Digital Duplicators Market Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Digital Duplicators market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Printing Machinery and Equipment 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.

The category is expected to experience a moderate price rise resulting from increasing investment in technologies and automation by commercial printing companies, but long-term price outlook remains positive for buyers as suppliers are expected to recover the technological investments soon.

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 Digital Duplicators procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

Digital Duplicators procurement best practices are moving towards a level of sophistication which is typically seen in traditional procurement categories. Category managers now have an attractive opportunity to adapt the best practices seen within this category as well as those being leveraged in other non-related categories. This report summarizes the best practices picked from across multiple categories that could work well for category managers involved with Digital Duplicators procurement strategy.

For example, Buyers prefer to engage with service providers that adopt hedging techniques to mitigate the effects of fluctuations in printing ink prices. The majority of printing inks are primarily derivatives of crude oil, the prices of which are highly volatile. Thus, engaging with service providers that adopt hedging will allow buyers to minimize the impact of price fluctuations pertaining to printing inks during the contract tenure.

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.

Engage suppliers that can offer digital print outputs in different dimensions to help increase the visual appeal of printed materials. Service providers should be capable of offering a wide range of dimensional digital print outputs, such as pop-up cubes and multi-dimensional shapes that can expand, fold, and explode, as this increases the visual appeal of the printed product.

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