RTT Plus is RedTie’s new module designed to accurately capture and price bespoke printing jobs through a web to print system.
RedTie is attempting to change the perception of web to print systems among print service providers. Many, it has found, consider web to print to only be useful for templated items such as business cards and other simple stationery and marketing collateral. What happens when a customer has a project that does not fit within the constraints of a template? There has been no real mechanism to describe the job, to get it accurately priced, and to then be able to place the order, it claims.
RTT Plus is intended to make such perceptions a thing of the past. RTT (without the Plus) is RedTie’s flagship product, a webstore platform with an extensive set of customisation tools. RTT stands for RedTie Template. The company’s other main product is RTQ – RedTie Quotation – an instant online quotation tool designed for the more experienced print buyer.
With RTT Plus, which is offered as an extra module to RTT costing £150 per month, customers get a more modern version of RTQ, one with enhanced functionality for building price calculators and specifying file types, and which is now completely integrated within RTT and its product menu. For non-templated jobs, the user simply describes the project using configurable questions and drop down menus – number of pages, format, paper stock, finishing etc – and the calculator intelligently updates the price instantly according to the business rules in place. They can then upload artwork in any file format that the print service provider chooses to accept (so therefore, Microsoft PowerPoint for a presentation or tender document), and check out and pay as they would in the normal online way.
Kevin Tyler, RedTie’s head of business growth, said: ‘There are lots of webstores out there that define the job and you can upload artwork. That’s nothing new. But because this is within RTT, you can have hundreds of web portals and each can have different rules and different prices. One client logs on and they get price band A; another client gets price band B for the same job; a third client might only see certain jobs. Each can have its own types of products, payment gateways, proof approvals, credit limits and more. We are bringing a webstore into a web to print solution and allowing you to define the rules for each webstore.’
This is intended to alleviate the situation that a number of printers have found themselves in with web to print, according to Mr Tyler, in which they have had to spend thousands of pounds with web developers to create a B2C portal that was not even linked to the web to print system they use for B2B customers. ‘With this product you can create your own B2C webstore within a day, which you can link to your own webstore and you will have all the functionality of something that cost thousands of pounds.’
The pricing calculator inside RTT Plus understands the technicalities and working methods of litho print, such as work and turn; it understands digital print clicks and other areas such as wide format and silk screen printing. With only a little experience it is possible to create a bespoke pricing calculator within a couple of minutes, and the ability to simply drag and drop the relevant questions across from an existing calculator makes the creation of additional calculators even simpler.
Customers can still buy just the basic RTT, or buy RTT and RTT Plus together. RedTie expects the latter to be the case in the majority of circumstances. ‘We would expect that every client will now take RTT Plus – it’s that valuable a tool that they’re going to need it,’ said Mr Tyler. ‘We have not sold a system without it since it was launched. The only reason it would not be taken is if it’s a direct sale to organisations such as councils or charities, that don’t need to be able to define products. Every printer will need RTT Plus. It is simple to use and clever, that’s the key thing. RTQ takes a bit more time in order to grasp the set up.
‘RTT Plus makes our product much more flexible than current template solutions, and that, I think, puts us a few steps ahead of the competition.’
