Customers looking for more Ability to Advise
(NPES International E-commerce Website, Sep 04 2008) Walter Feck (50 years old) is a Director of Besscom AG and Managing Director of Satz-Rechen-Zentrum Berlin, DDZ DigltaI-Druck-Zentrum Berlin and Heenemann Verlagsgesellschaft. The members of the Besscom AG group in Berlin offer integrated media services from creation to archiving and employ a total of around 350 people.
How do you view the market and the situation for prepress service providers in Germany?
As in the whole industry, there is severe selective pressure. Technically, prepress is already completely globalized. Differentiation is made in terms of criteria such as advice, capability, cheapness, speed of response and reliability.
What trends can you discern in the wishes and requirements of your customers?
Combined with low prices, customers are looking for more and more ability to advise from service companies. Since, on the customer side, staff with a printing industry training are now the exception, customers are looking to service providers for expert support and advice. That this is a valuable service is very much something that has been realized by certain customers.
Increasingly, the demand is for an integrated, all-inclusive service. The second trend, in my opinion, is that increasingly customers have 'good' data or they leave it to the service provider to look after this, which means that the trend is very definitely towards automated processing and generation of 'print' copy, which will in part only be published electronically, although in typographically prepared form.
What has the impact of this been on your company? Where are you particularly looking to invest in the near future?
We want to invest in people, in well trained, motivated, independently thinking and acting staff, Increasingly, customers want to be advised and they expect creative proposals from their service providers. The technology has become 'democratic', In our industry the limits of the feasible are no longer technical but a matter of the imagination. |
