22. How to do more for your customer

22.

How to do more for your customer

A passion to do more for your customer should be your standard state of mind. Make that mindset a common thread through your entire life in business management. To always be willing to work more together with your customer will broaden the horizon and help you plenty.

The first thought while expanding is often to do more of what you already do. That is correct, but also try to see the bigger picture. Look wider. Investigate what you’re not doing today. Maybe a competitor is doing almost your stuff but with a twist, and your customer isn’t aware that you also produce and deliver that. Do you know everything your customers need, demand, and what their road map looks like? Where are they heading for and who is the customer of your customer? What are their needs and demands, how are they acting now and how will they act in the future? If you know and understand this, you can add more value to their road map and help bringing them forward in the best way possible. It’s a great chance to support them with more products. Business opportunities will occur and you as a supplier will expand both in volume and in value. Business will be more profitable for you and your customer as you do this together – grow with your customer.

Looking into the future, you’ll need to expand your product portfolio. You’ll need to produce more and different products. It’s what your customer needs. The problem historically has been to know the demand today and tomorrow. “What comes first, the technology or the demand?” Steven Jobs, Apple, had the answer: “A lot of times people don’t know what they want before you show them”. Know your technology! Find out what your customers might need – even if they haven’t figured it out themselves yet. That means driving you and your customer’s business forward, a bit of what we’re trying to do at Visutech together with you as a customer. That doesn’t mean that you need to write books to your customers but talk to them! Start the dialog, be a partner, grow both your own and your customer’s business. We call it the eco system of business. You can read more about it in my earlier books, the chapter about ICDT: Information, Communication, Distribution & Transactions as the DNA of business. If you today produce for example labels, what stops you from doing more like shrink slews, flexible packaging, pharma packaging or in-mold? The printing part is the same, media, and finishing is different. Maybe there are some differences in regulations, but not too far apart. Doable? Big investment? Adding any value to your existing customer is good, and they maybe already purchase this from one of your competitors. As mentioned earlier; the trend ahead is clear, your customer will choose fewer numbers of suppliers and the ones kept will grow, do more and become an integral part of the company and their future business together. In the commercial print business, which currently drops in size around -10% YoY, today they have to buy volumes or acquire (consolidate) a company just to keep up the volume in their existing machine base. But when entering the next low economy, focus will change towards the ones that don’t make it any more, those who end up under chapter 11 or declare bankruptcy. Market demands for physical printed information are going down favoring the electronic display way of information like via iPad, etc. Still, printed market communication between customer and consumer have a value if it is carrying values outside of only printed ink on paper. It will require a greater value in the connection between the brand owners and their consumers. This segment will keep growing toward the full supply chain, taking more responsibility for the whole value chain from A to Z. From idea and creation to how, what, and when it is supposed to reach the customer. Therefore, here are great possibilities to discuss if you should expand your product portfolio and offer new deals in cooperation with your customer. That could very well include supporting clients on a whole new level, taking care of the entire chain of communication. All of this, of course, varies from customer to customer. But your knowledge of what your customer values is crucial; it will be an important key to your success.

For example, expanding toward large format printing for signage, point of sales or packaging that still is mostly based on sheet, fiber, and board for packaging. Don’t miss out on opportunities if your digital HP Indigo today is based on sheet. There is a lot of high value media that can really expand into higher value products like fine art, plastic, synthetic, thermal and textiles like canvas for paintings, etc. This will at first not gather high volumes, but a high market value and high margins. HP Indigo also has a lot of different types of special ink outside of the standard 4-process color Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Orange and Violet for IndiChrome, makes 95% of all PMS colors (kind of hexachrome, it is expanding the color gamut), White ink for printing on colored paper and Black with a very nice effect. Special PMS colors can be ordered as unique colors for special effects or a brand color. Invisible color for safety printing represents a high value and a great need in contra fitting (pharma, tickets, security, etc.). Also, don’t underestimate that HP Indigo can print process color with only 3 colors EPM: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (without Black). That will speed up your existing press with 33% and save costs. Whether this is relevant for you or not will depend on which job you’re printing. Try it, setting up a new queue in the system and the rip will process the file toward 3 colors instead of 4. Ask us at Visutech if this is possible on your press and how to get it up and running. If you have a roll-feed HP Indigo press you can do the same stuff when it comes to coloring and do labels. First, too many label converter’s with digital and flexo presses sell these as two different products and at different prices. Instead use one strategy and one business plan toward customers. It will increase the total margin and capacity. The balance today can be 30% digital volume representing 70% of the total profit. In many cases, 80% of the jobs can go digital at least 50/50 in volume flexo/digital, the rest is old legacy. Change your business strategy so it includes digital as one product only in your plan and the production manager will then fill and balance both technologies for the right machine, with the best fit possible and make them available for all of the shifts you are running. Second, there are interesting products that add extra value today regarding labels outside of media and ink via the finish. Benefit from it by adding same new offline finishing or add a new module to already installed equipment like die-cutting for fine-board, small packaging products for pharma, candy, giveaways, etc. Shrink-sleeves as an alternative product to labels can add a massive value to your customer’s products. The consumers also appreciate it, remember when Coca-Cola first added label variations and then a sleeve on the bottle? Today, these empty bottles still sell for more than USD 100 on eBay and have become collectibles. Talk about adding value to a product.