C. Clint Bolte & Associates

This 58th annual DMIA Conference & Expo was held at the Las Vegas (Nevada) Convention Center October 22-24, 2003. The Document Management Industries Association is comprised of distributors and specialty manufacturers, who choose to market their graphic services and printing products exclusively through this same distributor network of independent sales and marketing firms throughout the world. More than 1,500 attendees gathered for the two dozen educational seminars and the trade exposition, which had nearly 400 booths. Fifty-eight of which were first time booth participants.

The Expo showcased the latest solutions in commercial printing, promotional products, labels, e-commerce, plastic products, packaging and more. Some of the more interesting innovations were the CD/DVD screen printing, CD/DVD duplication, blank media and packaging capabilities shown by Hartland, Wis.-based Spectrum Digital Services. Elk Grove Village, Ill.-based Plastag Corporation explained the benefits of a registered holograph on foil beneath a protective overlay. Online business card and stationery ordering systems have been around for half a decade but nice improvements continue to evolve as shown by Greenville, N.C-based AccuLink (formerly AccuCopy/QuickTabs) and Palo Alto, CA-based Printra, Inc. (printra.net).

The pre-conference day programs were dedicated to DMIA's special interest groups, called SIGs, to which its members join to improve their expertise at selling and servicing niche applications. These included direct marketing, labels, promotional products, commercial printing, healthcare, and fulfillment. In addition to active online list serve among SIG members for discussing on-going issues throughout the year, each SIG meets formally twice a year.

The Fulfillment SIG was initially formed last spring with this being its second meeting at this DMIA annual conference. Discussions concentrated on one of the most difficult management issues; cost recovery pricing. Presentations were made on often hidden cost drivers such as seasonality, collect shipments, customer service intensity, returns processing, and disposing of overs following kitting projects.

With no industry standards available and only limited benchmarking studies available, several fulfillment SIG members shared their confidential methodologies and results for capturing times and costs. Several distributors attending this SIG meeting have no intention of going into the fulfillment warehousing business, but they simply want to learn more about these services both for selling these services as well as being better prepared to manage their chosen third party fulfillment vendor. Next spring's SIG meeting will concentrate on the preparation of marketing proposals with members submitting examples of their approaches.

Featured speaker Dirk Beveridge, President of the Beveridge Consulting Group, concentrated on the critical success factors leading to an effective mandatory business operating system standards (BOSS). The marketing trends which summarize these factors are a shift from (1) product to customer focus, (2) commodity orientation to value-added services and expertise, and (3) finally, quoting activity to customized systems and solutions. Part of the shifting culture to achieve these success factors is training investment and corporate management setting high performance standards. "Where there is no discipline for nonperformance, we always have declining standards," touted Beveridge.

Many distributors gained early career experience as sales representatives with major print manufacturers before choosing to go out on their own. As a result, a popular DMIA seminar topic is "How to compete with the majors." Two former officers of Wallace and current principals of The Open Approach consultancy, Ron Seavey and Bob Cronin, suggested that times have never been better to compete against the majors. Continued consolidation among the majors is perceived by many print buying clients to represent industry turmoil and is therefore of concern to them. The former perception of security in dealing with the stability of a major vendor is eroding as these large print firms rationalize their over capacity by shutting down plants and reducing, if not eliminating, research and development on new products.

Additionally the majors almost universally have abandoned the small to medium-size markets. This is because their higher overhead costs can only be absorbed into services that they hope are perceived by the larger clients to be at a higher economy of scale. Therefore, the distributors have excelled at penetrating this entry level market niche.