An emphasis on bottom-line benefits helps solution providers tap into a significant market opportunity

For Sprecher Brewing Co. the benefits of moving more color printing jobs in-house materialized in a most welcome place-its bank account.

The Milwaukee-based maker of gourmet sodas and microbrews installed a color laser printer from Xerox to print labels and packaging that it formerly had farmed out to a commercial print shop. Frequent trips to a commercial printer to review proofs for these items had been wasting significant amounts of staff time and money.

But with its own high-quality printer and color-matching software, Sprecher now produces in-house proofs calibrated to match the final output from the production print run. In addition to proofs, Sprecher's color laser printer produces such final products as brochures, fliers, and even vinyl-coated tap labels.

Within a year, the color printer saved Sprecher almost $30,000 as part of a wider strategy that addressed color printing and electronic document-management goals. "Through consistent color and creative marketing tactics with our color laser printer, the Sprecher brand shines as brightly outside our brewery as it does within," says Anne Sprecher, director of communications.

Competitive advantage

Sprecher isn't alone in realizing the ROI of in-house color, and solution providers can exploit this trend as they cultivate increased color sales in the hot small- and medium-sized business (SMB) market.

What are the key selling points? According to Xerox research, more than 90 percent of the respondents in an SMB survey said color office documents and marketing materials help attract new customers and convey a more professional company image. Similar percentages of respondents said that color provides bottom-line benefits by making the companies look successful and by enhancing their competitive advantage.

Financial savings are at the heart of this increased competitiveness. "SMB customers are spending about $26 billion in the U.S. in [printing] outsourcing," says Anneliese Olson, Hewlett-Packard's director of LaserJet category management, imaging and printing in the Americas. "If those companies bring that work in house, they will save a significant amount of money, and that's a huge budget that solution providers can go after by helping educate their customers about the cost-savings potential of color."

Some studies have shown that lower costs and greater efficiencies for in-house color can save SMBs 40 percent in printing costs compared to using offset printers. The sweet spot for in-house efficiency is print runs of 2,000 pages or less, analysts say. Other advantages for SMBs are faster turnaround times and the ability to produce only the number of pages needed for an individual job, not a minimum run determined by the commercial printer. Overruns may account for 15- to 20-percent of commercial jobs, according to some industry estimates.

Address Concerns

But for ROI sales strategies to resonate with customers, solution providers must convince buyers that usage controls can avert color waste that saps ROI. Color controls like Ricoh's WebSmartDevice Monitor and HP's WebJet Admin monitor usage, while third-party solutions like MegaTrack, Equaitrac, and Print Manager Plus perform job tracking and billing tasks.

"People still have the impression that color is so much more expensive than black-and- white printing. That's not the case if you compare the black-and-white and color on a page-for-page basis," says Dave Brownlee, an executive with solution provider CamCorpUSA, Lakeland, Mich. "But without controls, we've all seen what happens when a company gets a color machine--all of a sudden pages are getting loaded off of the Internet and the company is buying a lot of toner because people are printing pages that probably shouldn't be printed in color."