Post Profits with Postpress Products

Preserve re-orders by enhancing document utility and functionality postpress.

Adding value to printed products after production takes many forms—from diecutting, laminating, punching and perfing to varnishes, crash imprinting, gluing and binding.

These varied processes, either singly or in combination, add more utility to forms for the end-user, and with that added utility comes efficiency in use and, likely, added profit for the distributor.

"Sales of value-added products are very healthy; we've seen the dollar value of our sales increase an average of 11 percent per year," said Joseph Lunkes, CEO of USAdocufinish.

The Plainfield, Illinois-based manufacturer, formed in 1986 as United Stencil & Affixing, now sells $9 million annually, all of it in value-added forms. "Forms that combine printed information with additional functional utility offer more value to the end-user," Lunkes said. In addition, the more a form can do, the less likely it is to move to an electronic form and result in lost printing business, he said.

Leon Bogner, president and general manager at Ace Forms, Pittsburg, Kan., concurred with his colleague's positive assessment, saying, "Here at Ace Forms, we have seen a big move toward value-added products," Bogner said. "Our postpress labor hours have been growing at a rate of 20 percent annually."

As with business forms in general, individual value-added processes have seen peaks and valleys over the years. Lunkes noted the decline of carton labeling stencils, calling it "analogous to the electronic industry's evolution beyond vacuum tubes."

In addition, integrated cards and labels, which may require diecutting, varnishing and affixing, are becoming "very standard products," Lunkes said, and are suffering price erosion as a result of their ubiquity.

Expanded Markets

At one time, "value-added" was synonymous with being unique, which is what the integrated products were when they first came out. "The good news is, there is more market acceptance of this product and expanded uses for integrated products," Lunkes said.