Word Processors Market Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Word Processors market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Printing Machinery and Equipment market. High procurement costs put a hindrance for buyers looking for upgrading or replacing a printing asset. As an alternative, suppliers are offering cost-effective re-engineering capabilities such as retrofitting of existing equipment with new systems.

Rapid digitization of workspace and work processes has significantly reduced the use of paper in corporate world and therefore, industry has seen a consistent decline of print volumes. Still, the term \"paperless office\" will take years to become a common phenomenon. Print is here to stay and will co-exist with the digital document solutions in a \"paper-light\" corporate world.

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.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Word Processors 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 Word Processors. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, 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.

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 would benefit from engaging with service providers that display a high level of adoption of technologies such as web-to-print, workflow automation software, and remote proofing. These technologies would, in turn, enable buyers to achieve savings in their printing budgets, improve print quality, provide better visibility over the printing project, and offer greater flexibility over the printing project.

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