A Path to Progress Part Two_ 2010_Q3
- 1. While pondering this letter, I began to think about all of the tools we use to communicate. Not just in our industry, but also in our everyday lives. Recently, I had the opportunity to attend TWTRCON in New York City, a one-day conference dedicated to the use of Twitter in business. Sitting in the conference room was a unique experience. The audience consisted of a number of agencies, media and individuals hoping to learn more about promoting their small business on Twitter. Almost everyone sitting at the round conference tables had their laptop plugged into the charging stations and logged onto the wireless. Next, they pulled up their social media dashboard of choice to update their followers regarding the discussion of Twitter use by organizations such as Whole Foods, Newell Rubbermaid, Comcast, TurboTax and NASA. As speakers were interviewed on stage, TWTRCON’S live feed of tweets updated instantly on a large projector screen next to them almost as quickly as the content left their lips. It was fast. It was furious. It flowed seamlessly. It was, I reminded myself, just one other aspect of communication in the 21st century. As we have all seen in recent years, our businesses must change to provide our clients with the tools they need to communicate. It is an exciting time to be involved in the future of print. The theme for this issue, “Print Shop of the 21st Century” is fitting because our clients want faster turnaround, more product options, multi-channel communication and informed consultation. It is about providing the right message in a seamless, relevant way. To provide this customer experience, we need the right tools and processes in place within our business to ensure we can deliver what we promise. This issue will visit part two of one company’s journey integrating business systems, as well as discuss the aspects of choosing an automated workflow to meet your business needs. You will learn how one company, immersed in a natural disaster, used social media not only to communicate with clients and employees, but also to set up an e-commerce site to sell posters with proceeds going to the community. This disaster also prompted a discussion regarding disaster recovery—do you have plans in place in case the unthinkable happens? In the business section, you will learn how one company is reaping the benefits of lean manufacturing. Finally, round out the issue by learning about digital finishing technology for label and large-format. Having belonged to this community a little more than a year, I continue to be amazed at the power of members who are willing to share both triumphs and stepping stones in the path to growing their companies. We also have some great Partners who can help us implement programs, automate processes to meet client demand and help us show value in combining the power of print with other communication vehicles. As always, the content in Dscoop Quarterly can only be as relevant as the feedback we receive. If you would like to see a particular issue addressed, please e-mail us at [email protected]. Sincerely, Krista Fischer Director of Marketing, L&D Mail Masters, Inc. Technical Reviewer, Dscoop Quartlery Volume 4 – Issue 3 | august 2010 Workflow Automation Solutions page 3 issue sponsors Technical 2 — Disaster Recovery After the Tennessee Floods 3 — Workflow Automation Solutions: The Key to Profitability and Client Integration 4 — Dscoop and InfoTrends Offer Guidance in Purchasing Decisions 5 — Path to Progress, Part Two: Making the Transition to Marketing Service Provider Label Packaging 6 — Production Automation 8 — Digital Finishing Technology Large-Format Signage 9 —Digital Die Cutters Save Time and Money Business Sales 9 — The Impact of Lean on RT Associates Disaster Recovery After the Floods page 2
- 2. Making the Transition to Marketing Service Provider by Integrating Major Business Systems By David Smith, Director of Business Development, Williams Visual Solutions and Technical Chair, Dscoop Board of Directors [email protected] This is a follow-up to an article first published in the Dscoop Quarterly in the summer Issue of 2009. To read the original article, visit www.dscoop.org/dscoopquarterly and log in to access the Archives. Along with a rebranding of the business and realignment of resources internally, a significant investment has been made at Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Williams Visual Solutions in technologies to provide marketing solutions products and services, and to engineer scalable and refined processes and further optimize production. Meanwhile, we continue to struggle in our traditional market space (the ultra- competitive and overcapacity 40” offset market) and have lost some opportunities that have damaged the traditional business base and required a thorough re-analysis of our strategy and its execution. While we are still very much committed to the new products and services program, we have not aligned our messaging to the customer and prospect quickly enough, and as a result have not made as much progress as hoped in delivering new business. Williams Company (rebranded as Williams Visual Solutions) is now truly in the early stages of leveraging the newly installed technologies for our internal use while implementing limited but important developments for our customers and prospects. Currently, resources and activities are roughly split between our own marketing programs and ongoing customer project engagements. It is important to realize that the process of developing programs for customers and prospects involves a significantly larger capture of customer requirements then a traditional print job, one of the factors in its longer sell cycle. As a result, sales discipline and focus, customer service retraining and continual internal production process development are crucial to the process and must be an ongoing effort. Implementing the technologies we have added has been a struggle at times due to resource constraints and business challenges. While the Web-enabled print and media services platform we chose, Online Print Solutions (OPS), is an extremely robust product and has a wide variety of capabilities, it (like all Web-based workflow toolsets) presents a challenge to plug into existing MIS systems, especially legacy-based systems. Integration into existing workflows can be very challenging and requires taking a step back and determining if existing workflows are appropriate. Nonetheless we are making good progress and have great expectations for our portal-based products. Ongoing Sales and Marketing Efforts The addition of Web-to-print and multi-touch, multi-channel media capabilities have opened new doors for our sales and marketing resources team. However, so often the immediacy of need is much less than with a typical traditional print project requirement, resulting in frustration with the sales and management team. Almost without fail, our conversations with customers and prospects migrate to social networking, websites and e-mail communications. This is the way of life today for companies with $20 million to $80 million in sales, the prospect size that has traditionally been the target of many small to mid-size commercial printers. Budgets have been slashed and remaining resources have been moved away from print. This trend has accelerated during the economic downturn and traditional collateral likely will never recover to pre-recession levels. But the argument remains strong for a company that provides superior service and has enough differentiators to create space in the market. And the opportunities exist, but they require perseverance and diligence in the prospecting and sales process. Using our own technologies to market and develop business is a renewed focus. Current Projects Current projects underway include: a retail (Williams-branded) Web portal for ad hoc job submission, an event and activity triggered multi-channel and multi-touch programs portal, and a conventional Web-to-print catalog-based application for print-on-demand and pick and pack. Our first traditional OPS-based pick and pack and demand print Web portal is scheduled to release in late July. The Web-driven inventory reporting and flexible workflow and shipping options that we are creating with OPS will offer a very competitive system, comparable to more traditional logistics software systems, and provide many optional marketing resource center-like services to develop for our customers as their familiarity with the portal technology grows. We have had early success with multi-channel campaigns and are perfecting our process and workflow with both our customer campaigns and internal campaigns. Implementation is a Full-Time Job! In the first article, I wrote about our aggressive plans for systems integration. Our progress on implementation of integrations mentioned in the previous article is as follows: Server switching, data and backbone systems including VOIP (continued on page 6) 5 Path to Progress P a r t T w o
- 3. 6 Path to Progress(continued) telecommunications platform was completed in early 2010. Server and workflow implementation across the organization has been phased in starting with the creative and new technologies teams. Ongoing resource requirements to fully implement a solutions- based architecture must be acknowledged and planned for in the business growth plan. Next Phase: Process Automation and Further Work on Integrations Our integrations still in progress include OPS (Integrated Web and Print Services) to Logic (MIS). This integration is several months behind schedule, but it is mostly our fault for not devoting the necessary resources to this issue earlier in the year. Also the depth and complexity of such an integration requires a clear and well documented path for the handling of transactions. Like many other Web- enabled technology providers to the industry, OPS has continually updated their product and has added an integration to preflight software (Enfocus PitStop), a workflow solution and integration to PressWise for imposition and workflow management, and is working on a prepress link into the Screen Trueflow workflow. Originally we had planned to use an offline imposition system tied into the various output streams from OPS and our other workflows, but in light of the above integrations and partnerships, we are reconsidering our plans. Lessons Learned Several valuable lessons have been learned from this process that are important in any project of this scope and multiple vendor activity. Be sure that you have a clear scope of project and a detailed listing of what you will receive in hardware, software and services. If you plan to redo your core IT infrastructure, it is critical to identify upfront a detailed network plan including network naming schema, IP and domain naming conventions and machine types and operating systems. We have had to backtrack and rework configurations because network names and addresses in the Windows domain have clashed with default setups on Apple servers and Apple Bonjour technology. It is also critically important to ensure your marketing plan is in step with your new product offerings, and timetables are set and adhered to for marketing communications, sales team and business development objectives. In the last 24 months, there has been a renaissance in label and packaging convertors needing to radically update their Management Information System (MIS) solutions. The MIS market is highly fragmented, but it can be generalized as providing the functions of business management and overall management of end-to-end production for any production type. Almost every packaging converting site has some kind of MIS at the most basic level of job planning and billing, if not more. Recent research shows that in the commercial printing market, the adoption of MIS solutions reaches 55 percent of printers. In the label and packaging market, it reaches almost 100 percent, and yet we see a change in the way convertors look at MIS and what they expect to gain from it. Drivers and Motivations Two main challenges are driving this new interest in modern MIS systems. One relates to the maturity, even commoditization, of analog printing pages. Fierce pricing competition and eroding margins of packaging printing drive the need to be more efficient, and efficiency means automation. The second challenge comes from wide adoption of digital printing, and the market’s needs for short runs, resulting in a need to deal with hundreds of stock-keeping units (SKUs) per day. In a world of manually touching each and every job, and dealing with it—for planning or prepress—even as little as 10 minutes can cause bottlenecks in production procedures and workflow. Converters must automate entering orders—if not all of them, then at least those that are reprints of successful past jobs. Market data shows that the MIS market is highly fragmented and geographically distributed. More than 100 MIS solutions are available in the market today. None of those vendors have more than 10 percent market share, and almost all of them are either available in the U.S. or in Europe. In addition, 70 percent of the MIS solutions at packaging convertors are home-grown, meaning that they were developed by the convertor for his specific needs. Home-grown MIS systems gained popularity in the past decade due to the high prices of standard solutions (in many cases, the final price was twice the originally assumed price because of the integration price component in MIS buying), and the long and excruciating process of implementation. The worst part was that at the end, many users felt it wasn’t exactly what they wanted. A huge barrier was the need to integrate such a system with the existing devices, software components, and manufacturing tools that each site had. Every site had to start the process almost from scratch. At those terms, no wonder most of the market preferred a tailored solution—built for them, according to their own requirements. But home-grown solutions are hardly ever built to grow. They are perfect for a highly known production environment and capacity, but in most cases, implementing changes requires so much effort that it’s like starting over again. Such a change in production habits and the environment drives many owners of old MIS systems to look for a new or upgraded solution. Production Automation in the Label and Packaging Environment LabelPackaginggg By Sharon Rothschild, HP Indigo Strategic Marketing, Labels and Packaging Workflow [email protected]