PRINT 09 MUST SEE 'EMS Committee Identifies Core Technologies for Today's Printing Industry

After IT competency, Web-to-Print and MIS, all in a three-way tie for first place, digital printing was cited as the next key technology for commercial printers to embrace. Printers whose mainstay output is sheetfed or web offset are finding that the lack of digital printing capability, even if only for addressing and brief messaging, puts them at a competitive disadvantage. According to the Selection Committee, in the longer term—three to five years—digital printing will have infiltrated the majority of printing operations and, as one member commented, "You won't want to be without it."

Several Committee members noted that if, or when, the ink jet equipment demonstrated at drupa comes to market, increasingly longer run work will start to gravitate to both sheet and web ink-jet digital printing. Several Committee members commented that the key to moneymaking with digital print is mastering variable data printing and mining the markets where personalization and one-to-one marketing pays off; which leads back to the top technology selections.

While no single technology secures a commercial printer's place on the road to profit (it takes a grouping of technologies working together to best serve specific markets) the Committee noted one exception—the fifth technology pick, workflow—since efficient applications workflow is critical for any printer.

Color management, and the ability to provide cross or multiple media products, tied for sixth place on the list of critical survival technologies. As black-only work is on the decline, few commercial printers can exist without color capability, and the key to quality color lies in color management, agreed Selection Committee members.

In 2009, because advertising and information markets have become fragmented, multi-media capability provides printers with a diversification opportunity. In the short to medium term, the Committee predicted cross-media will transition from being an opportunity to a required customer service.

PRINT's TOP 10 TECHNOLOGIES