This message was confirmed last week when I listened to an HP Indigo webinar. One of the speakers was Gary Peeling, managing director of Precision Printing, which up until 2005 was a purely litho operation. At that time it had a turnover of £5.5m, employed 85 staff and took an average of 45 orders per day with an average value of £496. I visited Precision in early 2008 when they were a beta tester for the HP Indigo 7000 press. At that time digital complemented the litho work and was mainly used for short-run colour jobs; the firm had no W2P facility, did only a small amount of variable data printing and used the same finishing kit for litho and digital.

Just three years later, Precision is a totally different animal, thanks to investment in W2P, digital workflow and integration.
The company developed its own workflow, OneFlow, built a partnership with Italian W2P specialist Pixartprinting, and upped its digital capacity to four HP Indigos. In 2010, the company had a turnover of £12m and its staff had increased to 120 employees. Litho turnover had remained constant at £6m, despite a major increase in capacity with a 10 unit Heidelberg Speedmaster 74, and with 55 litho orders per day, now averaging £432 in value. Digital printing turnover was £6m with over 10,000 orders per day with an average order value of £2.30. In the 2009/10 year digital print grew 80%, and orders peaked at 25,000 orders per day in the run-up to Christmas.

Punching above its weight
Digital technology has enabled Precision, a small progressive printer, to do the same things as major organisations. The systems Precision uses make it easy for customers to buy from them at reasonable prices using their own buying approaches including linking their buying systems directly into Precision’s systems.

Precision is not alone in making this transition or opening up totally new business opportunities by adopting W2P and using it to create partnerships with other firms. One of the best examples of building growth through partnerships is Colorcentric in the US, which has built its B2B business through a range of partnerships with other online firms such as Lulu, Snapfish, Blurb and Fujifilm. Colorcentric, like Precision, built its own workflow, Printernet, and they are now using this to build a worldwide franchise where other companies can link into the Colorcentric network to create their own online print operations.

It is interesting to speculate whether Precision will also offer further partnering with its online operations to allow other companies outside the UK to link with them, but it’s worth recalling something John Lacagnina, CEO of Colorcentric, said: "When something goes digital, it’s going to go global."

Andrew Tribute is a print technology journalist and consultant