On-Demand Digital Print Services: A New Commercial Print Paradigm as an IT Service Vertical

On-demand digital print service is a form of personalized manufacturing service. Key to commercial print value-creation chain is the service engagement and fulfillment between the content suppliers and the print service providers (PSP). Content suppliers are the service clients, they request print services and supply content for print. PSPs provide the fulfillment services to the content suppliers in exchange for payment: converting the supplied content into printed products and shipping them to the end-customer. In this paper, we will describe on-demand digital print service, and the application of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as platform to integrate information and communication technologies (ICT) into the end-to-end print service fulfillment process to enable digital print automation, and the SOA implementation assisted by process modeling. We also extend the SOA framework to include the order negotiation process and envisage a coupled demand-fulfillment paradigm. SOA-based digital print automation leverages from the integration of ICT into the print manufacturing operations management, it is an IT service vertical.