The traditional jobbing printer is dying a death. Time was when a general commercial printer accepted individual job orders, printed and delivered them, and hoped for repeat business from a core set of clients.

　　But these days, a general commercial printer’s work is not jobbing but contracts C agreed levels and/or types of work from a customer, spread over a specified period of time. And to get a contract, a printer must do more than put an ad in the Yellow Pages and send a salesforce out: he has to tender.

　　Contract-based work and the tendering process is not a new phenomenon in the print industry, but what is new is the extent to which it’s becoming the norm. BPIF head of business Gil Reid-Robbins says contracts work better for the customer in many ways, but mainly because they provide security in both directions, and yield better value for money.

　　Reid-Robbins adds that printers who have specialised in public sector work before now are familiar with the process, but the increasing dominance of print management companies C which work with printers exclusively on a rostered, contracted basis C means more printers are being introduced to the tendering process. “The whole business of being a print buyer is becoming more professionalised, so more printers are having to gear up to get their work.

　　“Where even large corporates buying direct might have bought print job by job in the past, now they’re all wanting to do the same work on a contract basis. The whole move to intermediation, where print buyers are becoming more dominant in the supply chain, may help to standardise and raise levels of consistency and quality in the industry,” she says.

　　Another big driver for the move towards contract-based working is the upcoming London Olympics, whose print tender has been delayed due to complexities in managing the supply chain, but is due to appear any day now. The 2012 Games expect to generate around 7,000 contracts, forming supply chains of an estimated 75,000 opportunities C every single one of which will be managed by contract. And the tender document, says group director at the London Development Agency Simon Meneer, has “a huge amount of questions about the tendering company’s fitness to compete”.

　　A sign of things to come

　　The questions cover professional areas such as financial stability, technical competence, health and safety, equal opportunities, sustainability and customer and workforce issues. “And that’s just the pre-qualification process. Printers won’t even get a foot in the door until they’ve demonstrated answers to all those questions, and that’s before they even get to bid for the work,” says Reid-Robbins. “It’s indicative of the way things are going.”

　　Many printers have, until now, worked without feeling the need for such credentials. But the increasing dominance of the tender as a way of winning work is changing all that; it amounts, says Reid-Robbins, to a wholesale dragging of the industry into the 21st century as far as professionalism goes.

　　“For better or worse, this forces printers to look at their cost rates, their processes and their systems,” she says, “and it’s to their benefit that they do so. We hear mutterings from commercial printers who think they’re being asked to jump through a lot of hoops, and they are resentful, particularly at a time when margins are at their lowest-ever. But what they overlook is that many of the requirements on a typical tender document are in their own interest to have C not just in winning the work, but in working in a more sustainable, profitable, more efficient way that helps to address the question of falling margins.”

　　But the level of discontent that the BPIF has clocked is real. One printer recently told PrintWeek that it took four weeks of management time completing a pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) for a public tender. It demanded policy statements on more than 30 areas of business. Another printer, this one based in Hampshire and already doing around 30% of its work on public and blue-chip contracts, threw out a PQQ three months ago because it demanded ISO 14001 as a pre-requisite and the purchasing officer in charge of the tender process “wouldn’t recognise our own environmental management system”, said the operations director. “We chose not to go for ISO 14001 because it didn’t set high enough standards, so with our own system we’re actually outstripping all the ISO levels, but the purchasing officer wanted us to tick the box C and we couldn’t.”

　　And even where box-ticking is insisted upon, it’s surprising how many buyers don’t want to see the proof, says Grant Hazell, environment officer at Halstan Printing Group. “We have documentation to prove everything that we do, and we’re happy to show it to our potential customers, but many don’t ask for proof or further details about how we’re making improvements,” he says.

　　However, for printers who choose to do the gearing-up, the rewards can be substantial. Tewkesbury Printing pinned on its ISO 14001, FSC and PEFC badges back in October last year, and has seen both its potential markets and its level of business increase correspondingly as a result. “Our range of work has broadened,” says estimator and environment co-ordinator Nicky Wilson. “An increasing number of tenders now require the printer to be FSC-certified and ISO 14001-accredited.”

　　Down the road in Gloucester, Alpha Colour Printers has also experienced the boom in business that comes with a more professional stance. “We won a contract this year in excess of £300,000, and it was on the basis that we have and retain our ISO 14001 accreditation,” says quality assurance manager Dave Oldfield. And Merthyr Tydfil-based Stephens & George (S&G) has “not just opened doors, but stopped other doors from closing,” with its commitment to ticking environmental boxes.

　　“It’s enabled us to submit tenders we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to tender for,” says S&G’s spokesperson Karen Connolly.

　　Another, perhaps unanticipated benefit of the move towards contract-based work is the boost it can give to smaller printers’ networking abilities. “Increasingly, smaller printers are looking to form links with their peers to make up tender consortia to bid for the larger contracts,” explains Reid-Robbins.The benefit to printers is in the shift of peers from rivalry to a spirit of co-operation, to the mutual benefit of all concerned C which, in this age of consolidation, can lead to even greater things. The BPIF has witnessed several mergers or acquisitions coming out of such practices. “I think it shows how something perceived as a negative challenge, in this case the shift towards contract-based working, can actually turn out to be a positive opportunity,” says Reid-Robbins.