Our own Raymond Duval, VP Sales, Americas, EMEA & Japan, visited dscoop Edge Rockies and had a short, but very interesting, interview with INKISHTV.
Q:
One of the challenges that I know faces every software implementation is organizing the company to be able to be successful. What is Ultimate TechnoGraphics role in helping them get organized to get the most benefit out of your product?
RD: First thing is to listen to their actual state. How they are automated, where they want to go with their automation and the segment of the industry they play with; digital, digital cut-sheet, continues feed, offset, large format. Once we understand their challenges, where they are today and where they want to go, we have the technology, we have the knowledge to bring them to the state where they can automate prepress, they can automate printing and they can automate bindery, postpress, to bring everything together and then eventually get the data back even to a dashboard, a crm, an ERP system to get their status, their data, what’s happening in production, all automatically.
Q:
When you’re doing that, what kind of staff is requiered by the printer, to be able to implement these things?
RD: Well, I have a personal way of approaching this. I used to say if you apprach it the Gutenberg way or if you are approaching this the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs way, these are two different Worlds. So we actually need the IT team(s), we need prepress team(s), we need operational team(s) to really bring us to where they are at today. Because the considerations are not just about the craftmanship and how good printing finishing materials will be. It’s about ‘How do we get the jobs in?’, ‘How do we produce them automatically?’, ‘How do I get my bindery, my finished products, produced automatically?’
So you need a lot of teams inside a customer customer to bring all this together.
Q:
One of the things that your solution does, is make the company more efficient and that’s a benefit to the client. How do you explain to the sales staff so they can express what that value is to their client base?
RD: We tell them to listen, you know in sales right, the key thing is to listen. The customer has a lot of information where their pain points are and what they want to achieve at the end of the day. ‘Is it about increasing speed to produce more short run jobs?, ‘Is it about bringing together bindery operations, so they don’t have to be dependent on people that they can’t find, they can’t hire enough good people to operate bindery equipment?’
Once they listen to those pain points they can bring the technology that we offer, the knowledge that we offer, to combine with everything the customer has and just glue everything together to be automated.