Spring 2014 will see the publication ‘Disruptive Supply Chain Strategies for the Wide Format Printing Market’ from InfoTrends.
The company is about to embark upon email surveys, phone interviews and desk research to
- Quantify industry value chain profit and cost pools
- Identify other critical bottlenecks and sources of friction in the graphics products supply chain
- Identify opportunities for e-commerce and organized supply chain management
- Illustrate companies that are developing alternative and successful supply chain strategies
- Describe best practices that improve supplier and distributor profitability, distribution coverage, inventory visibility, distributor training, and pricing strategies
- Report ratings of the reseller and communications programs for subscriber vendors
- Identify ‘hot buttons’ for future loyalty and market development programmes, and determine thresholds for more efficient reseller management
“The shift to digital wide-format printing has partly been fuelled by the printers’ desire to manage assets more effectively. This in turn has meant that many PSPs don’t want to buy any equipment or supplies until they know they need them, and they often only know they need them 24-48 hours before they have to deliver printed graphics. Effective supply chain management includes making sure that products are available to end users as needed, but also priced properly and represented accurately by distributors,” said Tim Greene, director of the InfoTrends Wide Format Printing Service. “Manufacturers have to develop strategies to deal with different sized accounts, different geographic regions, and different types of distributors.”