impact, sales to existing customers typically result in a bigger impact on your bottom line.

    3. Focus too heavily on price. Being the low-cost provider is a definite competitive advantage.

    Good luck maintaining that advantage. Somewhere, someone is planning to steal your customers through lower prices.

    Your goal is to provide the best value. Value is an advantage you can maintain through a combination of price, schedule, service, and relationships. If your marketing focuses mostly on price you’ll train customers to constantly look for a lower price, both from you and your competition.

    Spend at least as much time finding ways to increase value as you do finding ways to lower costs and prices.

    4. Push too hard to grow same-customer revenue. Trying to sell more to existing customers is smart, but don’t do so blindly. First know what each customer needs and only then try to meet those needs. Never suggest a product or service a customer doesn’t need.

    And never ask, “Is there anything else we could do for you?” unless you already know the answer and are ready to provide a great solution.

    Otherwise you’re just pushing, and customers hate being pushed.

    5. Accept high employee turnover. While high turnover is a fact of life in a few industries, in most cases employees leave because they aren’t treated well.

    So do customers.

    Unless systems truly drive your business, you can’t expect to have long-term customers unless you first have long-term employees. If turnover is high, find ways to fix it. Otherwise customer turnover will always be high, too.

    6. Forget what keeps the lights on. Every business has principal products or services that form the foundation of the business. Every business also has key customers that form a foundation.

    Over time key products and services—and key customers—can get taken for granted while newer, sexier, higher profile initiatives get all the focus.

    Make a list of the customers you can’t afford to lose. Then list what those customers buy. That list is the foundation of your business.

    Never forget what keeps your lights on.

    7. Reward the wrong employee behaviors. This happens most often in sales, like when commission rates are much higher for new customers than existing customers. If that’s the case and I’m a salesman, why should I work to maintain existing accounts when I get paid a lot more to find new ones? That approach only works if your systems ensure someone else takes over the responsibility for forging great relationships with existing customers.

    Think about the incentives you provide and goals you set for your employees, and make sure they encourage the outcomes you really want.

    8. Make problem resolution painful. Policies and guidelines are great for ensuring that employees comply, but a customer with a problem doesn’t care about your policies. She just wants her problem fixed.

    Let employees use complaint-resolution policies as guidelines rather than rules. Give employees the freedom to make judgment calls.

    Resolving a customer problem or complaint can help your business establish an even stronger customer relationship when you give employees the freedom to make that happen.

    Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden

  • Xerox Launches Fast, Efficient Light Production Series

    Monday, March 05, 2012

    Press Release

    Xerox’s newest series of light production devices – the Xerox D95/D110/D125 Copier/Printer and D110/D125 Printer – deliver sharp black-and-white image quality with speed and efficiency.

    Built to handle the demands of print-intensive environments, the devices make it easy for educators to create curriculum materials, student directories, course packs and bound materials. Productivity can be increased with archiving and stamping software allowing legal, insurance and healthcare users to store documents electronically and guarantee their authenticity with numerical markings. In the print-for-pay market, commercial, quick and franchise, printers can meet tight turnaround times and offer more applications and services, like newsletters, on-demand book publishing and customized catalogs.

    The copier/printer models are available in speeds of 95, 110 and 125 pages per minute (ppm), while the D110/D125 Printers are available in speeds of 110 and 125 ppm, which is suitable for the transactional print environment. Key customer benefits are:

    Fast and easy.

    • The Xerox copier/printer has a standard single-pass color scanner,

    2400 x 2400 dpi print resolution and prints from and saves to a USB drive.

    • A built-in scanner scans up to 200 images per minute and manages high-volume, complex jobs with a 250-page automatic document feeder.

    Advanced workflow tools.

    • An integrated controller comes standard with the copier/printer models, allowing powerful workflow with an easy-to-use touch screen. Two optional servers – the Xerox FreeFlow® Print Server or the Xerox EX Print Server powered by Fiery® – deliver additional flexibility.

    • Xerox’s Extensible Interface Platform allows users to simplify work processes right from the copier/printer’s touch screen interface.

    Multipurpose finishing options.

    • An array of finishing options on the copier/printer provide a professional touch to documents, from booklet making to creasing, stitching and hole punching. Users can easily produce tape-bound, lay-flat and full-bleed booklets with the Xerox Tape Binder, the GBC® e-binder 200 and the Plockmatic Pro30™ Booklet Maker.

    “The faster scanner and the simplified graphical user interface should make these new products popular in light production environments where ease of use and affordable productivity are key,” said Jim Hamilton, group director, InfoTrends.

    The D95/D110/D125 Copier/Printer will be in the Xerox booth at drupa 2012, May 3 -16, Dusseldorf, Germany.

    Availability and pricing

    The Xerox D95/D110/D125 Copier/Printer and D110/D125 Printer are available immediately worldwide through Xerox direct sales, agents, resellers and dealers, by calling 1-866-480-3119 or at http://www.xerox.com/direct. List prices range from $53,400 to $86,350.

  • The long road to recovery: the impact of the Great Recession on print

    I found this article, this morning, on whattheythink.com. It’s a fairly long article, and here’s just the beginning of the article. After this intro, you’ll find a link to the complete article.

    Commentary & Analysis

    The long road to recovery: the impact of the Great Recession on print

    By William Mitting
Published: March 5, 2012

    When French bank BNP Paribas announced the closure of two of its off balance sheet investment vehicles on August 9 2007, few outside the world of high finance took notice. However, that event marked the first lashings of rain on Europe of a storm that over the next three years would devastate the European economy and result in the loss of tens of thousands of printing jobs across the continent.

    The technical definition of a recession is two quarters of consecutive contraction of GDP (Gross Domestic Products). In reality a recession is defined by one thing: fear. Just over 12 months after BNP’s closure of its investment vehicles, the Federal Reserve and the US government took the indefensible decision to let Lehman Brothers, an investment bank that had hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime exposure on its books, fail.

    Fear paralysed the global economic system. Money markets, on which many European banks relied for funding, ceased up as banks lost trust in their peers to repay the funds; banks collapsed amid the dearth of funding and European taxpayers were forced to intervene to save the global economic system from collapse. A recession like no other in living memory ensued and in its wake thousands of print companies were forced to close their doors.

    The perfect storm

    Of all sectors, print is perhaps hit the hardest by recessions. On one front, it is reliant on consumer confidence, GDP growth and the subsequent advertising investments made by large companies. On the other it is a manufacturing industry, reliant on bank lending to invest in equipment. For printers, the financial crisis was a perfect storm.

    You can read the rest of this long, yet interesting, article by clicking on this link:

    http://whattheythink.com/articles/56549-long-road-recovery-impact-great-recession-print/

  • Nuance Extends eCopy ShareScan to Automate the Conversion of Paper into Electronic Medical Records

    A few days ago, we published a Service Point Solutions press release that talked about Service Point’s Dutch subsidiary expanding its business to include scanning/digitizing medical records. Last night, we came across a press release from Nuance; Nuance’s press release talks about its software that automates the conversion of paper into electronic medical records.

    Press Release

    Nuance Extends eCopy ShareScan to Automate the Conversion of Paper into Electronic Medical Records

    02/21/2012

    LAS VEGAS – Nuance Communications, announced that Nuance eCopy ShareScan will be a part of the Health Story Project’s Use Case at the HIMSS 2012 Interoperability Showcase. Nuance is demonstrating eCopy ShareScan’s capability to automatically convert unstructured, paper documents to HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) files that can be distributed into electronic health records (EHRs).

    eCopy ShareScan is the world’s best-selling document scanning and workflow solution for networked multifunction printers (MFPs.) The solution simplifies and streamlines the scanning of paper documents, adding touch-screen scanning to networked scanning devices and providing hospitals and clinics with the ability to implement secure paper-to-digital workflows that can be distributed throughout the organization using existing investments in scanners and MFPs. The software works with MFPs from the world’s leading vendors – including Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Océ, Ricoh, Toshiba and Xerox.

    “With the increasing migration to EMRs and EHRs, the demand for scanning medical information into digital workflows and for archiving is high and still growing. A critical need going forward is the mining of both structured and unstructured medical data for better health outcomes and cost reduction,” said Angele Boyd, IDC GVP/GM, Imaging/Output Document Solutions.

    A 2011 study of forty physicians’ practices commissioned by Nuance showed that while 80 percent of practices have implemented an electronic health record system, all forty practices continue to generate, receive and manage paper records. Furthermore, of the one half of surveyed practices that were scanning documents, most are dissatisfied with their current scanning process citing the cost of labor, time lapses from receipt to online access and accessibility to scanned information in their EHRs as their major complaints.

    “Paper documents remain pervasive in healthcare workflows, particularly in the sharing of information between providers, and cause barriers to meeting Meaningful Use criteria in the adoption of electronic medical record systems,” said Robert Weideman, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Document Imaging. “By empowering any healthcare worker to use any scanner or MFP to securely convert paper into HL7 CDA files that can be consumed by EHRs and EMRs, we are helping speed access to patient data and making the patient record more complete, while ensuring compliance to patient privacy mandates such as HIPAA.”

    Health Story Project at HIMSS 2012 Interoperability Showcase

    The Health Story Project was founded by a collaborative of healthcare vendors, providers and associations to develop and promote data standards through HL7 that support the flow of information between unstructured documents and electronic medical records. Using the HL7-approved CDA, Health Story standards create structured narrative data by using XML to tag, sort and export scanned documents into the EHR.

    HL7 CDA messages enable the standardized passing of patient records to content consumers, such as an electronic health record systems and HIEs. Standards such as HL7 CDA help healthcare organizations extend interoperability across all aspects of patient care to eliminate error-prone manual processes and increase information accessibility.

    “By supporting interoperability of scanning devices and EHR systems through the use of HL7, Nuance is supporting our mission of maintaining the patient story using all available channels, including the conversion of unstructured, scanned documents,” said Joy Kuhl, executive director, Health Story Project. “Using HL7 CDA helps meet Meaningful Use criteria because it leverages existing communication networks and workflow to populate the EHR from primary sources, such as paper records.”

    Nuance is a member of the Health Story Project and will be demonstrating its standards-based scanning and document conversion of paper-based clinical documents as part of the Health Story demonstration in the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase. Participants in the Health Story demonstration will show how to maximize the information available to the EHR to maintain the patient story using all available channels, from unstructured, scanned documents to dictated consult notes and discharge summaries and notes enriched with abstractor, computer-assisted and NLP coding.

    Visit Nuance at www.nuance.com

  • Save (on) plan printing costs ???

    From People Logic Software:

    http://tinyurl.com/7yeszwu

  • All the Latest Technology to get Your Job Done

    American Reprographics …..

    “We have many printers, all the latest and fastest, ready to get your work out the door”:

    http://www.amrepro.com/content/equipment/equipment.asp

  • Top Ten Reprographics Companies in the U.S. ???

    Someone e-mailed me the other day and asked me this question:

    In terms of annual sales revenues, which reprographics companies in the U.S. are in the “top ten”?

    I’m pretty sure (well, let’s say, almost certain) that these companies are in the top ten:
    American Reprographics Co (ARC)
    Thomas Reprographics (TR)
    ABC Imaging (ABC)
    National Reprographics (NRI)
    Service Point USA (SP)
    Anybody out there willing to venture a guess as to the others that would fall into the top ten?