Board Printing Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Board Printing market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Printed Products market. Digital printing has made significant in-roads at the expense of offset printing owing to its benefits such as order flexibility, optimized stock handling, and minimization of time-to-market for printed content.

Many large and mid-sized companies, especially from legal, financial, healthcare and real estate sectors are still heavily reliant on paper. Off late, there is a growing concern on security of documents - whether printed or stored digitally on a connected printing device. To address this concern, suppliers are coming forward with solutions that offer print and document security and monitoring services.

Suppliers expect an increase in OPEX from rising prices of paper and ink which has resulted from rising input costs and to some extent, from shortening supply. Still, declining use of paper and intense competition will offset this incremental cost.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Board Printing procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

It has become imperative for category managers to remain as agile as possible in terms of their procurement practices. However, it is not always easy to quickly spot and implement alternative practices in a category like Board Printing. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Buyers can use standard scorecards to evaluate service providers and offer necessary comments to rationalize the given scores. This will help document the decision-making process.

Buyers should engage with regional service providers of digital print as this will reduce the procurement lead time. Shipment of goods from regional service providers takes lesser shipment time compared with shipment from global print service providers.

Personalization of posters, cards, and messages have a high impact on end-consumers during marketing campaigns and therefore, preferred suppliers must have the capabilities to offer personalization in digital printing.

Board Printing procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Board Printing procurement. Some examples include: