Dscoop9: Nothing Short of an Industry Watershed

It's been about a week since I got home from Dscoop9, this year's meeting of the HP Graphic Arts User Group. This was my fifth Dscoop, my first as a board member, and the best I've ever attended-- and, dare I say, the best one yet. There are so many things that make this the best event in the industry, too, it is hard to know where to begin. I guess the biggest thing is how much I bring back with me to Standard Register, plenty of new practical knowledge but more importantly many new ideas and new relationships.

Chris Petro, Dscoop Global Chairman, and Dion Weisler, EVP of HP’s Printing and Personal Systems organization, a $60 billion annual revenue business that includes personal computers, mobility devices, technical workstations, printers, graphics solutions, managed-print services and internet services.

The theme this year was "Break the Mold", which is quite appropriate.  This event surely does break the mold of the industry user group, typical conference, greatest trade show and any educational program--  all in one fell swoop.  And though it's become quite large, it remains an intimate gathering for unquestionably the most forward looking print service providers and their trusted partners-- those who are breaking the mold of what being a printer means every day.  With close to 2,500 print professionals and a solution showcase populated by more than 100 of those aforementioned partners, you almost need not attend any other annual event.  I would probably scratch GraphExpo off my calendar this year, were it not for Dscoop and EDSF activities in Chicago. 

This photo does not do justice to how big the room was, and how many people were in it!

Over 100 incredibly valuable conference sessions! I understand almost half of the companies represented this year were first time attendees!  I personally met a handful of prospective Indigo owners, which was really cool... each of them expressed how surprised they were with the size and quality, saying it was not what they expected.  As someone who is closely involved with the event, and I've been drinking the Koolaid since my first attendance, it's unbelievably thrilling to hear this sort of thing from a first timer. And while the organization has gone global, we've hosted events in Europe and APAC, more than 33 countries from around the world were represented in the audience here in North America. It's beyond impressive. 

Rod Key

Before I continue let me take a moment and mention Rod Key, who passed unexpectedly on Sunday, January 19, 2014. Rod was the founder of R and R Images, which was acquired by Shutterfly just last year. A special memorial was held on the Wednesday before Dscoop9; then, at the start of the opening session of the conference, Rod's wife Patti (with son Austin and other family members looking on) was honored with a special new Rod Key Excellence in Marketing Award, which was created in his name by the board. 

To say he will be missed is an understatement.

To quote Dscoop Global Board Chairman Chris Petro: "Our hearts, love and prayers go out to his wife Patti, son Austin and all of Rod’s family, friends and colleagues.  For those in our community who had the honor of meeting or working with Rod, you understand the sense of loss of our dear friend; it is extremely difficult to accept. His commitment to Dscoop was unending and his passion for our industry, our organization and our teams was unwavering. Part of the original Board of Dscoop, Rod previously served as North America Conference Chair, Marketing Chair and led countless other successful efforts in our industry. Rod's passion and love for the Dscoop community personifies the essence and strength of what Dscoop is all about. His loss leaves a hole in our community that we will never be able to fill." 

In honor of Rod, the Electronic Document Systems Foundation (EDSF) created the Rod Key Memorial Scholarship. Rod’s family has asked that all donations be made to the scholarship fund. 

Keynotes

Jason Jennings is a researcher and one of the most successful and prolific business and leadership authors in the world and his greatest thrill is helping lead individuals and companies to their full economic potential.

Jason Jennings, New York Times best selling author of The Reinventors – How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change shared some great advice.

He and his team studied more than 40,000 companies and identified the ten most productive companies in the world for his bestselling, Less Is More. The book revealed the secrets of the world's most productive companies. His work continues, and he shared insight on companies like Ikea and Starbucks, focusing on the leadership qualities they embrace that have made them outstanding among the best global companies. One notable takeaway: adding Oatmeal brought Starbucks an additional $500 million in revenue, virtually overnight!

Our second Dscoop9 keynoter was Scott Stratten. He is the President of Un-Marketing. He is an expert in Viral, Social, and Authentic Marketing which he calls Un-Marketing. Scott says it is all about positioning yourself as a trusted expert in front of your target market, so when they have the need, they choose you.

Scott Stratten shared some truly useful insight into social media marketing, and entertained the heck out of the standing room only Dscoop9 crowd

Stratten claims to have over 165,000 people following his daily rantings on Twitter and was named one of the top 5 social media influencers in the world on Forbes.com. When he was introduced at the event, it was characterized as "150 followers", which gave him fodder for some self-effacing jokes! "Me and my 150 followers".  He has written three best-selling business books, the newest being “QR Codes Kill Kittens” a picture book for fed-up business people. Extreme common sense.  I've been ranting for years now about what a waste of space QR codes are, but Stratten articulates in a funny and effective way that I never could, while at the same time offering plenty of very positive advice about how to use new digital technologies. Scott made this video before his appearance at Dscoop9.

Exciting Machines, Software, Real World Examples and Sessions

I've got to nerd-out on the Operations track sessions for at least a moment here.  My fellow board member Ed Wiegand is Executive Vice President at the Matlet group. Ed, a former VP from P&G, and a guy from an MIS vendor did an amazing live demo printing Olympic personalized Old Spice labels (28 different countries) on an HP 20000 across town from the event at Matlet's location, and boxes for the bottles down on the show floor, all through through an Esko workflow.  Very cool.

Randy Bice, long time Dscooper, hailing from RPI in Seattle, Washington brought us a wonderful track on Lean Manufacturing for Digital Printing Operations. I'll tell you what, you have to love companies in the industry who are not afraid to admit they print things.

Jennifer Matt from Web To Print Experts, Inc, did a nice job on a session on the applications of the same name (Web2Print).  Just don't mention that name to customers, because they won't know what you are talking about-- absolutely true, thanks Jenni!  She also hosted two other important sessions that mixed technology and business topics. HP has installed something close to 90 Indigo 10000s, the B2 format press that leads the Generation 4 line up and is the result of a couple of billion dollars in R&D spending.  So it was only appropriate that Jim Hamilton from Infotrends led a panel of users featuring Sandy Alexander and the UK's Precision Litho. The discussion included the market and applications, as well as practical examples. 

So many more sessions to name, not enough time to write about them here. Perhaps I will add some notes over time.

Boxes awaiting die cutting after being printed on the Indigo 30000

I hate to go down the "it was the inket drupa" kind of thought process, but there certainly were some leanings toward this being the "label and packaging dscoop".  HP has a new machine, the Indigo 30000 that makes boxes. It was shown operating in North America for the first time at the event. In the closing session, Indigo GM Alon Bar-Shany mentioned he was heading to Cincinnati to visit Innovative Label Solutions (another of my board member colleagues Jay Dollries' company), where were installing a new Indigo 20000 right after Dscoop. There was a TON of supporting finishing equipment, both connected inline and scattered around the Solutions Showcase. We don't like to call it a trade show, but it did look a bit like one. Only better!

I got an incredible education on the state of the art in wide format Latex printing from one of the HP guys.  I was just walking by, admiring the output, and he gave me a wonderful education-- brought me right up to speed on this awesome technology, as well as on the market. That's the magic of the event, so much knowledge in the house, just unparalleled.

Near the area I would call "Indigo Alley", pictured here before the opening of the event, there was a showcase of some of the incredibly cool products members have made with Indigos.  My crappy iPhone camera cannot do these items justice.

Introducing Dscoop University!

Dscoop University, debuting at Dscoop9 exclusively for Dscoop members, provides industry-leading, personalized education focused on supporting business strategies and accelerating growth. The curriculum is tailored for specific job functions within member companies: business owners, sales and marketing professionals and operations and production team members.

At Dscoop9, the new initiative started out with a bang by introducing several instructor-led courses on the opening days of the event:  three in sales, three in business management and two operations management focused.  These 3-hour interactive workshops were totally awesome, featuring subject matter experts for each session, ranging from university professors to HP experts. 

John Tenwinkel, the full-time Director of Dscoop University was recently interviewed by Whattheythink.  Dscoop University offers 24/7 access to training, on-demand content, live-streaming and downloadable resources, and in-person courses. Dscoop attendee members were given significant credits so they could try classes online for free!

Other Important Stuff

Dscoop and HP jointly announced the “Tell Your Story Sales Program.” It's clear that many people on the buy side are living in a "5 years ago" mindset, and this new program creates a beautiful frame work for print service providers to help them learn about the new capabilities and extremely high quality now possible with digital. It's chock full of sales ideas and tools, over 100 digital assets, as well as videos and PowerPoints. 

Next Year!

This year marks the end of my tenure as chairman of the Technical Operations committee, which has been a fantastic experience. But I will continue to contribute to Dscoop's newsletter.

More exciting is that I've been chosen as a member of the Conference Committee for Dscoop10.  This premier event has a track record of getting bigger and better every year, but I can tell you the 10th anniversary is going to be something extra special!!  Join us March 5-7, 2015 in Washington DC!

If you can't wait that long, Dscoop Asia 2014 will be held June 12-13 in Bali, Indonesia!

Look forward to seeing you at Dscoop!

HP Graphic Arts Users Group, Dscoop

I just returned from Dscoop7 in Washington, DC. This was the 7th annual face-to-face meeting of the Digital Solutions Cooperative, founded in 2005. Dscoop is the independent global community of graphic arts business owners and technical professionals who use HP Indigo and Scitex equipment and related solutions. Dscoop7 had over 2,000 attendees and more than 150 sessions. More than 90 vendors showcased their solutions in addition to HP, and we also had a pre-conference program for graphic designers this year called DSee, which was wildly successful.

I'm proud to say that the Operations Committee (of which I am the incoming chairman) was responsible for a track of 10 sessions over 2 days, all of which were delivered to full house crowds! Kudos to Mike Blanco (with GPA), our outgoing chairman who led our group into the conference and Amy Biedenharn at Dscoop HQ, who facilities our every move.

I put together two sessions for this year's event. My first session was a "201-level" panel discussion called Fine Tuning Web-To-Print: Implementation and Operation. We realized going into the conference that a lot of technical and operations folks already know the basics of W2P, because these things are becoming part of how we all do business. A lot of companies now run more than one system or are in their second or third implementation.

So we put together a panel of experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities and talk about the nuts and bolts of such topics as storefronts, cross-media capabilities, e-commerce, workflow and business system integration, variable data printing and customization online, hosting decisions and more.

I wanted to have representatives of all the great Web-To-Print solutions present at the event. Logistically-speaking, it's awfully hard these days to get technical people from printing companies to commit to speaking at events. Thanks to Leslie Wengenroth at PageFlex, the well known VDP and storefront vendor, we got Paul O'Brien, CTO of Acculink, a leading-edge printer in Greenville, NC to join us. I managed to round up a nice cadre of technical people from most of the solutions present at Dscoop7: Alex Boissezon from Pixfizz; Chris Young from XMPie, a Xerox company; Greg Salzman- CEO of Aleyant Systems; Steven Enstad- one of the founders of PageDNA; and Becky Schick from HiFlex, now an HP company as a result of their recent acquisition.

There was a time in the not too distant past when a panel like this would have seen the vendors bickering over small points and vying for the microphone to get the last word in. This panel was nothing like that, in fact there was much agreement on many points, little contention. These companies all have powerful solutions: Paul and I as the users on the panel could easily see the value in each of their products and technologies. In the recent past, software vendors had more of the approach that the marketplace was a zero sum game, and to win you had to squash the competition. This isn't the case any longer. Today, you must pick and choose among solutions that fit your target customer and market, and they must work together. That was the overriding message of the session. I had 3 pages of "seed" questions I put together in advance with the help of the panel. I only made it through a handful. We had fantastic audience interaction, many great topics arose. The session could have continued for the entire afternoon if the time had been available!

The second session I presented was called Printing is Easy, Everything Else is Hard (Workflow Automation), and was somewhere in between introductory and 201 level. I partnered with Bill Weiners from Digital Lizard, who is a kindred spirit and well known in the group. Digital Lizard is owned by venerable Las Vegas offset printer Creel, and while smaller than Mimeo, Digital Lizard is very advanced from a technology standpoint-- and they own almost as many Indigo presses as we do! Like Mimeo, they produce both documents on demand as well as photo products.

The premise behind the session was that when you have powerful equipment on your floor, printing is the easy part. The hard part is getting the work from the customer onto the press, tracking it throughout the steps in your operation, getting it finished and out the door, finally delivered and billed. The solution for many of these challenges lies with advanced workflow automation.

Bill and I presented case studies of the way we do things at our respective companies. We talked about key building blocks for implementing solutions to help our attendees streamline their operation, while improving efficiency, quality and profitability. This session was in the last time slot of the event on a Saturday afternoon, and I am happy to report that the room was completely full. Bill and I can't take full credit for the topic or the speakers being such an exciting draw-- it's just as much a product of the fact that the Dscoop audience is definitely the best and brightest, and most dedicated, group of printers in the industry!

There were many, many other highlights at the the event. Notable among these, the introduction of new HP Indigo Presses, the Indigo 10000, Indigo 20000 and Indigo 30000 the "biggest" among them, in more ways than one-- these new machines can print in the popular 29" or B2 sizes, and applications include commercial printing, labeling and packaging. There were many other announcements, including software upgrades and new workflow solutions. HiFlex was highlighted in a couple of sessions, and in the solutions showcase. I will talk more about the software aspects in an upcoming post.

Keynote marketer Sally Hogshead provided an exciting and fun kickstart to the event. It's the first time I've seen a Keynote presenter at an industry conference do a shot on stage! HP Indigo GM Alon Bar-Shany, presented a fantastic "state of the industry" report, with terrific insight. Bar-Shany paints a very good picture for adopters of the technology, and HP Indigo as an organization is well positioned to help printers capitalize on the opportunities ahead. Along with all the data, Alon pointed out that Dscoop7 began on March 22nd, which was the 10th anniversary of HP's acquisition of Indigo. Resting on the laurels of the past 10 years is not in the cards, though, as the company charges forward!

Even though Dscoop7 has just ended, I'm already looking forward to Dscoop8 next February in Dallas, Texas!

(photo credit Bryan Yeager, Associate Director, Infotrends, from pre-Drupa festivities at HP in Israel the week prior to Dscoop7.)