Digital Industry Application Practice of Petroleum Industry Publishing and Printing Factory

The enterprises that have undertaken literary and print jobs may all have the same feeling: tight time and less print. This feature of the printed and printed type of job allows many companies to be quite scratching their heads.

The same problem has also plagued the printing press of the Petroleum Industry Press (hereinafter referred to as the oil printing plant). In the business structure of the plant, the literary and cultural category (mainly from China National Petroleum Corporation, with a short print run below 500 copies) occupies a considerable proportion. Most of the meeting materials are left and right. According to the situation of oil printing plants in previous years, if the cost of paper is not included, the average annual processing value of this part of the livelihood can reach 560,000 yuan.

With more and more “24-hour” color transcripts appearing, traditional printing methods can no longer meet the changing market demands. According to the traditional printing process, after a series of processes such as imposition, printing, printing, binding, etc., a complete process has gone down, and the timeliness apparently cannot reach the customer's “24-hour” requirement. In the case of too many urgent shipments, the printing factory cannot complete the task with a single force. It is often necessary to find a cooperative factory. Many factors combine to make the time cost and labor cost excessive. Therefore, for a long time, the oil printing factory had to take some of the color jobs to the neighboring fast printing shops for production to meet the needs of customers.

According to current market prices, the balance between traditional printing and digital printing is about 50, for example printing 50 pages of 8 pages and 16 color pages. If you use traditional printing, the printing price is roughly 1,000 yuan. The cost of filming, proofing and paper is about 800 yuan; if digital printing is used, the price is calculated at 4 yuan per page according to the market price, and the cost is about 1,600 yuan. The price difference between the two is not significant. For customers, the timeliness of the latter is clearly stronger than that of the former; for print shops, the profit margin is also several times that of the former.

The oil printing factory believes that the digital printing market, yet to be developed, will surely become a new profit growth point. In this way, digital printing has entered the sights of oil printing plants.

Practice

In 2003, the oil printing factory set up a project for digital printing. The original idea was to purchase a black-and-white digital press. After six months of investigation, the market has undergone great changes. The customer's requirements have increased. A large number of documents are accompanied by color pictures, and the number of color jobs has increased. Therefore, when the final selection is made, At the same time, the oil printing plant chose both color and black and white digital presses.

"In the choice of equipment, the starting point of different selection results are different. For the fast printing shop, the main pursuit of speed. And the printing factory because of accustomed to the traditional printing equipment, color reproduction capabilities, relatively more emphasis on quality." Related parties explained.

In combination with the comprehensive performance factors of the equipment, brand, and cost-effectiveness, the oil printing plant purchased the NP2100 and DM9110 in 2004, becoming the first user of the NP2100 in mainland China.
After all, the investment of several million yuan is not a small amount. When investing, it is natural to go through some meticulous considerations. According to the original volume of literary print jobs, plus the expected increase in profits, the equipment costs invested in the previous period can be recovered within 3 to 5 years. The oil printing plant adopts a conservative estimate. In fact, the maximum printing capacity of the NP2100 is 750,000 impressions per month, which means that even if only 300,000 impressions can be printed per month, the cost can be recovered in one year.

Digital printing equipment is different from traditional offset printing equipment. After the traditional equipment is purchased, the rest is equipment maintenance and maintenance; digital equipment is not, in addition to daily maintenance and maintenance, we must also cultivate and develop the market. For training classes like Kodak and Fuji Xerox, which are held from time to time, one of the key training content is technical training, and the other is market development.

Since the purchase of equipment, the monthly printing capacity of oil printing plants has reached 100,000 impressions in just a few months. Compared with the ratio of 230,000 printed sheets in general fast printing shops, the business volume of petroleum printing plants has grown significantly faster. However, the oil printers understand that the reason for such a healthy development is largely due to the internal resources of the group and its subsidiaries.

In order to expand the market, the oil printing factory has opened up two promotional channels: mobilizing the “internal” propaganda of the original traditional customers, and “external” propaganda—linking to websites, and combining advertisements in professional magazines and popular newspapers.

With the initial development of the market, the petroleum printing plant now has a certain number of social customers. These customers are concentrated in the advertising and design fields. The businesses undertaken are mainly design books, catalogue samples, tender documents, etc. In addition, the oil printing factory also carried out a variety of personalized printing services for home users, such as personalized maps customized by parents for their children.

Difficult problem

Price is like a double-edged sword. Excessive competition will inevitably lead to a sharp drop in prices, leading to a vicious circle. Not only does the traditional printing price fall into such a dilemma, the digital printing market seems to be following suit. Taking color digital printing as an example, the price of each A4 proof in the past was 30 yuan, and it has now fallen below 5 yuan. However, all kinds of fast printing shops and digital printing divisions have been sprung up. Within a two-kilometre radius of the oil printing factory, there are hundreds of print shops. The multitude of numbers will inevitably lead to ragged and mixed situations.

Similarity in product structure is undoubtedly the start of the price war. According to reports, nearly 80% of the printing shops in the fast-printing shops are concentrated in architectural design books and renderings. With such a high density of repetitions, it is not surprising that a big price war is going on.

In addition to the “internal contradictions that are becoming more and more intense” among printing companies and fast printing shops, the contradiction between printing companies, advertisers, and upstream customers is also prominent on the supply chain.

Collaboration concept. Although more and more customers in China have begun to accept the concept of digital printing, the “disassociation” of upstream customers, advertising companies, and printing companies has also added difficulties for the expansion of the digital printing market. In foreign countries, advertising companies are in close contact with customers, actively providing value-added services for customers, and customizing personalized design programs. In this way, cooperation with printing companies naturally closes. However, in the Chinese market, advertising companies do not really form strategic alliances with upstream customers, and more often they pursue the maximization of their profits, let alone provide personalized solutions. The "free" state of the upstream link directly affects the development of the downstream market. This is one of the important reasons why the domestic digital printing market cannot grow quickly and grow.

Customer habits. Unlike traditional printing, the main workload of digital printing is concentrated in the previous period—document conversion and inspection. Due to the fact that many advertising companies do not have standardized documents, they need to run through and communicate in the early stages. From pdf format conversion to reconfirmation of information, they often occupy 80% to 90% of the entire working time. For foreign digital printers, their customers are relatively fixed and their running-in time is short. Customers' documents can be sent directly from the Internet and printed directly on the machine.

Cost concept. On this issue, the disparity between domestic and foreign companies' viewpoints has led to the development of two different markets. In the eyes of foreign companies, the cost of the machine is far behind the cost of labor, saving manpower is placed first; in the eyes of Chinese companies, the cost of equipment is the company's largest expenditure. By way of example, for the same NP2100, for the average digital printer, the equipment prices in Europe and the United States are equivalent to about one year's salary for five senior blue-collar workers. Compared with traditional printing, only the saved labor costs have already passed the purchase of equipment.

In addition, the market is changing rapidly. One of the markets that the oil printing plant had originally envisioned was to do sample books. In the past few years, the sample book was once popular. But now, there are few sample books similar to “fake books” at the book fairs; in addition, the on-demand publishing environment is far from mature, and the publishers have made so many initial investments, and the minimum number of prints has also reached the point of preservation. Therefore, the proportion of sample books in the digital printing market is already very small.

"Market success companies, big market achievements big companies." It is precisely because people are optimistic about the potential market that digital printing has formed a competitive pattern today. But the key to the problem is whether this competition is orderly or disorderly. Only in a healthy environment can the market really mature, and so does the digital printing market.

The author is the deputy general manager of the Printing Press of the Petroleum Industry Press

Source: Coinprint