When computer to plate first found its way into production environments, many prepress companies invested in the strategy of making the printing plates and then delivering them to printing companies. The plates were physically driven to the customer. As these companies wondered how to deal with two-in-the-morning breakdowns of 24/7 presses, a family-owned prepress business in Winnipeg, called Embassy Graphics, was taking an entirely different approach to the new world of digital workflow.

They actually encouraged their printing clients to install CTP technology, while Embassy instead focused on transmitting crisp digital files. As the industry confirmed its shift from film, hundreds of prepress firms found themselves in jeopardy. Most of the ones that did not go out of business were bought by, or became, printers. As a result, a lot of frontend expertise has slipped out of the industry.

This, however, is not an entirely dire situation because as the frontend continues to advance - with the likes of PDFx - the software used to drive it is slowly becoming a commodity. This may change many of the ideas that printers have formed around the value-added promise, a strategy for the new economy that few companies seem able to actually derive significant revenues from.

"And here's where a lot of people in the industry in the past have been thinking," says Bryan Payne Jr., president and CEO of Embassy. "Well, sell value-added... that is a bullshit term. Give them some magic pixie dust, then they are in a haze, they are in the ether, like they don't know you are getting a premium. That is crap."

Payne looks to the likes of Dell, the computer reseller, as an example of the next generation business mindset, which is summed up quite properly by the words: cut the crap. Dell has built its brand around cutting the crap, because they are transparent with their price and what components you are ordering. In other words, they tell everyone how they are going to keep driving prices down, as low as they can go. The success of Dell has nothing to do with turnaround time.

"The industry needs to understand better, faster, cheaper," says Payne. "The goal should always be to drive costs down. If you are out in front always driving the costs down then you are going to be in business. But if you sit there and go 'I can't drive costs down, this guy's doing it for that, this guy's blowing his brains out, he's doing it too cheap' and start whining about it, then you're done."

Payne compares his approach to that of a skateboarder, suggesting that in skateboarding you can't lie: either you can do an ollie or you can't do an ollie. And even if you try to dress like a skateboarder you will be recognized as a poser pretty quickly.

"Let's acknowledge it," he says. "Quality, that has to be a given. Service, that has to be a given. Turnaround, that has to be a given. Price has to differentiate and the only way I can see it happening is through the networks that you pick, how you get stuff done. The value-added is created by doing all four and making it seamless and effortless."

A year and a half ago, Embassy began to shift its business model toward being a graphic solutions provider, which is another of those terms floating around with very few real-world working examples in the industry. By leveraging 13 years of digital prepress experience and a growing network of third-party printers, Embassy may be one of Canada's first true graphic solutions providers.

At the heart of the matter sits a hub that Payne calls his smart factory. The smart factory is made up of two advanced prepress firms, shouldering a last-man-standing attitude, in Winnipeg and Toronto.

To Payne the difference between a printer and a graphic solutions provider is very simple: printers are looking at ink on paper and Embassy is looking at its strategy in terms of getting the customer's revenues up and their costs down. His goal is to develop this network in such a way that Embassy will have $1 billion worth of print under management. He plans to grow the company 30 per cent per year until 2018. This is the year he knows he will work until, at least.

The Environment

"We deal with Scholastic out of the United States," says Payne. "In the prepress side alone, not print, they had 150 vendors. They cut the list down to 15, then they cut it to seven. We made the cut. And they did the same thing with the printers."

Payne is not bragging when he makes this point. He is using it as an example of one of the more important trends he has noticed in corporate print procurement. Many of Embassy's publishing clients no longer allow new vendors in the door. This sounds strange but there are so many people calling on these large companies in today's economy that they rarely have any time to consider new companies.

The trend will be a huge driving force behind the success of enterprise consulting initiatives by the likes of Xerox (XGS), HP and IBM. The potential of these three companies lies in their ability to stretch enterprise involvement well beyond print procurement.