I am officially manufacturing director,” Jasper Scott, told a seminar at mediaPro, “but this amounts to director of cost-cutting. It used to be a job working towards improving print quality, but all magazine production directors have become one-trick ponies.” And that trick is driving down the amount paid for print and repro. One of the groups he is responsible for pays £3 a page for Wyndeham to pre-flight each PDF ahead of printing, yet Scott is under pressure to eliminate this and save the publisher £150,000 a year; small beer from a total print production budget of £100 million, but symptomatic of how every cost is under scrutiny.
From the other end of the stick, Les Pipe, group development director of Wyndeham, told the same debate: “Driving cost out has become a game of Hit the Suppliers. The problem is that there aren’t any left; perhaps just five suppliers in magazine repro, while the web offset sector has consolidated with more to come. Margins are non-existent so it’s difficult to see how Hit the Supplier will work.”
There is probably no way of making the ends meet. For Scott, production is now perceived as a cost that has to be cut. “When I joined the industry at Condé Nast 15 years ago, repro with German or Italian suppliers was £450 a page and print prices would be £38 a thousand for a 32-page section. Now we pay about half that for a 64-page section,” he said.
The current pressure on price began about four years ago with IPC instigating a review to reduce the costs paid for repro. This has been applied differently across IPC’s five magazine groups. The ball started rolling at Inspire, the division housing the specialist magazine titles, where the profile of the average designer is younger than the highly experienced art directors looking after prestigious titles in the Southbank group. Consequently the specialist titles have adopted full page creation in-house to delivery of print ready PDFs. Likewise parts of TX, the listings titles division, are working in a similar way for the listing pages at least. But at Southbank the requirement for retouching and difficult cut-outs means that outside repro is still needed.
The third member of the panel was Mal Skelton, BBC Magazines, who has taken repro in-house to try to solve the pain of repro bills. Three years after the decision to follow its Bristol unit, Skelton says the project is keeping to its aims. “We didn’t want to replicate a repro house inside the company. We brought in the people and expertise we needed and found that we needed fewer experts compared to the numbers of people employed in an outside repro house. The model has worked and is working for us and is helping to drive more costs out.
“The new drive is to remove hard copy proofs from the process using the appropriate on-screen technology. What we want to do is deliver a file to the printer and he will run to the on-screen result that he will have access to alongside the presses. If he wants he can generate his own hard copy proof. We feel there is still a need to provide the printer with a target, but ultimately to have the on-screen result as that target.”
The BBC has also switched to online receipt of ads directly into its Atex booking system which automatically creates the email to say that the ad has been correctly delivered. It has resulted in a big drop in ads sent as email attachments and in the first four months since introducing the system in May, the publisher is receiving 53% of all ads in this way.
This is clearly improving workflow and delivering cost savings, but it is not the end. Skelton said the idea was to be able to work smarter. “Technology is the area of development that is driving the change,” he said. There is an opportunity from spreading the publishing load across the month ¬– “what we do at present doesn’t make for the best utilisation of resources across the production chain. Better communication reduces cost and mistakes.”
This is the mantra that as a prepress services provider Wyndeham is repeating. The group is in a unique position in having a well-developed prepress operation linking to its array of web offset presses and platesetters. Through control of the prepress file from the publisher, mistakes through naming conventions are avoided and the file can move directly to imposition. But the greatest benefit can be delivered through the emagine publishing platform that the company continues to enhance. It started as a flat planning tool and this remains its core application explained Barry Fitzpatrick, but it offers far more in terms of improving communications, automating workflows and so reducing costs.
“We keep looking at the automation of workflows and we are trying to reduce duplication across the whole process, from start to finish. By working with publishers we can identify areas of duplication where clients and suppliers are doing the same things and we can eradicate some of these elements.
“Within emagine, the publisher has full control over the flatplan in real time. It brings the technical and administration processes together in a single portal with full cost analysis and online approval, and even the creation of digital versions of a magazine. It is a tool to manage the entire process, opening the way to better utilisation of staff.”
In short, his message was that to drive further costs from the process, the process needs to be looked at to see where it can be improved; a move to on-screen proofing being an example.
For Pipe, concluding the session, the BBC route has some merit, though involving a hefty investment in IT. “It raises the question of what happens next for the publisher doing this,” he said. A Wyndeham-type solution is a software way to streamline production, to allow in-house production where appropriate or to outsource time consuming tasks like intense retouching or cut outs to India at a single click. “It’s a means to maximise internal resources and an affordable way for a publisher to take much more control over his costs.”
Ultimately that has to be the way forward: not cutting costs indiscriminately, but gaining a greater transparency over what is being paid for.
Audience view – production consultant Vic Lime
From a personal perspective, I thought the debate on “how to reduce production costs” was more notable for what wasn’t said than for what was.
There seemed to be a general consensus amongst the speakers that print and paper prices were already close to rock bottom and therefore any additional savings would need to come from within – which is fair enough.
BBC Magazines have been trying to address this by taking their repro completely in-house, whilst IPC prefer to outsource to Wyndeham Graphics, and have managed to cut costs by using Wyndeham’s emagine online platform to radically streamline their pre-press workflow. Undeniably a step in the right direction but, in my opinion, still a way to go; and I think these two media giants could benefit from observing, and perhaps even seeking to emulate, the stripped-down approach favoured by their smaller counterparts.
Significantly, my own consultancy clients (from the consumer and contract magazine sector) neither employ dedicated production staff nor use an external repro facility - page creation, right through to print-ready PDF, is routinely carried out by a member of the design team.
With profits hard to come by, there is a real need for publishers to cut staffing levels but at the same time boost productivity. The only way to achieve this is by identifying and implementing the most appropriate mix of people and technology for the job in hand.
Nor is it entirely necessary for publishers to continue plying their trade in a ‘factory’ environment. Certain businesses now have the opportunity to drastically reduce overhead by outsourcing some, or all, of the publishing process to specialist freelancers, rather than paying full-time staff to work from a central location.
These are tough times. It would be all too easy to blame our present woes on the global economic recession, and whilst there’s no doubt that it’s been a major contributing factor, I also believe we’re about to see an irreversible shift in the publishing landscape that will spell certain doom for those who fail to recognize and react to it.