How Automation Benefits Mimeo

Automation is critically important to what we do at Mimeo, and touches every aspect of a job—even when there are manual processes involved in producing parts of it.  The automation begins with the customer on our web site, and extends to the delivery of their job.

Automation delivers many features and benefits to them and to us.  Every document we produce originates as an order placed on our website. The customer brings their content and uses our interface to tell us how they want their print product produced— organizing the content, telling us what paper and binding they want, specifying finishing options like folding or covers.  As they create their piece on the screen, we show them exactly what it will look like, and provide them with their price in real time. 

Automation means the website can look at the choices they are making, and determine when we can produce the job, so we can tell them during the process “Submit this order by 10pm Eastern for delivery as early as 8:30AM tomorrow”, or conversely telling them that a particularly option they’ve chosen might take us an extra few hours to produce, so will not be able to be delivered until the next day.

When the order is placed, we already know how much it will cost to produce, and how much we’re selling it for.  We’ve often already collected the money.  The best part is: it automatically goes into production (although some jobs can be automatically routed to preflight or prepress, if necessary or desirable). In many cases, a job could literally appear on the workstation of a press operator seconds after the customer clicks. People throughout the organization have visibility of the job’s status at all times. Once printing is complete, the job moves through the plant for finishing, then on to shipping. 

Once the job is finished and shipped, a number of different groups throughout the company take advantage of the data we’ve collected about the job and our performance to make decisions and continuously improve our products and operations.

drupa every 4 years, but always once in a lifetime

I returned from spending a week in Germany at the every-four-years drupa trade printing and paper trade fair.  I was there with HP and  Dscoop. We had more than 1,000 Dscoop members present at the fair. HP played an amazing host and kept us busy with events and tours throughout the week.  They were showcasing several new presses including their new B2 presses, the 10,000 20,000 and 30,000, to which our group had been introduced in March at the Dscoop7 conference in Washington, DC (see previous post here.)

Here's a quick video from Whatheythink.com that editor Cary Sherburne and I shot while I was at the show.

This show always surprises, and this time around was no exception. I saw a tremendous amount of exciting technology, and had a lot of really great conversations with industry colleagues.  I am hoping to take a few minutes next week to catalog some of what I brought back from the show next week.

The Era of the Hard Drive in the Sky has Begun!

Yesterday, Google announced Google Drive, a cloud storage system that is among the most anticipated features of any software system, ever. Industry analysts, pundits and gadflies have been predicting the eventuality of this capability for years. In it's initial launch incarnation, Google drive is simple to install and easy to use, and as far as I'm concerned, totally lives up to the expectations built-up around it! Out of the gate, anyone who signs up gets 5GB of online storage for free. Upgrade to 20gb, 100gb or even a terabyte for very affordable incremental fees. It makes storing files to the cloud and syncing them among multiple devices seamless (PCs, Macintosh and Android Smartphones today, Apple iOS and other OS/devices later). Google Drive acts just like another drive on Windows or the Mac. You can copy or move files to it, and even create new files and folders in it. I installed it on my Macintosh first, and when I logged in, I just saw all my Google Docs files in a native OS window on my MacBook Air. It could not have been simpler.

The timing of the Google announcement may have been planned to steal the thunder of a Microsoft announcement only two days earlier-- of a similar solution, the new version of SkyDrive, which gives MSFT a competitive offering in the cloud storage arena. Notable in the announcement are new storage applications, new support for devices running Mac OS X Lion and iOS, as well as support for Windows phones. SkyDrive automatically synchronizes the devices to which it is connected. Files and folders are organized in SkyDrive in the same manner to which we've all become accustomed on our local devices.

While Google and Microsoft are well-known as rivals to one another, they are both equally wary of startups who might come along and eat their lunch. In this case, those companies are Dropbox and to a lesser extent Box (formerly box.net). Dropbox was founded in 2007, and has a good head start on both of the (in the case of MSFT relatively) new competitors. Dropbox has more than 25 million people using the service, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, as well as with mobile apps on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Drew Houston, Dropbox's Co-Founder and CEO, upon hearing the announcement of Google Drive, tweeted, "In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine." I'm not sure if this response is hubris or real fear. Prior to the announcement, Dropbox's private company valuation was speculated to be about $4 Billion. It remains to be seen if it can maintain that sky high valuation in light of the fact that two of the biggest tech companies in the world just came out with respective "features" that come close to duplicating Dropbox's entire business. That is sort of the key: for MSFT and Google, this is a feature among many thousands of other features, not the whole company or even the most important part. On the flip side, though, Dropbox has been expecting this kind of competition for a long, long time. Now its here and it is formidable. For example, Google Drive's pricing is roughly 1/4 of Dropbox's pricing today. That could dramatically change the game, in terms of acquisition of customers for Google, and loss of revenue for Dropbox. Furthermore, the integration between Google Drive and Google Apps, though a bit minimalistic today, is already very useful for companies like my own who have been using Google Apps almost exclusively for the last couple of years.

For consumers of this technology, it's going to be exciting to watch this competition between industry giants. In addition to simple storage and backup in the cloud, these services offer great collaboration and sharing possibilities-- both intracompany and between companies. It's hard to believe that in this day and age high-tech companies would still be using technologies like FTP to share files, but they are. Replacing such primitive services with these new technologies is good for everyone-- the creator, the user, the printer, the IT guys, everyone. With the large files we consume daily in the graphic arts industry, these services offer a really affordable and easy to use alternative to old fashioned, error-prone methods that our customers don't want to understand and shouldn't have to!

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.)

64th TAGA Annual Technical Conference

It’s hard to say “there’s something for everything” about the TAGA Annual Technical Conference, the global graphics arts industries’ most elite technical conference. It’s specifically NOT for everyone—unless you are an academic, engineer, scientist, or technical practitioner of printing. In which case you will certainly find things that you need to know being discussed at this year’s 64th annual event, to be held in Jacksonville, Florida, on March 18-21. If you are a CEO, COO or Owner of a printing company or industry equipment or software manufacturer, I would strongly advise that you send a couple of your key technical people. I’ll explain why.

My personal involvement in the industry is in the creation of software for printing applications, and there are always a few great talks on this topic. But for me, what I find incredibly invigorating about TAGA is the fact that there are so many topics discussed that I am not directly engaged in as a professional. These topics are as far ranging as ink, paper, mechanical engineering, chemistry, physics, photography, light—but not limited to these. In fact, there are almost no limits. The result for me has been broadened horizons—I learn what I don’t know, and approach problems I face in my work with a new perspective.

The keynotes this year include some of the most interesting leaders from some of the most exciting companies in the graphic communications business today. Starting with Marc Olin of EFI, who has been travelling the world buying up printing-related software companies while other former industry leaders are suffering, to Mike Puyot from Memjet, a company which is finally shipping product via OEMs and is poised to dramatically change everyone’s business, after existing as a virtual “urban legend” for almost 10 years! These are followed by the most complete, robust technical program available this year at any conference in the industry.

One of the coolest things about TAGA is the questions from the audience after the presentations. As you can imagine with a group of this make up, there are many opinions and TAGA encourages an intellectually charged environment. There are no assumptions, and this is not a love-in where PR rules-- people are often challenged on the statements they make from the dais. It’s exciting!

Another really important aspect of the event is the student chapter participation, and the annual student competitions. To the printing company owner: here is the most important reason for you to send you top technical stakeholder or two to TAGA: recruiting. Plug your company into the top printing schools in the WORLD—Cal Poly SLO, Clemson, RIT, Western Michigan, as well as Ryerson in Canada, and leading global schools Grenoble Institute of Technology in France, and Linköping University in Sweden, to name just a few. They will be sending teams of their best students (usually Juniors and Seniors, who will soon be looking for a career position) to compete for awards in our annual technical competitions.

The program includes talks from some of the recipients of the Printing Industries of America’s prestigious Intertech Awards, an opportunity to learn about some of the industry’s latest and most advanced, game-changing commercial product developments.

Beyond all the important content, there is the “real world” social platform as well-- the three day conference is loaded with great networking opportunities, including luncheons, the association’s annual business meeting, and a gala awards banquet. TAGA’s annual event has been a “can’t miss” for the industry’s tech community for a long time, and I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t attended in the past to make it a new annual tradition. There is still time to register and attend, visit TAGA's Web Site.

State of Print and the Cloud

Looking forward in 2012, there will be exciting developments in Cloud printing. We will assuredly see advances in all the topic areas and from all the technology companies we've covered here, including Apple, Google, HP, and the graphic arts industry suppliers.

Beyond the constantly forward-looking technology components, the business of print in general continues its transition. Business models are blurring. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and commercial Print Service Providers (PSPs) are competing for the same work in many cases. MSPs want to gain share at the expense of PSPs, and vice versa. In speaking to many document owners in large corporations, even at companies that own their own production operations, I hear people looking for additional, better options.

I've said for some time that customers impatience is growing. This is manifested by their restlessness with the status quo of how printing operations do business. Digital media, and Web2.0 applications, have hurt how print is perceived. People expect the same sort of experience working with print manufacturing operations online that they get from everything else in their digital sphere. Instead, in many cases, doing business with printing companies is like going back to the 1970s, not in a fun and nostalgic way, but instead in a complicated, frustrated, primitive and time consuming way.

Another thing that has happened lately is that some what were "hottest" technologies for print have become obsolete without ever achieving critical mass. One big example that is becoming more apparent every day is 1:1 personalization in print, a technology and application that has struggled along for many years, now appears to be all but dead. Many things led to this death, for example, people realized that the worst time to sell something to someone is when they are reading a bill (causing the death of TransPromo). But the main things killing off 1:1 VDP are Google and Facebook. Print personalization never had access to platforms like these, rich with the data necessary to effectively target users with personalization-- and now never will. And even if we somehow obtain access now, the speed at which we can deliver the message is so slow, it's likely to be at worst completely irrelevant when it gets to its recipient, and at best, old news. Another example in "big iron" is the direct, on press imaging, or "DI" presses. There are just few applications for these niche technologies, you've got to ask yourself, is it worth it?

An example of how fast things are changing in the hardcopy world can be found in the everyday lives of those of who spend a lot of time on airplanes. One of the main drivers behind development of early Cloud Printing platforms, like EFI PrintMe was airline boarding passes. How ironic is it that at virtually the exact moment in time when most hotels now have free access to workstations and printers for you to print your boarding pass, you no longer need a physical boarding pass because you can use your smartphone.

We have a big year ahead of us. A series of upcoming events will shed great light on what our industry is going to look like in our near future. First, PODi, in January-- what will they talk about, now that 1:1 is dead? We shall see. I'm guessing "becoming a Marketing Service Provider (MSP)" will be a key topic. The Automated Solutions Network of the Printing Industries of America will feature a tour of Mimeo's Automated Document Factory in Memphis and a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Fedex global hub, on January 31st. Automation needs to be a mantra in this industry, especially at a time when communicators in corporate America can go online and get their message out almost for free, in a split second. Vision 3 Summit, in February, where there is bound to much hand wringing regarding the number of business closures and "unforeseen" mergers going on in the business. I bet some deals will be done there! V3 will also no doubt see pundits telling the audience members to become Marketing Service Providers (MSPs)-- all you printers out there, let's cheer them on and while they are busy trying to compete with Facebook, Google and Groupon, we'll print all the stuff their customers used to print with them!

Moving on to more positive territory, the 64th Annual TAGA Conference will be held in Jacksonville in the middle of March, showcasing the industry's future through it's student competition, along with the industry's best and brightest scientists and academics. Immediately following that same week, DSCOOP7 will be held in Washington, DC, and is certain to be one of the most exciting events of the year. Drupa, the international trade fair in Germany, begins on May 3rd, and I think this year the most interesting stuff will be everything that is NOT a printing press(which is not to say there won't be exciting printing presses there.)

Then it's time to come home and execute on everything we've all learned. Stay tuned for more developments as these trends unfold.

BERG Cloud revitalizes the whole idea of printing with Little Printer

BERG, a design studio in London, UK, is focused on product invention. For the last year or so, they've been working on a new concept they call Berg Cloud. BERG Cloud is their technology to "move the smarts" of (apparently physical) products onto the internet. On their website, you'll read a bunch of grandiose statements about their plans for BERG Cloud, but meanwhile, the exciting announcement they shared is about a product called Little Printer, which is just that-- and they say is the first of a family of connected products for the home.

Little Printer is an adorable inkless thermal printer in a tiny box that "lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf". The software in the BERG Cloud apparently assembling content you've told it to care about into pre-designated deliveries/outputs.

On BERG Cloud's site, you'll see plenty of mobile phone screens showing how you configure Little Printer from your phone. The company has built a network of content partners for their launch, including companies like Arup, foursquare, Google, the Guardian, and Nike.



My favorite part of the whole announcement is this statement:

"Paper is like a screen that never turns off. You can stick to the fridge or tuck it in your wallet. You can scribble on it or tear it and give it to a friend."

Excitement about print. That's not something we hear much these days, is it? In several years of trying, the Print Council hasn't come up with a statement that cool. Making a favorable comparison of Print to a screen, in an awesomely positive way.

There are a lot of applications for this, which is actually somewhat surprising since this the printed form factor is pretty much a cash register tape! Some of the applications shown by BERG are a tiny bit unlikely-- like a "to do" being put into a wallet. Why would you need a printed to-do list when you have a smart phone? (Which, presumably you have, since you used it to configure the Little Printer.)



Others are great, though, like the idea of printing out a slip for a workout or run, and taking that with you-- I, for one, never take a wallet or a phone with me when I'm working out. I know too many people who have dropped their iPhone while exercising, nightmare. Grocery list is another example. I have used an App for it, but it's cumbersome. Right now, I write down my list and give it to one of my kids who reads it to me while we shop. A little printed reminder is extremely useful sometimes.

Much bigger companies like HP have been trying to print news on personal printers for years now, including with the recent HP ePrint initiative. The jury is still out on whether anyone wants to do this (at all), let alone whether someone will want to do it on a cash register tape! In any case, though, I am a big fan of a Little Printer.

Little Printer is a "small thing", but it is a big idea. And it is super cool. I'm going to buy one just to support their energy, and I hope 2012 brings much more exciting innovation to print in a variety of shapes and sizes!