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Network Power

To stay competitive, successful offset manufacturer Herald Printing bought a digital press and teamed with Kodak and Four51.

By LaShell Stratton

Before Herald Printing bought a digital press and became a full-service print provider, the manufacturer had somewhat narrow sales discussions with customers and prospects. “In the past, the conversation was based on price and that was pretty much it,” confesses Jim Morgan, president and CEO of Herald Printing.

Though the 125-year-old Washington, Ohio-based company was a successful sheet-fed offset manufacturer, Morgan realized that change was on the horizon in the printing world. He decided to make the company more competitive and enhance its capabilities by buying a Kodak NexPress in 2006. Morgan also hoped to offer e-commerce solutions to customers, but he did not want to spend excessive amounts of time and money transitioning to a digital print operation. So he, like many other printers, joined the Kodak MarketMover Network and used the resources of Kodak Graphic Communications Group’s e-commerce partner, Four51 Inc., Eden Prairie, Minn.

“Four51 and NexPress have allowed us to have a new conversation to the point that it’s pretty much all we talk about during our sales presentations,” he says. “It has given us more orders and it allows our customers to see what they can do with an e-commerce solution.”

The Kodak MarketMover Network is composed of printers with Kodak presses who manage their workflow through web-to-print sites engineered by Four51. The network connects printers, distributors and buyers around the world. According to Kodak, to date, the MarketMover Network has connected 4,880 users, and it hosts 4,391 static and variable products ranging from business cards to backstage passes.

Morgan says the Network helped Herald Printing land work from a South American-based client that had initially passed on their sales offer.

“It’s a bath products company. They make tubs, whirlpool baths and faucets,” he says. “Their corporate offices are in Colombia but they have an office in Ohio. We presented a fulfillment program. It was a traditional software program by IBM but they didn’t really like it. We suggested something else but they didn’t like that either.

It didn’t have any of the visuals that they wanted. There was just text on a screen.”

But when Herald Printing joined the MarketMover Network, it finally had access to cost-efficient, user-friendly, web-to-print interfaces. “When Four51 came on the scene, we realized that the price point was a lot cheaper than the other programs,” Morgan says. “And we could create pictures of the products. It was also easy to maneuver through.”

Now customers can order online, doing away with the fax and phone orders of old. “They were never able to do this before,” he says. “Now they have tracking capability. It really helped them to streamline their process.”

Morgan says that, for now, Herald Printing is handling fulfillment only of static materials for its Colombian customer, but “they’re considering also using print-on-demand applications and doing replenishment orders online,” he says.

Morgan says sales are strong thanks to the Network but he expects them to be even stronger in the future after some of his staffers are trained to build Four51 e-commerce sites instead of having the software company do it for them. “We can get training as long as we agree to buy a license to the software,” he says.

LaShell Stratton is former assistant editor at Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to editors@psda.org.