Jennifer Matt is the managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Print Software section as well as President of Web2Print Experts, Inc. a technology-independent print software consulting firm helping printers with web-to-print and print MIS solutions.
Displaying 1-99 of 489 articles
Published April 19, 2023
A CRM tool needs to deliver value to your sales team in the form of time savings or differentiation in how fast they can get quotes out to their customers.
Published March 29, 2023
When the power dynamic is uneven across the functional areas of your print business, more powerful areas (production and sales) tend to shift manual steps to the less powerful areas (customer service).
Published March 15, 2023
We tend to discount the time of our full-time employees because we are paying for it already—looking at them like sunk costs. So, when we ask them to do things that are non-value add (aka a complete waste of their time), we don’t see it as a cost. Well, it has real costs.
Published March 1, 2023
In a print plant, it is easy to come to work and fall into the drama of getting jobs out the door. There is always something you can focus on in your day-to-day work life. The art of moving your business forward happens when you direct your focus to areas of your business that you can impact the most.
Published February 15, 2023
In conversations with a label converter recently, the General Manager told me that more than once in the last few years key employees had voiced the core belief that “this plant wouldn’t run without me.” Now, you can take this statement a lot of different ways. My initial reaction is concern for the business because the employee that says this is both likely a key player and potentially a risk.
Published February 1, 2023
Printers are complaining of the lack of qualified candidates and a higher-than-expected amount of turnover. While this section of WhatTheyThink is titled Software, the focus is often more on people than software. After all, people are what make your software investments' ROI. Software is simply potential.
Published January 18, 2023
A Print MIS/ERP purchase is an event; the journey is where actual differentiation takes place.
Published January 4, 2023
Optimization efforts can often result in generalized approaches that miss the mark of delivering what each customer needs, when they need it, based on their specific business needs.
Published December 14, 2022
More software systems create more complexity, which creates more overhead in your business. Choose wisely based on the realistic and mandatory feature sets required to run your business.
Published December 7, 2022
A willingness to learn can be greatly enhanced by creating a safe environment for mistakes to happen. Documented processes are a tool that removes shame and blame from work mistakes and helps the organization get better.
Published November 30, 2022
Diving into your business to mine ROI out of your processes is best done with your ears and your eyes. Observe and listen to how the processes are being managed today, then step back and choose the challenges that return the most ROI for your business.
Published November 16, 2022
Solving challenges in your print business that involve your software solutions can be tricky because your team has a strong bias to how you are currently working and generally no experience of how other companies are utilizing the software.
Published November 9, 2022
You can’t buy software like a press. It must keep moving with the technology infrastructure, the market, and your business. SaaS is a subscription model that better matches the reality of the way you need software to keep evolving.
Published November 2, 2022
Issues arise whenever you’re trying to work with a team. Do you have a safe and consistent method for identifying issues and processing them so that your business can stay in alignment?
Published October 26, 2022
The print industry has focused on diversification on the production floor (e.g., digital, offset, oversized, flexo, web, etc.). It’s time to look at diversification in your sales channels—how you get new customers.
Published October 19, 2022
Transforming your business can happen incrementally by looking at the daily workflows you execute on and finding areas of improvement. New software tools are a great time to transform your workflows.
Published October 12, 2022
The building of integrated workflows continues to get more complex and require more, not less, vendors. Your decision-making approach must be balanced between solving specific needs and integration up and downstream.
Published October 5, 2022
Change can be difficult. You can make it a little easier by dividing up the constituents and hearing from their unique perspectives, basically giving them the airtime they deserve.
Published September 28, 2022
You have change agents: they are your sales team. A group of people who are selling change every day. Use that team to help sell internal change whenever possible.
Published September 21, 2022
Your customers require selling even after they are customers. The selling comes in the form of encouraging them to engage with you in a way that is both convenient for them and improves the outcomes of your workflows.
Published September 14, 2022
Process or workflow documentation sounds like something only for very large bureaucratic corporations. This is not true. The smallest companies can benefit from process improvement. Your business is a series of processes that are repeated over and over.
Published September 7, 2022
Physical foundation has been our collective focus for decades. The print industry creates physical products using physical machines. Digital foundation is our new differentiator: data and systems create new business opportunities and enable you to run your business more efficiently.
Published August 31, 2022
The software demo is typically a key to the decision-making part of the sales process. Your definition of your core challenges before the demo can greatly influence ROI outcomes in the future.
Published August 24, 2022
You run a print factory, you have an assembly line—find the critical path, then find what’s standing between you and your cash flow. Don’t be surprised if it's way upstream of your press.
Published August 17, 2022
Print MIS/ERP systems are a favorite thing to complain about and be frustrated with. This week I am trying to do the impossible: get you to double down on the Print MIS/ERP you currently own instead of throwing it out and starting over.
Published August 10, 2022
Doing a little more work on feature requests can have an oversized impact on the likelihood of getting into a product roadmap.
Published August 3, 2022
There are a lot of differences among the different demographic groups in the labor force colliding right now in your print business. The most critical for your business is both the access to technology throughout their lifetimes and the rate of change of technology in their lifetimes.
Published July 27, 2022
The production floor was the centerpiece of print businesses for decades. It determined so much about your business. Capacity, capability, and deliverability times were all dictated by your equipment mix. Today the focus is turning to what customer challenges you can solve in front of the press.
Published July 20, 2022
A competitive differentiation is when you’re doing something that your prospect finds valuable that your competitors are not doing.
Published July 13, 2022
Labor is forcing us to scale in innovative ways. No more “throwing more people” at every scale problem, it's time to optimize so that you can continue to grow with the team you have.
Published June 29, 2022
Look at everything as a project and you will find that you need to define everything a lot better. Goals, roles, and constraints get confused with most project and that causes a lot of project failure.
Published June 22, 2022
Evaluating and buying software can be overwhelming, especially if the software segment is mature and therefore has hundreds of features to it. It is hard to keep track of which solution has which features, let alone evaluating if they will work in your environment.
Published June 15, 2022
Total automation is a common dream in the print industry (a custom manufacturing industry where the customer provides a key part of the manufacturing process at the time of purchase!). There are dreams and there is the reality of what is operationally possible with your business (a collection of constraints).
Published June 8, 2022
Allowing a remote workforce can improve your talent pool as well as force you into fixing your manual process habits.
Published May 25, 2022
The way you’ve always done it vs. the innovations currently available in the marketplace, mostly in the form of software, can create a lot of tension in your business. Mutual respect for both perspectives is the key to better outcomes.
Published May 18, 2022
Commitments are hard. The sales process for print software is like dating. Everyone is full of positive hormones about potential. Then salespeople step away and the implementation begins. It gets hard. It doesn’t go back to the honeymoon phase—ever.
Published May 11, 2022
Being good at one thing doesn’t make you an expert at everything. Expertise is limited because time is limited, and change is unlimited. Understand what you have expertise in and then respect the expertise of others as a way to optimize your business.
Published May 4, 2022
We all know our businesses have lots of room for improvement, yet when faced with change we often have an unreasonably fierce attachment to the status quo. This happens in every business and leadership is the only anecdote. In this time of tremendous change, it is critical to apply leadership to overcoming your employee’s fierce attachment to the status quo.
Published April 27, 2022
Real change, real business value comes in the form of process improvement. It is incremental vs. revolutionary. Remember, change is often limited by the pace in which the people working in your organization can digest it. Incremental change often takes root, revolutionary change faces fierce resistance and often gets fully rejected by it.
Published April 20, 2022
Inflexibility is what causes most of the headaches with print software. When your business doesn’t flex, you are at the mercy of software vendors and their commercial print software solutions.
Published April 6, 2022
Constraints have always been present in our print businesses. Today, new ones seem to be getting introduced at what can feel like an alarming rate. Understanding how you can put you and your business in a position to respond to new constraints is the differentiator.
Published March 29, 2022
Jennifer Matt takes an in-depth look at PressWise by SmartSoft, a print MIS built simply as a system to remove touchpoints in a digital printing workflow.
Published March 23, 2022
When I think about operations in a print business, I think about the end-to-end business process “order entry to invoice.” The operations of getting jobs out the door and cash in the bank as another way to put it. This business process encompasses a lot of different functional areas of your business, many people, and a handful of software technologies.
Published March 16, 2022
There is much in your control when it comes to choosing the right print software package for your business. It has nothing to do with counting features. It has everything to do with your approach to engaging with the vendor, learning from other printers who already have the solution, and choosing your team wisely.
Published March 2, 2022
When you move to integrating with software systems external to your business (e.g. at your customers or your suppliers), it’s time to think about your integration strategy or architecture. You can waste a lot of time and money redoing the same thing repeatedly or you can have a strategy that simplifies how you interact with external systems and reuse components each time.
Published February 23, 2022
Don’t delude yourself into thinking measuring more metrics in your company will magically fix broken processes. Measuring more doesn’t fix things, it simply identifies that there are more problems to fix.
Published February 16, 2022
We’ll never go back to a preset “normal.” No matter what change happens, there is always this collective delusion that things will return back to a previous state. When COVID started, I admittedly thought we would be sheltering in the place for a few weeks. We are now so far past a few weeks and so far away from a pre-COVID normal, it's hard to even remember what that felt like.
Published February 9, 2022
The Print MIS/ERP administrator role in your print business is a strategic differentiator. You want as much independence and ability to move at your own pace as possible from the software vendor.
Published February 2, 2022
I feel a little like a broken record regarding the importance of data integrity in your Print MIS/ERP. It seems like I write an article about it a couple times a year. It isn’t getting any better out there and it’s only getting more important to your print business’s ability to profitably scale and innovate.
Published January 26, 2022
Self-service is a strategic move. It takes leadership. The status quo is a powerful resistance machine which should not be underestimated.
Published January 19, 2022
Using a software support desk is not anyone’s favorite activity. You have more control than you think over your ability to get what you need via your software vendors support desks.
Published January 12, 2022
Business processes controlled via trusted software systems are the best defense against the ever-tightening labor market.
Published January 5, 2022
Automation is about finding recurring patterns and then taking them out of the hands of humans and into the realm of software so that repetitive tasks can be done programmatically—and “programmatically” automating anything in your business will inevitably involve your Print MIS.
Published December 15, 2021
The default approach to working is to just show up and respond to inputs. But what’s the non-default approach to work? Goal setting, which is more important than ever because we’re all drowning in our inputs. Prioritization is critical and goals help us prioritize.
Published December 8, 2021
Teamwork can be a differentiator for recruiting and hiring in a tough labor market. Technology can help set up the conditions (trust and transparency) that make teamwork possible.
Published December 1, 2021
You can’t learn a Print MIS system by calling the support desk. One ticket at a time is not an ideal learning environment. Internal expertise and the ability to optimize your print software investments delivers value directly to your bottom line.
Published November 10, 2021
Jennifer Matt takes an in-depth look at Canon’s PRISMAprepare Go pre-production workflow solution that can be deployed and optimized in a small print facility whose primary business is processing small “upload and print” orders.
Published November 3, 2021
Sometimes the way you’ve been managing your core business data in your Print MIS/ERP is fundamentally broken. This has a ripple effect across your business, so it’s worth the effort to clean it up. Stop ignoring the crack in your business foundation.
Published October 27, 2021
Your existing technology stack should be one of the most important factors in making decisions about new software solutions and new automation projects.
Published October 20, 2021
“Must-have” features typically are not worthy of holding up a launch or delaying the utilization of software. The best way to assess the importance of features is to start using the software, then you stop assessing “theoretical” importance.
Published October 13, 2021
Jennifer Matt takes an in-depth look at Print Reach’s MyOrderDesk, a product that has not only stood the test of time but has now become a foundation block in Print Reach’s automation strategy, with a feature set that clearly reflects a product that has evolved with the times and continues down that path.
Published October 6, 2021
You can use software as it was designed, or you can stand your ground and request workarounds to force the software to work like you do today. Your flexibility has a greater impact on your business outcomes. Using that flexibility to optimize software utilization is the most powerful lever in your toolbox.
Published September 29, 2021
Automation is about changing a business process. Focus on the business process, involve the people operating the business process today. Keep full automation as a goal, drive incremental improvement as the strategy.
Published September 22, 2021
Self-service is an unsettling concept in the traditional business-to-business print world where growth is achieved by pivoting on every custom request from your customers. Online, self-service businesses embrace constraints and reap the benefits in their bottom line.
Published September 15, 2021
Jennifer Matt takes an in-depth look at Liftoff, not a traditional web-to-print solution, but one that has expanded its feature set into other software areas (e.g., CMS, ERP). For example, the Liftoff product suite allows you to create content like blogs on your web-to-print solution.
Published September 8, 2021
Sales is being reinvented in the age of self-service. When the customer can make a buying decision without parental supervision (aka a sales representative), you can turn marketing into a sales engine.
Published September 1, 2021
When you lose a press operator, you know what to do. What happens when you lose your Print MIS administrator?
Published August 25, 2021
Launching a new way of interacting with our customers can be scary. It is also the best way to learn how to iterate the solution going forward. The sooner you realize you don’t know how your customers are going to utilize new tools, the better for your business. It makes you a better listener and helps your customers feel heard.
Published August 18, 2021
The products we produce are on paper, so paper is part of our business. Yet we need to break our attachment to the analog (paper) as a tool for running a dynamic custom manufacturing business.
Published August 11, 2021
Projects like a Print MIS/ERP transition always create resistance to change. The most common resistance to change is fear but it generally is disguised under a barrage of logical objections.
Published August 4, 2021
Automation is the sexy sales and marketing term. Process improvement is where the magic happens. Keep your reality hat on and think about automation at the discrete task level of your business process.
Published July 28, 2021
Constraints are real. You can feel limited by them or you can decide to work with them in a way to maximize your results. No business is without constraints. With print software, humans and existing software are critical constraints to embrace.
Published July 21, 2021
Being busy doesn’t equate to business success. Is your busy-ness leading you in the right direction? Or are you being led by your inputs? Prioritization takes uninterrupted time and discipline, it results in your activities having strategic direction.
Published July 14, 2021
This Print Software Product Spotlight looks at EFI’s Midmarket Suite. EFI’s “suite” approach to software solutions essentially pre-packages a group of products that already work together to solve end-to-end workflows.
Published June 30, 2021
A strategic feature of software is a value driver that generally has prerequisites in order to reap the benefits of the feature. The sales process generally skips the prerequisites (for obvious reasons). It is your responsibility as the buyer to understand precisely what it will take to reach the potential.
Published June 24, 2021
Lift Software Print MIS/ERP was invented inside a large wide format printer. That alone will tell you a lot about how Lift perceived the challenges of running a print business. For most Print MIS solutions, supporting wide format has been an add-on to a more traditionally focused offset or digital print manufacturing focus. For Lift it is clearly a deep specialty.
Published June 16, 2021
Software has evolved to allow automation with developers. Print businesses can take advantage of this if they invest in technical leadership and give them a seat at the decision-making table.
Published June 9, 2021
The documentation of your repeating processes will change your business in so many ways. No matter how inefficient you might be today, the simple act of documenting processes and committing to iterative improvements will turn your business into a continuous improvement engine.
Published June 2, 2021
Software solutions have features that overlap and are outright solving the exact same issues. Just be careful of the tendency to assume that a small feature means more than it really does. Be wary of where the feature gets done in your workflows.
Published May 26, 2021
Lots of activity, little in the way of results is often the situation when your culture jumps to solutions without defining the problem first. Pause, say the problem out loud. Ask others to say it in their own words. Don’t move to the “how” until you all agree on the “what.”
Published May 19, 2021
Who is in charge of your print software solutions? The small step of simply assigning an individual goes a long way towards truly owning the software tools that run your business.
Published May 12, 2021
The PrintVis Print MIS/ERP is an offering that combines a globally recognized ERP system from Microsoft (Dynamics 365 Business Central), with the print industry specific addon from PrintVis, and in this article we’re featuring Sabre Limited as the implementation partner.
Published May 5, 2021
Where are you headed? What is your strategic goal? Then who is going to execute on all the tasks required to reach that goal. Strategy + execution plays a part in almost every project you take on in your business—especially print software projects.
Published April 28, 2021
Training is not learning. Training is something you hire other people to do to you. Learning is something that you do. Start building a learning culture now in your print business; it is the only defense to the acceleration of change in our industry.
Published April 21, 2021
The integrity of your print business data is a foundational building block of your business. It impacts how fast you can move. Lack of data integrity is like an anchor your business has to drag around—it slows almost every aspect of your business down.
Published April 14, 2021
Replacing your Print MIS might be one of the most important projects you take on in the history of your business. Shopping is not the first step. Assessing your data and your processes is ideally done before you start interacting with software sales representatives.
Published April 7, 2021
Laggards are people in your company who have stopped learning and actually insist on doing their job in the same way they have been doing it, and for one reason: it’s the way they’ve been doing it. Investing in your laggards to drive software utilization is a good investment.
Published March 24, 2021
You getting paid is as much a part of your customer’s experience as placing the order. Make every effort to streamline how much customer time you consume. A vendor that is easy to do business with creates loyal customers.
Published March 17, 2021
You can’t start printing until you have approved artwork, but you don’t have complete control over this step in the process. You can optimize your press and finishing processes down to the second, yet you might wait three full days for artwork approval. The best you can do is make it as easy as possible for the customer to respond in a timely manner. Don’t confuse them, don’t make them work, and don’t underestimate convenience.
Published March 10, 2021
How are orders managed before they hit the press? In this third part of a five-part series, Jennifer Matt defines the complete order process from initial inquiry to invoice payment. This means a great deal of the process happens in the carpeted area of your print business.
Published March 3, 2021
Think about your front office in terms of what “objects'' you need to manage there. In part 2 of a five-part series, we discuss customers and prospects. This means tracking sales activities and inserting more valuable information (both quantitative and qualitative) into your Print MIS regarding your customers.
Published February 24, 2021
This article, the first of a five-part series on the modernization of your print business front office, starts with some guiding principles and then discuss the various “objects” that are managed by the carpeted area of your plant.
Published February 17, 2021
If you run a print manufacturing business, chances are you should invest in a print-specific MIS/ERP solution. However, proceed carefully if you insist on adopting a generic MIS/ERP software solution. Don’t get caught up in paying for customizations that are expected features for a print business.
Published February 10, 2021
Technical skills are important in every functional area of your print business and sales is no exception. Every salesperson needs to be able to calmly and strategically uncover business challenges and communicate these challenges to your technical resources without limiting potential solutions or setting unreasonable expectations with the customer.
Published February 3, 2021
Working from home, data as an asset, and automation: three business trends and their specific impact on print businesses.
Published January 27, 2021
Understanding your customer segmentation and even more importantly the “jobs” the printed products do for your customers can help you better target your sales efforts. Diversity is a hedge against catastrophic market segment collapse (another lesson of COVID-19).
Published January 20, 2021
Feature requests are popular. The default response to new software to ask for it to be changed to fit the way you specifically think it should fit into your specific environment. “Change your processes to optimize your use of the software” is the one statement that would save the print industry millions of dollars.
Published January 13, 2021
The printing industry is becoming more dynamic—not just as it relates to COVID-19 but in general. Everything is moving and increasing in velocity. Our ability to thrive in this environment requires a dynamic business approach, one that is characterized by constant change. A business must adjust according to its current conditions. This is a path to systemizing a dynamic business, one that is characterized by constant change—but a constant change that doesn’t leave your people behind.
Published January 6, 2021
Integrate with your customers’ systems so that your technologies have relationships just like your people have relationships. The more ties that bind you and your customers together, the less likely you will divorce!
Published December 16, 2020
Selling during the pandemic is like selling during a widespread economic downturn. You have to figure out the market segments who are least impacted or, in COVID-19’s case. find the companies who are positively impacted. Directing your sales efforts is critical to closing new business.
Published December 9, 2020
The future of your customer service department still involves skilled labor. In fact, the labor is more skilled than it is today and it will be able to handle more volume because of the self-service tools your customers will have access to. Customer service will turn into customer success—a proactive element to drive more business and maintain loyalty thru convenience.
Published December 8, 2020
WhatTheyThink Print Software section editor Jennifer Matt looks back at the year 2020 in software, some of the trends that emerged from the pandemic, and how software has become an important element in helping print companies adapt and pivot.
Published December 2, 2020
Humans resist change, even when it provides them real value. If you need a group of humans to change, you have to think about your approach in order to optimize the outcomes. This applies to your existing customers and how they engage with your business.
Published November 11, 2020
Selling during the pandemic is like selling during a widespread economic downturn. You have to figure out the market segments that are least impacted or, in COVID-19’s case, find the companies that are positively impacted. Directing your sales efforts is critical to closing new business.
Published November 4, 2020
A crisis is also an opportunity, and COVID-19 is no exception. The rate of adaptation taking place is one of the most powerful forces at play in 2020. Entire populations are expanding their comfort zones with online tools, remote learning, and working from home.
Published October 28, 2020
Your business processes need to move off of paper and into software. This was important before COVID-19, and like everything else, COVID-19 has simply accelerated this trend. Paper is no longer a viable business process medium.
Published October 21, 2020
Sales is never going back to normal. The pandemic didn’t create anything new—it simply accelerated what was already happening. Evolve your sales team now; donuts and face to face meetings aren’t coming back.
Published October 14, 2020
Most web-to-print software solutions are built inside software companies. Propago was built inside a large commercial printer. This is a unique origin story for a software platform and it tells us a lot about how and why features made it into the Propago product. Print Software Section Editor Jennifer Matt takes a close look at Propago’s web-to-print solution.
Published October 7, 2020
Making decisions wears us out, even easy decisions like what to wear, what to eat for breakfast. Decision fatigue is something we need to manage especially when it comes to projects that require lots and lots of decisions (like Print MIS implementations).
Published September 30, 2020
Web-to-print portals are the enabling technology behind a “print program” which can elevate your relationship with your customers from transactional to relational. That relationship becomes “stickier” when technology is embedded into the customer’s organization.
Published September 23, 2020
Don’t make your customers think. Don’t make your customers administer multiple logins in order to do business with you. Don’t make your online engagement a burden on your customers.
Published September 16, 2020
Don’t have a mindset like a lighthouse. Have a mindset like a fast, nimble, ship with the most advanced navigation systems. When navigating the waters of the print manufacturing industry, stationary businesses will not survive.
Published September 9, 2020
Like it or not, all work involves learning. Not like our education system, but self-directed, project-based learning. You have to be a self-learner and as a leader you have to hold your people accountable for self-learning.
Published September 2, 2020
As your business matures and grows, you will need to improve your processes. As software invades every corner of your business, your processes have to change to adapt to the new reality. You need to know who in your company is a process creator.
Published August 26, 2020
Your customer service team is the place to start online ordering adoption. You can practice your sales pitch on them and then teach them how to pitch your customers into a self-service workflow.
Published August 19, 2020
COVID-19 is a challenge and an opportunity to rebuild and make changes to your business that would otherwise be met with the standard “this is how we’ve always done it” line of resistance.
Published August 12, 2020
Data decisions get made everyday in your print business. Here are three examples of important data decisions that we can all learn from.
Published August 5, 2020
Online ordering is about customer convenience. How do you leverage technology and self service to make it easier for your customers to do business with you?
Published July 29, 2020
Your business is made up of two kinds of processes: predictable ones and exceptions. A well-run business has codified or systematized the predictable business processes so that the humans working in the business apply all their skills to the exceptions.
Published July 22, 2020
Partnering can solve challenges that you don’t feel comfortable taking on initially. A partnership also helps you grow your expertise in an area so that when you do expand, you’ll make much better investment decisions.
Published July 15, 2020
More and more, the productivity of your company is based on the ability to efficiently work in the software applications that run your business. Don’t hamstring your mission-critical software applications by starving them of the resources they require.
Published July 9, 2020
Getting your customer’s pricing is a critical measure of customer satisfaction. Your customer might not be outwardly complaining, but many print customers are migrating to online solutions that provide immediate pricing. Not every job you produce deserves a manual estimate.
Published June 24, 2020
Every business has projects. Every business treats them differently. The range is enormous; from no project methodology to bureaucratic craziness. Print businesses of all sizes would benefit from a simple project methodology because it can quickly eliminate the most common reasons why things just don’t get done.
Published June 17, 2020
Evaluating print software is a process that desperately needs to evolve. Step back and look at the business objectives of the evaluation as a starting point to reinventing your approach to purchasing software.
Published June 10, 2020
So many trends are being amplified or accelerated by COVID-19; the evolution of the sales process is one of them. Your customers are being asked again to do more with fewer people and less time. They need vendors/partners that can help alleviate the pressure.
Published June 3, 2020
COVID-19 economic symptoms include the weakening of the “we’ve always done it this way defense”—which will have some positive impacts on outdated printer workflows and some negative impacts when customers evaluate print spend under new market conditions.
Published May 27, 2020
There will be a new, new normal after the height of COVID-19 passes. It will be even more reliant on software technologies to connect your employees, your customers, and your suppliers. The time to evolve to this new reality (often referred to as digital transformation) is now—crisis evolution cuts through a lot of the resistance.
Published May 20, 2020
Learning is the real work of software optimization. Once you really learn the application you own it. Once you own it, then you have the chance of reaching its full potential inside your organization.
Published May 13, 2020
Crisis creates an environment for rapid innovation. The digital transformation of all business sectors was in progress before COVID-19, and the crisis will continue to separate the digital haves and have-nots.
Published May 6, 2020
Some basic questions—who? what? and most importantly why?—of print software will greatly increase your chances of optimizing your print software investments.
Published April 29, 2020
Understanding what the primary objective or challenge that a print software claims to solve is an important factor for shopping for print software solutions. You have challenges, print software vendors have solutions (in the form of products). The better defined the challenge, the better the chance of alignment and return on investment.
Published April 22, 2020
We are going to come out of COVID-19 into a different economy and a different print industry. Many of the changes taking place now will persist, even after we’re all vaccinated or have developed widespread herd immunity. Your customers will return with fewer people resources—a competitive advantage will be for vendors who can save customers time.
Published April 8, 2020
Adult learning is hard especially when you’re transitioning from a toolset that your people have been comfortably using for years. Do not give the resistance any power and do not try to force the new system to work like the old one—you will pay dearly for that in the form of lost productivity.
Published April 1, 2020
First an April fools laugh, then some more insight on how to deploy your best resources during the COVID-19 pause in capitalism.
Published March 25, 2020
Documenting your core workflows can be a good strategic use of key resources who might not be fully occupied working from home.
Published March 11, 2020
The sales process should extend into the implementation of print software because all humans need to be persuaded of the merits so that they can become enthusiastic about the new toolset.
Published March 4, 2020
There are a lot of decisions to be made around print software; it might surprise you which ones I think are the most important.
Published February 26, 2020
It's easy to get into a panic when you wake up to the reality that your approach to software in your print business requires a major overall. It probably took you years to get into this state; don’t freak out because it could take years to crawl out of it. The best thing to do is to calmly prioritize and then start making incremental progress.
Published February 12, 2020
Your software investments deserve big picture, strategic planning. It’s time to step back and assess your core business processes and how software helps, hinders, optimizes, or ideally automates the steps required everyday to deliver on your customer promises.
Published February 5, 2020
We have spent decades focusing and optimizing the production floor (where there is no carpet). It is time to focus our energies on the carpeted areas of the business which impact customer’s perceptions of our business.
Published January 29, 2020
Describe your business challenges: be specific, be precise. Then let go of any attachment to the “how this business challenge gets solved by print software.” You want your business challenges solved. One of the fastest ways to solve them is to describe them accurately and then to be open to all the possible solutions.
Published January 22, 2020
You purchase software to solve business problems. When evaluating software, keep your focus on the challenges you want to solve. This will keep you open-minded about all the possible ways your challenges might be solved, rather than attachment to one specific solution.
Published January 15, 2020
Treat software like printing press hardware: assume your people and your processes have to change to optimize the new software rather than staying attached to how you think the software should work.
Published January 8, 2020
Technology is invading every corner of the print industry, and many print business owners are novices when it comes to technology. How do you make good business decisions when you are not the subject matter expert? Whom do you listen to? How do you know they are qualified? Run your business like a meritocracy.
Published December 18, 2019
People in your organization have to keep learning new things so that you can continue to optimize your business using new tools (mostly software). Leadership’s job is to deliver the “have to” part of the learning equation.
Published December 11, 2019
What do you provide for your sales team to get the upper hand in the marketplace? Do you have differentiation? Are you investing in something that will not only win new customers but keep existing ones?
Published December 4, 2019
A customer narrative documents the experience of doing business with you—from the sales process all the way through invoicing—from the customer’s perspective.
Published November 20, 2019
Your print sales people need a different perspective when selling web-to-print solutions. They need to understand short vs long term benefits as well as how the customer’s convenience is driving loyalty.
Published November 13, 2019
The merger of software technology stacks and strategy is a key component to any two businesses coming together. It takes time, effort, and patience as technology is uniquely embedded in a business. Be strategic about what you address and when you address it. Not everything should change right away.
Published November 6, 2019
Software feels malleable. New features come out. Trade shows are packed full of vendors showing the bright new thing that might lure you into the sales process. Complex software (Print MIS) does not change fast (because it shouldn’t), and the sooner you realize that changing your business is a better strategy, the faster you’ll get to the ROI and business differentiation that a Print MIS can deliver.
Published October 30, 2019
The number one thing we hear when we engage with a printer who is having trouble with their print software (Print MIS, Web-to-Print, or Pre-Press automation) is “we didn’t get trained.” Ironically, more training is rarely the solution to this common complaint.
Published October 23, 2019
You have a bias for what solutions work; that bias is based on what has worked for you in the past. If you’re a print business owner, buying new stuff feels like a solid way to solve challenges of hiring new employees. Solving print software challenges requires expertise in print software.
Published October 16, 2019
We live in a connected world. The artifacts (documents, spreadsheets, etc.) we create for business should be stored centrally with controlled access in the cloud. Isolated artifacts on employees’ computers slow projects down and make research into past projects nearly impossible.
Published October 9, 2019
Getting the return on investment for print software takes a lot more work by the people at the printer than you are led to believe in the software sales process.
Published October 2, 2019
The dream of an online business that delivers profitable revenue from strangers is a good dream to have. It simply takes a lot of work to be successful at it. I have seen too many printers spend too much time focusing on the software and forgetting that internet traffic is not free or easy to get.
Published September 25, 2019
Building good software requires a very desirable skill set in our current economy. Virtually every single company on the planet needs to utilize software in order to increase their efficiency and reach more customers.
Published September 18, 2019
Getting outside perspectives into your print business is important, especially when implementing a Print MIS or other print software. You want people who see a wide variety of print businesses to weigh in on best practices.
Published September 11, 2019
Define the challenge you're trying to solve before you jump into a shortcut that borrows from another feature in your Print MIS or web-to-print. If you borrow too much, you’re implementation of the software will get detached from the vendor’s product roadmap—which can be expensive and painful.
Published September 4, 2019
The value in the print industry today is migrating from the production floor to the mobile device of your customers. How are you investing in providing your customer access to your business from their phone?
Published August 28, 2019
Print software is a pile of features that solve business process challenges. You have to learn how to prioritize what’s the next most important feature in the software by comparing its impact against all the other features.
Published August 21, 2019
Don’t let a feature stop you from implementing what works for you today. Don’t let the people in your organization that are good at looking for all the ways something won’t work win. Implement what works and then find ways around the missing features. Waiting is keeping your business in neutral.
Published August 14, 2019
Print software gets thrown out by printers primarily because of factors that are 100% in the printer’s control.
Published August 7, 2019
Your print business has two kinds of challenges: the challenge of getting jobs out the door (tactical) and the business of continuing to strategically evolve so you maintain relevance and competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Published July 24, 2019
Learning is the most important part of software procurement decisions. The vendor needs to learn about you (to assess if you are a good fit for their solution) and you need to learn about the vendor. An RFP doesn’t facilitate any learning.
Published July 17, 2019
A learning event vs. a selling event—that is the event the print industry needs. An event where you go to solve your challenges through active collaboration, open-minded because nobody is trying to sell you anything.
Published July 10, 2019
Internal communication deserves better tools than email. Real collaboration happens best when more, not fewer, people are involved. Taking internal communication out of email reduces the cognitive overhead of deciding whom to communicate with.
Published June 26, 2019
Your print sales team has to evolve to understand and be able to sell the value of the software that enables print demand from business processes. Every printer should have a direct revenue line for their software.
Published June 19, 2019
The level of trust you have in the data in your Print MIS impacts all aspects of your business. When printers get their Print MIS to be “trustworthy,” they can move a whole lot faster, with less labor costs, and be more responsive to the never-ending request for more data from all stakeholders in your business.
Published June 5, 2019
Everyday, most of us choose the most important thing to work on. The employees in the carpeted area of your print business are making these decisions everyday. Do you know what they are prioritizing? Do you know how they are spending their time? You should measure time just like you measure revenues, profits, and costs.
Published May 29, 2019
Being strategic about print software is nearly impossible when you are in a crisis. Too many print software decisions are made under duress. When you have the discipline to plan before the crisis, you are being strategic.
Published May 22, 2019
Jennifer Matt reviews Slingshot by Avanti, and feels that its integrated warehouse management, multiple approaches to scheduling, and approach to implementation are its core strengths.
Published May 15, 2019
The toolset for solving business workflow challenges has completely changed in the last decade. If the only tool(s) you’re deploying are email, spreadsheets, and/or PDFs, you are using yesterday’s tools to solve today’s challenges.
Published May 8, 2019
All print business owners want more data about their businesses so they can make better decisions. It isn’t about reporting packages or business intelligence tools—it’s really about how your business generates data on a daily basis.
Published May 1, 2019
I wish all customers’ top priority was purchasing high-quality print; it isn’t. Your customer’s have upstream problems. The printers who go upstream and solve these problems will be rewarded as manufacturers downstream.
Published April 24, 2019
Learning is the experience of trying to do something without parental supervision. It is not watching a trainer do something and shaking your head that you understand. Holding your people accountable for learning activities is the most important part of improving user adoption of new tools in your print business.
Published April 17, 2019
Your print business is rich with patterns. By looking at patterns we can find ways to codify those patterns into processes that make us more efficient. You need real human processing for your business—free this up by taking the recurring stuff off their plates.
Published April 10, 2019
Automation starts with an understanding of the business process and how it’s done “manually.” Documenting this business process is called a “standard operating procedure” which is where you can begin your journey to some level of automation.
Published March 27, 2019
Your customers want convenience. Printers who prioritize around making it easy to do business with their customers will differentiate themselves. Don’t wait until your best customers demand online ordering and self-service access to the business they do with you—do it proactively and strategically instead of under duress.
Published March 20, 2019
Software is like a press; it needs to be staffed. Software is like a press; it needs to be maintained. Software is like your business; it needs to keep evolving. Your most important piece of software is your Print MIS—dedicate the tasks of your Print MIS to one individual.
Published March 13, 2019
New software tools are often rejected because the humans feel like their jobs are being replaced by computers. Software does math better, faster, and more accurately than humans—that is not debatable. But new tools augment brainpower—not replace it.
Published March 6, 2019
Your print business is being invaded by software tools. These tools require a level of thinking/concentration that requires blocks of uninterrupted time for your employees. Without this uninterrupted time, your software will remain grossly underutilized and lacking measurable ROI.
Published February 27, 2019
Think of your go-live date for your Print MIS as a flood. Prepare for it by training everyone how to create sandbags and then monitoring that everyone actually applied the learning and figured out how to do their jobs in the new system BEFORE go-live.
Published February 20, 2019
User conferences are a great way to change your perspective and get a break from your day-to-day activities. The learning happens when you engage with both the presenters and the participants.
Published February 13, 2019
When buying and implementing print software, start with the simple jobs software does well, implement and learn. Do not get stuck in a myriad of “use case exceptions” as an excuse to do nothing. You will never get ROI and you’ll never find software that can do everything.
Published February 6, 2019
A lot of crazy things can happen in estimating departments. But estimating is the foundation of your print business. If your estimates are grossly inaccurate, you risk the utilization of your precious resources for the privilege of losing money. If your estimates are right on target, you are able to make very strategic decisions about customer pricing. Essentially, the estimating department is your profit management center.
Published January 30, 2019
Leading by example is the most powerful way to approach challenging business environments. When the leadership is engaged in constant learning, the culture of the company is much more likely to be a learning organization. If I could pick only one characteristic of a business, it would be learning because if you’re learning, you’re staying relevant against any future changes.
Published January 23, 2019
Technical people are a differentiator in your business—not just the typical geeks, but technical people at every position in your company. When your print business is staffed by technical people, they have a greater potential to deliver profitable growth.
Published January 16, 2019
Integrated software is a requirement for an end-to-end workflow. You will be faced with lots of decisions around integration when you’re purchasing new software tools. Never let integration to be a yes/no question—it requires much more exploration and understanding.
Published January 9, 2019
Software implementations evoke fear in the minds of your employees—these fears are manifested in a variety of ways. You should be looking for fear, not reacting to the symptoms of fear that cause all kinds of issues with print software implementations.
Published December 19, 2018
Your customers expect more than a “print order taker” print sales representative. Successful printers require a sales team that can dig in and learn about their customer’s business processes that involve print. When you understand the business process that print is involved in, you get the opportunity to solve other challenges and create more value for your customers. This is now an expectation of most customers.
Published December 12, 2018
The topic of Print MIS software can be a dangerous topic to bring up if you want to keep things low-key or drama-free. Most printers are really frustrated with their MIS. I’ve been working on customer-facing technology (web-to-print) my whole career—the Print MIS is by far the most important software tool you have in your business.
Published December 5, 2018
Software is never done. It has to keep moving to stay compatible. It operates in business processes that keep changing. The consumer expectation of how fast and easy software can change is being set by some of the most valuable companies on the planet.
Published November 28, 2018
What are you investing in that will result in the true differentiation of your print business? An important question in a market where many commercial printers look alike (same equipment, same sales approach, similar online tools). I think differentiation is about solving additional customer challenges that your competitors don't even know about.
Published November 14, 2018
Once you make a print software decision, you have to enforce it by communicating the strategy clearly and then repeatedly. Your people will forget, your business will evolve, sales people will appear from other solutions trying to convince your team of a different path.
Published November 7, 2018
If you make decisions about your business based solely on the intuition of you and your staff, you are limiting the growth and the scale of business learning that can take place in your organization.
Published October 31, 2018
Your web-to-print solution is underutilized. Do all functional areas of your company—sales, customer service, technology—understand all the challenges your current web-to-print system solves? Probably not. You can’t be “solution focused” without understanding the challenges your toolset solves.
Published October 17, 2018
A print business that learns is one that has a foundation for tracking its business processes and improving on them. From a cultural standpoint, a learning organization has to be able to talk openly about mistakes made from all levels of the organization.
Published October 10, 2018
The implementation of print software is as important as the software itself. With every software tool there is a foundational knowledge that will help you be more self-sufficient. Those printers who understand their software tools succeed in spite of lack of support from print software vendors.
Published September 26, 2018
The ability to make data-driven decisions is critical to your business success. The various software systems (Print MIS, web-to-print) are your primary tools for managing this data. When you do integrations make sure you keep the control of right data in the right hands.
Published September 24, 2018
Jennifer Matt reviews printQ by CloudLab and its modular approach to web-to-print.
Published September 19, 2018
The process of getting your Print MIS into a “trusted state” can be difficult, but the effort is well worth it. Printers who 100% trust the data in their Print MIS move faster and are more profitable than those who are constantly questioning the data.
Published September 12, 2018
Print software is a powerful tool to create efficiencies in your business. Your success with print software is dependent upon how well you can make the various technologies work and play together in your overall technology stack.
Published September 5, 2018
Buying more software isn’t always the best option. Duplicate solutions that solve the same set of challenges (e.g. multiple web-to-print solutions) have extra costs and require extra understanding by your sales team. Buying software should be at the same strategic level as buying presses is in your print business.
Published August 29, 2018
Working smarter is an evolution. Digital tools are providing us ways to work more efficiently, but it comes down to being able to work with other humans. Efficient communication is the key to working smarter and optimizing the digital tools at our disposal.
Published August 22, 2018
When sales become more complicated, involving more people on both sides of the equation, you need a team player to facilitate collaboration. A winning sales team is a combination of subject matter expertise and relationship building.
Published August 15, 2018
A disruptive market creates the conditions for acquisitions. This has been happening with printers for years and print software vendors are experiencing the same conditions. As a customer of these products, you must understand the conditions of the acquisition in order to prepare for how it will impact you as a customer of the software.
Published August 8, 2018
When you invest in software for your print business, it’s like a marriage because you want to have a healthy long-term relationship with the vendor. Changing software is painful and expensive (like divorces).
Published August 1, 2018
You work with a team. It’s time to upgrade the tools you use to foster more efficient teamwork and better management of the artifacts that are created in projects. Email with attached files doesn’t cut it anymore. We are creating an isolated mess of artifacts that cannot be effectively found or used in the next project.
Published July 18, 2018
A culture of finding ways to optimize software in your business is something you can control. The successful printers will be the ones who are getting the most of their print software tools—mostly by being open to evolving their own workflows to fit the how the software works best.
Published July 11, 2018
The source of our innovation is moving from the production floor to the customer’s mobile device. We are going from the differentiation based on speed, quality, and finishing to differentiation based on solving customer’s data challenges way upstream of the printing press.
Published June 27, 2018
Sales is about catering your company’s solutions to the specific challenges that are relevant to their current situation. There is no better way to lose a prospect’s attention then to talk about subjects that aren’t relevant to them.
Published June 20, 2018
The transition between sales and implementation of web-to-print systems can be a rough road for the implementation team and the customer. The leadership of the implementation belongs with the printer—all too often the customers take the leadership and run the project off a cliff after spending lots of time and money.
Published June 13, 2018
Do your innovation projects take into consideration what would be best for your customers? Your customers want to know that you’re innovating to solve their challenges.
Published May 30, 2018
When you lose a sales deal, how does your company react? Do you have a culture of learning from losses or do you have a culture of blaming? A sales loss is a treasure trove of learning—successful companies evaluate and adjust for their next pitch.
Published May 23, 2018
Prepress automation, streamlining your customer service department, and reducing the time between inquiry and jobs getting on press – these are common feature requests for web-to-print systems. They are all about you (the printer) – web-to-print isn’t about you! Web-to-print is for your customers!
Published May 16, 2018
Every industry is being transformed by a new staffing option for the “jobs to be done” and that staffing option is software. Your business needs to get stuff done—some of that stuff needs to be done by humans and a lot of that stuff needs to be done by software.
Published May 2, 2018
There is a conflux of pressures on businesses today: increase speed, personalize products, respond to the market faster, localize the messaging, and do all this with less people on a tighter budget. Read on for tips on how to cope with these challenges.
Published April 25, 2018
Our important customers get our attention and our dedicated resources. What happens when customers prefer online tools over dedicated resources? Read on to find out.
Published April 18, 2018
A print software application can do certain jobs for your business. Once you’ve proven it works, don’t forget to execute. Deploy the software so it does that job across your entire organization. Read on to find out how.
Published April 11, 2018
The meeting is a tool that should be used sparingly. It is expensive. It is for a specific purpose (alignment, understanding, status check-in, etc.). It is overused and the art of running a good meeting is underrated.
Published April 4, 2018
When new software is implemented in your native environment – that’s when the real learning happens. Everything prior to that point was theoretical. Take this time to learn how this software uniquely meets the needs of your business.
Published March 28, 2018
Your sales team must do more than sell. They must be good learners (that means less talking, more listening, and more curiosity about how they can help their customers). Your customer’s time is valuable. When they give you their time they are voting on your value.
Published March 21, 2018
Your business toolset is changing; software is becoming one of the most important tools for managing, growing, and innovating your business. At Dscoop next week, we are conducting a Print Software Bootcamp to help Dscoop Members learn more about the Print Software toolset.
Published March 14, 2018
The most precious thing you spend every day is your customer’s time. Treat it with the respect it deserves or it could be the reason you are replaced.
Published March 7, 2018
The definition of a successful printer is changing with the times. The updated definition is forcing printers to solve more than a manufacturing challenge. For printers who refuse to move out of their comfort zone; price will be the primary subject of conversation in every sale.
Published February 28, 2018
What is the difference between reactive and proactive customer service? The former waits until the customer has a problem and then makes contact. The latter strives to keep those problems from happening in the first place. Rather than wait for customers to complain, why don’t print software vendors proactively publish helpful best practices to their existing customers on a regular basis?
Published February 21, 2018
This software won’t work for our print business—a conclusion that can be the result of weeks', months', even years’ worth of time and money. Nobody wins in this outcome. Yet, it is an all to common result of failed software implementations.
Published February 14, 2018
What can your customers do without your parental supervision? Your customer wants to be empowered to interact with your business online. Can they?
Published February 7, 2018
A Print MIS transition requires an individual inside your organization to convince all aspects of the business to embrace change. The right leader is a critical decision in making a Print MIS transition less painful.
Published January 31, 2018
A business is a set of processes that are done over and over, do you have those processes written down? Do you review them? How often do make mistakes due to a human error that just involves “I forgot”? Process improvement starts with defining the process, adhering to them, and then constantly learning and adapting the process to the smarter you.
Published January 24, 2018
Technical resources are hard to find. Keeping up with technology requires constant learning. When looking for technical staff; probe for the candidates willingness and ability to learn new things - it is an absolute requirement.
Published January 17, 2018
Every industry has different roles, in the software industry there is a role called the “Product Owner” also referred to as the “Product Manager”. First, I’ll explain this unique role in the software industry; then I’ll make a case that as print continues to evolve and become more digitally friendly and software dependent printers are going to have to have this role in their organizations.
Published January 10, 2018
What makes your print business unique? This is a question every print business should ponder over the new year. In 2018 how will you guide your company to create differentiation? Will it be based on the past or the reality of our shared future?
Published January 10, 2018
Solving workflow issues for a customer opens up the door to long-term repeatable business. Jennifer Matt cites recent project work where building workflows brought in significant print business.
Published December 6, 2017
I’ve been interacting with a lot of customers of web-to-print lately (the people who order from web-to-print, not the printers). In every single interaction I learn something new.
Published November 29, 2017
Creating results in your company takes coordinated effort by a group of people – some would call that a “project”. Project management is the art of keeping all the contributors to the project on task “herding the cats.” This skill set and this role is underappreciated in our industry. When you need to get complex things done with a group of people – you need a project manager to drive the project to successful completion.
Published November 22, 2017
When you buy print software for your business, it needs to “fit” into the technology stack you already have. This means that it solves challenges you cannot solve with your existing software and it will fit with the other pieces of your technology.
Published November 16, 2017
The Print MIS/ERP system is the foundation to your overall print business technology stack. It is the system that should run your business. Many Print MIS solutions have and continue to expand their support for a diversified printing operation. One of printIQ’s strengths is its approach to and the execution of a modular approach to supporting additional manufacturing processes
Published November 15, 2017
The solution sale only works if you’re solving the problems that are most important to the customer. The race to find solutions often results in sales teams wasting tremendous effort solving the wrong customer challenges. When you first agree on the challenges and their importance to the customer – solution selling works.
Published November 8, 2017
Purchasing new software is exciting; it’s full of potential, the vendors invest a lot in making the sales process enjoyable. This influences our reaction to when our existing technology gets hard or frustration – it can feel easier to quit and buy a different platform thinking that will solve all our challenges.
Published November 1, 2017
We are biased towards solutions when the most valuable thing we can do it clearly define the problem first. The tech startup world calls this innovator bias (falling in love with solutions) – there are always many ways to solve something, the more time you spend understanding the problem, the better chances of getting to the optimal solution.
Published October 25, 2017
There is no magic innovation button, there is a boring execution button that can differentiate your business. Consistent execution on complex tasks is a path to profitability – checklists are a key tool to help you get there.
Published October 18, 2017
There is an educational gap in the print industry, our industry events are still centered around buying and selling equipment rather than preparing printers to compete in the internet age.
Published October 11, 2017
Everyone is talking about workflow automation; this article is about our attachment to artifacts of common print workflows. We have failed to upgrade our thinking beyond the “page” metaphor for sharing information and gaining agreement.
Published October 4, 2017
Are you interrupting a lot of people to find the few who are in need of your products and services? Or are you working very hard to be found by the customers that are actively seeking out your services?
Published September 20, 2017
What can your customers do online with your print business? How easy is it for your customers to do business with you? Are you asking your customers to use their precious time because your ordering process is inefficient and not available online?
Published September 6, 2017
Leadership is about embracing change as an iterative process of improving upon how your business operates. In modern times that equates to getting software to do more work for your business so your human labor can focus on higher-value activities.
Published August 30, 2017
Print is an artifact of a business process/workflow. You should get very curious about the overall workflow so that you can provide more value than just the print. This is the path to embedding your services with a customer and increasing the areas where you can add value.
Published August 24, 2017
Large software projects should be taken on with some extra planning upfront. Just like buildings, you should prototype and get a real sense of how the software is going to work. Given the time, we always build out the user experience first. Jennifer Matt interviews Chris Reisz-Hanson, a print software architect talks about how he would approach a large custom development project.
Published August 23, 2017
A manual, labor intensive workflow makes your print business inefficient – that is obvious. The hidden impact of manual workflows is the impact it might be having on your customer services team’s growth mindset.
Published August 16, 2017
People buy workflows; therefore sales is a discovery process that reveals the challenges in their workflows that you might be in a position to solve. You have to ask more question and make fewer assumptions.
Published August 9, 2017
We train on presses, we engage with the press vendors. We make sure operators are competent – why don’t we do the same for software solutions (especially Print MIS, production workflow, and web-to-print)?
Published August 4, 2017
Jennifer Matt talks with Peter Gunning, CEO of Grafenia about how owning the creative relationship has moved from print to the website - our industry needs to evolve with that change. Grafenia's Nettl brand provides print service providers the tools they need to compete in the digital world.
Published August 2, 2017
Successful print companies have always been re-investing in their business to remain competitors. Up until now, that investment centered around production equipment and systems. Technology in the form of software will be a primary differentiator moving forward.
Published July 27, 2017
Print MIS implementation is a never-ending process. Jennifer Matt interviews Jane Mugford about why the evolution of the Print MIS does not end after the initial implementation. The vendor releases new versions, your business keeps changing (new products, new workflows) - your Print MIS needs to evolve with your business forever.
Published July 26, 2017
Software is the toolset that enables you to solve the business challenges required to win the print that results from them. Your sales process is going to look like software as the main dish with print as a side dish.
Published July 20, 2017
Jennifer Matt interviews Chris Reisz-Hanson, software architect about how to protect yourself. One of the key questions that is often missed is "who owns what?" Where is the source code stored? If you own the software, you should have access to the source code under an account in your business name.
Published July 19, 2017
Every person in your business solves challenges every day with the tools they have at their disposal and the tools they are comfortable deploying. There is a rich set of intellectual property buried there which can be retrieved by listening and understanding how humans looks for ways to build trusted systems.
Published July 12, 2017
Evaluating software is not a math problem, please don’t count the number of features and award the deal to the highest score. Print software must solve your challenges, in the order of importance to your business.
Published July 6, 2017
Google is judging you on multiple fronts as it pertains to mobile. Jennifer Matt interviews Kellie Rife, a front end web developer and user experience designer about how she thinks about servicing both audiences: Google and Your Customers.
Published June 28, 2017
Too many online order entry tools are discounted because the printer fails to see the value from their customer’s perspective. Don’t let your competitors use your customer experience to replace you.
Published June 22, 2017
Your software should run your business, your people should run your software. Can you easily get to the trusted data of your business? Is it in a trusted system of record (Print MIS/ERP)? Or do you have to gather up data from many different sources to get to a version of the truth? Jennifer Matt interviews Jane Mugford about helping printers transition from people run business to a software run business.
Published June 21, 2017
Every software tool sets out to solve a set of problems, all too often the problem is never defined because the sales process focuses on solutions, benefits, and features. Take the time to understand the problem print software solves and most importantly whether you have that problem!
Published June 15, 2017
Mobile is now the predominate access point for users. Anything you put online needs to take into consideration how "mobile-friendly" your online experience is. Jennifer Matt interviews Kellie Rife, a web developer and user experience designer about how she thinks about mobile design.
Published June 13, 2017
Your print business runs on software, more and more of that software is being delivered via the cloud where resources can be precisely controlled and scaling (both up and down) is configurable in real-time. Kodak’s flagship workflow product – PRINERGY Workflow is no exception to taking advantage of what cloud computing can do to a printer’s production workflow.
Published June 13, 2017
In this podcast we talk to Susan Moore about the various roles Susan has had in the printing industry: supplies sales, printing business owner, MIS platform provider. We talk about becoming a data-driven company and how MIS transitions are hard but they create a great opportunity to restructure your business model and to transition to today's world.
Published June 8, 2017
Most printers have at some point hired a software programmer. Jennifer Matt interviews Chris Reisz-Hanson about why thinking about software programming with a single resource filling all the roles. Software is combination of user interface, defining the requirements, coding and testing - think about who is going to play all those roles before you start your next custom development project.
Published June 7, 2017
Buy, implement, build – software is part of your everyday business life now. It is the primary tool of all businesses.
Published June 1, 2017
When you're implementing a new print software project, a project manager can be critical to keeping momentum on the project. A project manager keeps everyone on task and aligned around getting a "side-project" done. Jennifer Matt interviews Bryan Quible about project management and software projects.
Published May 31, 2017
Making good software is like building a nice home, it takes multiple resources who are coordinated to deliver on your needs. The more a printer understands the software process, the better they will be at managing it for internal projects or influencing the software roadmap of their vendors.
Published May 24, 2017
We want to be efficient, we want to feel smart. When we hear even the first words of a challenge, we categorize it and start trying to solve it based on our available tool set. This prevents you from a real understanding of the problem.
Published May 17, 2017
People don’t like change, they need to be led through change because the transition between “how you’ve always done it” and the “new more tech-focused way to do it” can be a river of misery.
Published May 11, 2017
When you need to transition off a legacy Print MIS, there are few things that you need to consider when selecting your new trusted system of record. Jennifer Matt interviews Jane Mugford about how she guides companies through that decision process.
Published May 10, 2017
Change management is considered a soft skill (maybe because it can’t be measured easily in a spreadsheet). Change management can cause a lot of hard problems with technology change when it ignored.
Published May 3, 2017
A print software strategy is a definition of where you want to end up – an objective, a goal for how you want all the software components in your business to work together.
Published April 27, 2017
Our default reaction to talking about software is to try to describe the solution or a feature of the potential solution (e.g. drag and drop). Focus on telling the story of the CHALLENGE you are trying to solve - this is so much more helpful. What do you want to solve and who do you want to solve it for?
Published April 26, 2017
There is no “one software package” that runs your entire business. Businesses of all sizes have a technology stack (a collection of software). How well your technology stack fits together (like a beautiful puzzle) greatly determines your success in today’s market.
Published April 20, 2017
When you sell a web-to-print program, you have a brief honeymoon period that needs to be optimized. Stay focused on the business goals - get orders flowing through the system. Nobody wants to hear from a customer saying, its been six months and we've seen no value!
Published April 19, 2017
Clear communication is essential when implementing print software. When you don’t ask clarifying questions, you assume that if there were more relevant details about the integration they would have shared them with you. Do not assume. Ask clarifying questions. Be that annoying person who keeps asking questions.
Published April 13, 2017
One of the key functions of a Print MIS is to track where every single job is in your facility. Chain of custody is about inputting the transfer of ownership between resources in your plant. It always amazes us how powerful this one feature of a Print MIS when implemented properly.
Published April 12, 2017
We apply tools from our toolset to solve business challenges, often those tools create silos of data and processes inside our company that prevent us from becoming a truly data-driven organization.
Published April 6, 2017
Print is not dead, we still need print and it needs to work and play well with its digital alternatives. The use of print has changed, especially in marketing. Printers need to extend their value proposition to understand all communication options in order to keep print relevant.
Published April 5, 2017
I wish you could just buy the right print software product and it would make you successful. You can’t. Success with software takes your execution. Software doesn’t implement itself, vendors can’t implement it without your active involvement.
Published March 30, 2017
When new technology is introduced into a printer the success of it really depends on how your people engage (or don't engage) with the software. The success is way more dependent on your team than it is on vendor. You have to learn the software and then strategically apply it to your business.
Published March 29, 2017
You can call it change management, I prefer the wise words of Seth Godin – change requires you to embrace stupid. Our market requires all of us to keep learning, “the pre-learning state is stupidity.”
Published March 23, 2017
Demonstrating your web-to-print solution is critical to your sales process. Use your demonstration site to configure all the bells and whistles of your solution so you never have to say, "we support that feature but its not configured on this site."
Published March 22, 2017
Selling print online requires knowledge of how to both accept artwork and deliver print assets to the manufacturing facility. Generic ecommerce firms don’t understand this which can cause printers to spend their time and money educating resources about what makes print ecommerce unique.
Published March 16, 2017
Your print software is as important as your print manufacturing equipment. Software enables you to get to new customers and automate your workflows to enable you to do more with less effort. Software is becoming your most strategic resource.
Published March 15, 2017
Mistakes are part of our lives and our businesses. Nobody likes to make them, how you react to your mistakes dictates what kind of business culture you’ll create. Software changes are an excellent environment to create a learning culture and avoid a fear based culture.
Published March 13, 2017
Jerry Kennelly started his print career in a sweat shop run by his parents in their basement. When a wall in your house has to be removed to get the press downstairs, you know you might be working the 3rd shift someday. Jerry is an entrepreneur, founder of Stockbyte, Tweak and the Junior Entrepreneur Programme in Ireland. In this podcast we talk about what Jerry has learned and how passionate he is about both the impact and value of print in our digital world.
Published March 9, 2017
Your print business runs on two parallel paths (workflows), a product path and a business path. The production path results in a "physical product" that is shipped to your customer, the business path results in an accurate invoice that is delivered to your customer. Looking at your business in this manner can help you understand the roles of your Print MIS and your Production Management software tools.
Published March 8, 2017
Step back and regroup. Stop looking at features and focus on the overall business objectives of your software solutions. All of us (vendors and printers) need to get out of the feature focus so we can make better software decisions AND make the software we have work better for us in spite of the lacking features.
Published March 2, 2017
Across all markets, customer's demand for self-service access to business transactions is growing. Customer convenience trumps full-service. A self-service interaction gives the customer full control of when they want to interact.
Published March 1, 2017
When both parties in the print software sales process make assumptions, poor decisions are made. Money is wasted. Time is squandered. Replace assumptions with clarifying questions so you come to a common understanding of the truth.
Published February 22, 2017
User conferences are an incredible opportunity to load up on learning from the speakers, the vendors, and most importantly your peers. With Dscoop next week, this article covers the importance of the well-formed, thought out questions that can help you get the most out of events by preparing and focusing on your learning goals before you arrive!
Published February 16, 2017
What does "staying on Main Street" with your software product mean? It means using software for what it was intended to do and not trying to add features just because you can. Tight focus on both the development of software solutions and their use will keep everyone out of trouble.
Published February 15, 2017
Building good software takes a (small) village of people with distinct skills sets. Don’t try and build software with only a developer, you’ll end up with software that only developers will want to use!
Published February 9, 2017
In talking about software solutions, its best to talk about the problems you want to solve rather than suggesting solutions like "drag and drop". Making recommendations for how to solve things prevents real understanding of what you're actually trying to solve. Focus on describing the problems you're having and the results you want to create.
Published February 8, 2017
Retiring software solutions can be overwhelming. Continuing to pay maintenance on legacy software solutions is maddening. Start the process of transition by setting a realistic date – draw the line in the sand, rally your troops around what it takes to get from where you are today to throwing a retirement party for your legacy software.
Published February 2, 2017
Our market demands you to be more consultative with your customers so you can extend your value proposition beyond a commodity manufacturer. The best way to be a good consultant is to understand your customer's challenges. You have to dive in and fall in love with your customer's problems in order to build up that trusted partnership that is immune to competitive pricing pressures.
Published February 1, 2017
Your print software strategy is your responsibility. It requires strategic thinking to both define the challenges and the results you want to create (vision). Don’t make the common mistakes with your print software strategy.
Published January 31, 2017
There are two major workflows that a job travels through in your print business. The production workflow which results in a printed product and the business workflow which results in an accurate invoice. The job must travel through both workflows; often in parallel and frequently requires some collaboration and/or communication between the workflows to reach both desired results - high-quality print product(s) delivered on-time and an error free invoice.
Published January 26, 2017
When your Print business is faced with changing your Print MIS, the attitude towards the change can make all the difference. Are you looking to force the Print MIS software to work just like you work today or are you willing to adapt your workflows to optimize how the Print MIS software was built?
Published January 25, 2017
Your business should be run by your print software systems; your people should run the systems. These print software systems require attention for both short-term initiatives and long-term strategy.
Published January 18, 2017
Finding a niche for your print business (a target market with specific pain points) is not about aiming small, it’s about FOCUS and EXECUTION to build a repeatable product offering and to dive deeper into learning about your customer’s problems.
Published January 12, 2017
Growing and scaling a business can come from an investment in software.
Published January 11, 2017
User group meetings create a space for you to find peers for collaboration. Use these meetings to find your people. Do not proceed in these disruptive market conditions on your own! I invite you to attend the sessions. For those of you who are not planning to attend, I want to provide you with some of the key learnings that will be delivered.
Published January 4, 2017
When people get frustrated with software, they are looking for an easy answer to get closure. One of the most common reactions to web-to-print frustration is to shop for a different solution. Before you start shopping, take a long hard look at your investment in really learning the web-to-print solution you already have.
Published December 21, 2016
Implementing a Print MIS is challenging, it requires a focus on end results without an attachment to “the way things have always been done”, persistence, and adaptability. Look for these personality traits in the people you assign to lead your Print MIS implementation.
Published December 8, 2016
Make print easier to buy. The Tweak Cloud offering is a toolset that streamlines the process of getting to a final agreed upon design. Jerry Kennelly, CEO and founder of Tweak describes the offering and his approach to giving the customer self-service control over the proofing process.
Published December 7, 2016
As software takes on a larger and larger role in your print business, your technical leader plays a greater role in all aspects of your business performance. With the right internal technical leader, software can deliver almost everything that was promised in the demo! Without the right technical leader, you’re going to feel like your software investment was a complete waste of money.
Published November 30, 2016
Aleyant PrintJobManager™ is a cloud-based entry into the Print MIS market. Most printers will recognize Aleyant as the maker of the popular Aleyant Pressero™ web-to-print solution. Aleyant is entering the Print MIS market with a stand-alone solution PrintJobManage
Published November 16, 2016
Your web-to-print needs to solve two core challenges, the challenge of e-commerce and the unique challenge of selling print online. Design ‘N’ Buy took a different strategy for getting to market with a print-enabled e-commerce solution. They left the e-commerce part to the open-source community by proactively integrating with the most popular open source e-commerce platforms.
Published November 9, 2016
Scaling your print business requires the removal of bottlenecks from order inquiry to accurate invoice payment. Your Print MIS is the system of record that can drive you to a more efficient business and enable you to scale.
Published November 2, 2016
Web-to-print is part of your self-service offering and an expectation of most customers. The following article covers the top five questions I hear around web-to-print.
Published October 19, 2016
The most important thing you can do to thrive during times of disruption is to learn more about your customer’s problems. What you solved for customers in the past might not be relevant in the future, what you can solve in the future will reinvent may reinvent your business.
Published October 12, 2016
Every print software decision needs to be considered within the context of your end-to-end workflow. Isolated or point solutions are costly both short and long term. As jobs travel through your production and business workflows – it is vital that the various pieces of print technology can communicate with each other without human intervention.
Published October 5, 2016
Mistakes get made during the print software sales process because there is a lack of common understanding, a pressure on the vendor to say yes to every challenge presented, and a tendency to focus on solutions rather than the problems.
Published September 21, 2016
When you buy and sell software by the pound (# of features), you get distracted as a buyer as to what business challenge is actually most important to solve. As a vendor when you build software by the pound you keep adding without going back and refining the core features of your solution.
Published September 14, 2016
Implementing Print MIS software is an undertaking that touches every corner of your business. The belief system you go into this process with determines your success more than any other factor.
Published September 7, 2016
Inevitably, Cimpress (parent company of VistaPrint) is expanding beyond its roots with the micro business and the business card product. Pixartprinting, a 2014 Cimpress acquisition, targets the creative professional with a 100% upload-and-print model supporting an ever growing collection of product workflows.
Published August 31, 2016
Coding is one aspect of software. Making great software takes a team of well-coordinated resources. When we oversimplify software to just a coding event, we get unexpected results
Published August 24, 2016
Web-to-Print isn’t for the printer; it is a self-service option for your customers so that ordering from you is more convenient. Customer preference is strongly in favor of self-service options for virtually all business processes, print is no exception.
Published August 17, 2016
Going to live industry events is a great opportunity on many levels – get out of working in your business and focus on working on your business. Building relationships with peers and vendors is critical to your future success, live events are where these relationships are cemented.
Published August 10, 2016
Printers get frustrated with complex software solutions, this frustration often results in the purchase of additional complex software solutions. Don’t rush to buy your way out of the challenge – it might be more effective to learn your way out of it by doubling down on your commitment to the software you already have.
Published August 3, 2016
Customers come to printers to solve communication challenges. Transactional customers get their specific challenges solved. Transaction print is a tough business these days. Printers who inquire about and look to solve bigger picture challenges develop partners with their customers, moving above the transactional level.
Published July 27, 2016
The recent move by the U.S. women’s national soccer team (USWNT), to ask for a raise is leading by example for women of all ages. Their performance from top to bottom has been exemplary, on and off the field, and for them, this would be a performance-based raise. As it turns out, simply “asking” requires the courage to work against how we’ve been socialized to behave as females.
Published July 13, 2016
Web-to-Print software is sold to printing companies. Yet, the primary users of web-to-print solutions are a printing company's customers. This situation is the cause of many issues with the success of web-to-print programs. We have three perspectives at work (only one really matters).
Published July 6, 2016
The biggest mistake in software decisions is relegating the discussion down to the feature level. The feature is a potential solution to an often ill-defined problem which may or may not be relevant to your business.
Published June 29, 2016
If sales isn’t involved, your business-to-business (B2B) web-to-print project is going to fail. Web-to-print projects aren’t about features (solutions), they are all about solving the right customer challenges.
Published June 15, 2016
User experience is the product. 1,000 features does not necessarily equate to a valuable product. When features are embedded into a confusing an cumbersome user experience – they don’t get adopted.
Published June 1, 2016
A Product Workflow is a term I use in web-to-print projects; it defines the different offerings you enable online through self-service user interface. Defining terms is critically important to any project, product workflows is one of the key terms to every web-to-print project.
Published May 25, 2016
Print is a communication challenge solution. Typically, the printed product is but one part of a much larger challenge. When your sales people learn to take their “print googles” off and uncover the bigger picture challenge, they embed your company deeper into your customer’s business process and ultimately uncover more opportunities for printed products.
Published May 18, 2016
Communication is the primary thing we all do for work. This article outlines some of my favorite tools for communicating, tracking how we use our time, capturing our ideas, organizing projects, and improving remote meetings.
Published May 4, 2016
Your print business website should be a living, engaging, and a results delivering part of your business growth plan. For business-to-business printers, this means delivering qualified leads to your sales team.
Published April 27, 2016
Growing your business is more about marketing than it is about hiring more sales people today. The sales cycle is moving online where good marketing programs can nurture prospects from initial inquiry to paying customer.
Published April 20, 2016
The print industry’s technology is too closed, too proprietary, making it overly difficult for print businesses (the entities that make this whole ecosystem work) to access, use, distribute, and learn from the data their business’ generate every day. If we keep at this, we will choke off the only thing that matters (growing print businesses).
Published April 13, 2016
Technology decisions can be costly, not just in licensing/subscription fees but in the time and effort it takes your team to implement, learn, and launch technologies to your customers. One of the aspects of the Infigo product suite is the ability to add modules as you continue to diversify.
Published April 7, 2016
Find peers to collaborate with at all levels of your company. When your web-to-print person gets stuck, they should have life-lines to other printers who have the same technology. Don’t rely solely on the vendor. Industry events are the best places to meet peers who share your challenges.
Published March 30, 2016
Your customers don’t want to be trained, your customers want you to make them look good in front of their boss, get them promoted, and generally make their lives easier. Don’t try and educate your customers, sell them on what’s in it for them if they adjust their behaviors (e.g. use your web-to-print system, submit print-ready PDF files, etc.)
Published March 23, 2016
One workflow for all job types results in wasted labor, unrealized profits, and slower turnaround times. The modern print business has to drive automation by creating different routes for different job types. The approach has to be strategic, because automation in one area can create congestion in another.
Published March 16, 2016
Web-to-print is a strategic initiative that creates two service level paths through your organization; self-service and full-service. Your leadership is the key ingredient required for success.
Published March 9, 2016
As we move more business online, utilize digital communication channels, and look to diversify – our print business marketing becomes more critical to our overall business success.
Published March 2, 2016
At Dscoop this year, we will be presenting a series of Tech Talks in the Dscoop Collaboration Station on the show floor. We are all on a steep learning curve when it comes to technology. Join us to get a dose of technology education across a wide range of topics. Bring your technology leaders to Dscoop; their importance to your business is growing!
Published February 24, 2016
Your web-to-print initiatives should be focused on the “jobs-to-be-done” for your customers. What can the customer “hire” your web-to-print system to do for them? Web-to-print ROI comes from a 100% focus from your customer’s perspective.
Published February 17, 2016
Customers ask for a lot, they want us to service them but they also need us to apply our expertise to their challenges. The customer can and should be challenged based on your expertise.
Published February 3, 2016
Business meetings can be horribly ineffective, yet with a set of small hacks you can unleash the productivity and innovation your company desperately needs. Here’s the good news, all you need is some Post-It Notes and a phone.
Published January 27, 2016
As technology continues to change at a rapid rate, collaboration needs to extend into the functional areas of your business. Don’t stop at creating a peer group for print owners, encourage your accounting lead to get into a peer group, each functional area should have multiple sources of knowledge sharing.
Published January 27, 2016
In studying the Propago product, a consistent theme reverberated throughout the product; this product was built based on real-time feedback from live users in a large scale deployment. The approach to solving the business challenges of web-to-print are rooted in data-driven decisions rather than theoretical solutions to ill-defined challenges. Propago came out of a large commercial printing organization that consisted of twenty-five companies across the nation.
Published January 20, 2016
It’s time to stop talking about what we should become (marketing services providers) and actually take the steps that move us in that direction. Think through a go-to-market strategy for offering digital products, execute on that plan on your print business’ marketing, enable your sales team, and start diversifying your revenue streams for the digital age.
Published January 13, 2016
In Print MIS implementations, your business data entered into the Print MIS database structure creates the data model of your business. Your attention to detail at this critical juncture of Print MIS implementations can set you up for success.
Published January 6, 2016
Cimpress (parent company of VistaPrint) is expanding into the core of the print market; “upload-and-print”. They are buying demand generators and no doubt investing in user experiences that will enable self-service online purchasing of print for the largest segment of the print industry (manufacturing of the customer’s design/file).
Published December 16, 2015
Last week I attended Singularity University’s Executive Program in Silicon Valley. The best way to describe what happened to me after a week of hearing some of the brightest people in tech talk about the future is that they dramatically changed my perspective. Come to find out, I had a very narrow lens through which I viewed the world; they replaced it with a wide angle lens that goes beyond our planet and looks far into the future.
Published December 9, 2015
Rather than face the reality that all print businesses need to evolve, many print owners default to staying “busy” running the business the way it’s been run for years. Don’t be tempted to “numb yourself” by keeping busy, the market conditions are indisputable, the past performance of your print business is not indicative of future results. We are operating in a different reality with very compelling digital alternatives to print communication.
Published December 2, 2015
Most printers are business to business (B2B), they do business with other businesses that they have a working relationship with. Business-to-consumer (B2C) is the term used for online businesses that serve anyone who shows up on the website (not necessarily just consumers). As printers consider B2C, they need to understand what it takes to build a successful online business.
Published November 18, 2015
Integration projects span a wide spectrum, from cheap and easy to complex and very expensive. Focus all your attention about print software integration from one place – your business objectives.
Published November 11, 2015
The topic of single points of failure is typically reserved for technology, yet most businesses have humans as their most critical single points of failure. For your business to scale, be sustainable, and to be data-driven, you have to start transitioning knowledge from humans into systems (e.g. Print MIS).
Published November 10, 2015
Your Print MIS or Print ERP is the most important print software in your business. The process for purchasing a Print MIS is dysfunctional; avoid these five common mistakes in your Print MIS sales process.
Published November 4, 2015
Web-to-print is a critical piece of your online presence. The ability for your customers to easily transact with you online is no longer a differentiator, it’s an expectation.
Published October 21, 2015
This pace of change is outrunning your print business’ technology decisions. A web-to-print platform decision you made two years ago could be completely out of date with the mobile-first world we live in today. Your aging ERP/Print MIS system has no way of understanding a product that exits your building via an Ethernet cable rather than a shipping truck.
Published October 15, 2015
Jennifer Matt speaks about the dramatic transition we find ourselves in the middle of today, from physical communication mediums to digital devices. This transition is impacting all aspects of your business and your customer’s businesses. The per-page business model that print has been anchored to starts to look awkwardly dated in this connected, mobile, marketplace.
Published October 7, 2015
All printers should be thinking about “workflow automation” as a strategic initiative; produce more with less labor, less waste, in less time as a way to remain competitive. Time savings should be strategically invested in diversification, new skills acquisition, and cross-training.
Published September 2, 2015
A sales focus is external. A production focus is internal. A sales focused print business leader is constantly asking the question, “How does this activity/investment improve my customer’s experience or business?” A sales focused print leader escorts the external rate of change into the business at a rate that often makes their employees uncomfortable.
Published August 26, 2015
A web-to-print demo is your chance to demonstrate how your print software technology solves the relevant challenges of a specific customer. The key words are “relevant challenges” and “specific customer”. Do your homework so your demonstration addresses what the customer actually cares about.
Published August 19, 2015
Print software is eating your budget because software is becoming the tool of choice for industry leaders to create differentiation in the marketplace.
Published August 12, 2015
Maintaining and paying for multiple web-to-print solutions is more expensive than you think. Transitioning off legacy systems has positive repercussions for your technical resources and your customers.
Published July 22, 2015
Launching any new print software technology can feel risky. With the rate of change in both our businesses and software technology, we have to create a culture that is comfortable with launching early and iterating through issues. It is impossible to predict every possible scenario; it is liberating to accept that finding issues post-launch is part of the plan.
Published July 15, 2015
Print software is an infrastructure investment in our increasing online and digital economy. Adopting a strategic infrastructure approach to investing in and implementing print software will be a key differentiator for print businesses moving forward.
Published July 8, 2015
Staffing your technology is as important as staffing your presses. The top characteristics for good technical resources: understand the limits of your knowledge, resist making assumptions, and see opportunities rather than roadblocks.
Published July 1, 2015
As the online world continues to expand, your prospects and customers can become more educated buyers. Your response to this is to invest in your online presence so that first impressions count.
Published June 24, 2015
Software is mission critical to your business, like other infrastructure investments it takes time and effort to make the best decisions, plan to get the most ROI, and continue to build differentiation in the marketplace. Optimizing your print software investments comes with challenges which every printer faces in order to compete in an increasingly online, digital world.
Published June 17, 2015
Inbound marketing is the strategy of choice for online marketing, content is the main ingredient to any successful inbound marketing strategy. Your content has to be optimized for two audiences; your target customers and the search engines.
Published June 3, 2015
Web-to-print is our term for moving customer engagement online. This represents a big change for most traditional business-to-business printers. This article describes the top five mistakes I see when working with printers through this transition from an offline business to an online / self-service customer interaction model.
Published May 27, 2015
When you need a custom software solution, think about assembling a puzzle rather than building from scratch. The software landscape is full of integrate-able pieces that can give you ‘expected’ functionality so you can focus your custom development on what makes you ‘unique’.
Published May 13, 2015
Looking backwards won’t help you navigate the uncharted waters of the future. The print businesses of the future will adapt to remain relevant in a digital, online, and data-driven world.
Published May 6, 2015
Your marketing should talk more about your customers than about you. Compelling marketing content is about telling customer success stories to teach and attract more customers who find your content relevant to their current challenges.
Published April 24, 2015
What’s more costly, opening up a new successful retail location or a new successful online brand/store? The answer is “it depends”. Just because making a new e-commerce site is “cheap” doesn’t take into consideration all the costs of driving traffic and getting conversions.
Published April 15, 2015
Self-service is a growing preference among customers, pricing transparency is a feature of our online world, and speed is a growing differentiator in all aspects of our business. arifiQ has focused on a pivotal function of print – estimating/quoting; enabling printers to adapt to the new realities of our increasingly digital, online, and fast-paced business environment.
Published April 14, 2015
MarTech – the Marketing Technology Conference took place March 31, 2015 in San Francisco. I attended to see how print is being represented within the modern marketing mix.
Published April 10, 2015
You haven’t updated your website in over two years. You don’t remember if you have a LinkedIn page, you thought someone once tweeted something, and you recently had a customer complain about not being able to find you online.
Published April 6, 2015
A data-driven print business starts with a trusted system of record and then as selected meaningful metrics that influence your business decisions and your staff’s daily behavior.
Published March 30, 2015
The online channel is in the language of the customer and you have to compete to be found. These fundamental characteristics of this channel should drive your online presence at every level.
Published March 23, 2015
Expand your thinking in many directions, beyond the four walls of your manufacturing operations, beyond your business into your customer’s business, and beyond print to the other communication methods that are complimentary to print.
Published March 16, 2015
Marketing is about delivering qualified leads to your sales team. The online world has converted marketing into a role that can be precisely measured. Start thinking of marketing as a role with a quote (# of qualified leads delivered), stop thinking of marketing as your brand colors or business card design.
Published March 9, 2015
If your focus is all internal, you are missing the broader context of how your products and services are utilized within your customer’s business. Loyal customers are created when you help them achieve their business results, that means engaging with customers in the broader context of their business.
Published March 2, 2015
The first impressions of your business will be online. How does your online presence compare to you offline presence? Can prospects understand your business and what you can do for them from your website, your blog, and your social media channels? Your online presence sets up your sales team for success.
Published February 16, 2015
Do you approach change as an incremental, keep everyone comfortable manner? Or do you see how much the external conditions have changed while your company has stayed still? Is your print software able to support your current and future business needs?
Published February 9, 2015
Let’s get one thing perfectly clear, you DO NOT invest in print software to run your business as it is today. The whole point of software is to enable you to run your business differently - creating more efficiency.
Published February 4, 2015
Twenty years ago when we described the function of marketing we would have started with terms like “creative” and “messaging.” Then we would have talked about distribution channels for getting these creative assets and messages out to the target audiences, primarily consisting of print, TV, and radio.
Published February 4, 2015
When local businesses moved from “getting found” via the yellow pages to internet search so much changed.
Published February 2, 2015
Every business owner has ideas, plans, and a vision for what they want their company to become. There is never a shortage of ideas; there is a severe lack of execution. Good project management can convert more of your ideas to reality through a disciplined execution process that annoys most people involved (especially impatient, attention deficit prone business owners).
Published January 28, 2015
The dining experience at fast food restaurants isn’t about the dining experience at all. It’s about the price, the availability, and the consistency no matter where you are in the world. The value proposition is clear, you serve yourself, you’re encouraged to clean up after yourself, and clearly by the comfort of the seats, you aren’t encouraged to linger.
Published January 26, 2015
Frustration happens, especially with print software projects like Print MIS and web-to-print. When frustration happens do you flex, adjust, look for a solution or do you stay in that frustrated state? Find evidence of the behavior you want more of and reward that behavior, in your people, in your vendors, in your partners – that will accomplish more than yelling, escalating, and threatening will ever do.
Published January 19, 2015
EFI Connect, Dscoop X, AMPS Executive Leadership, NPOA, and PODI, the upcoming industry events where you have an excellent opportunity to connect and collaborate with peers. Do you want to do everything in your power to assure your next print software decision is a good one? Get the whole story from a peer who has already implemented the solution.
Published January 19, 2015
Jennifer Matt sat down with Jacob Aizikowitz to find out how XMPie approaches integration with other systems. What XMPie is doing to support mobile. And how they help printing companies find success with online services.
Published January 12, 2015
The checklist RFP (Request For Proposal) fails to deliver the best purchasing decision. Your peers (the voice of current customers) are your most trusted source of information about how print software products perform in live environments and how print software companies support their customers after the sales process.
Published January 7, 2015
The PrintVis MIS solution has a phenomenal product span, meaning the ability to “flex” in both directions, respond to growth and decline. In this Product Spotlight, Jen Matt reviews the PrintVis MIS solution.
Published January 5, 2015
Change is viewed as risky because we want to believe that past success guarantees our future success. Your customers are changing, technology is changing, and your competitors are changing, why would you think that maintaining the status quo is anything but the riskiest thing you can do? Standing still is the only way to assure your business’ decline
Published December 15, 2014
Often the best way to drive a print software solution’s adoption rate is to eliminate the complexity. How ironic is this? We buy print software products based on extensive feature lists and then we drive adoption of the software by turning most of the features off so people will actually use the tool. Isn’t that an awesome irrational cycle we put ourselves into?
Published December 10, 2014
The online channel is vital to the future of your print business. The online channel includes all the ways you engage with your customers online. Every new channel you open up with a customer increases the overall loyalty of that customer, creates barriers to entry for your competitors, and has the potential to decrease the customer burden of doing business with you by offering self-service access to your business.
Published December 1, 2014
Your people have the power to resist print software technology changes by focusing on the challenges instead of finding solutions. Your job as a leader is to portray technology as a complimentary tool for your people to work more effectively.
Published November 24, 2014
Web-to-print technology and the customer facing resources working in print today need to evolve together so we can support online “collaborative commerce”: a procurement process that requires collaboration between the buyer and the seller.
Published November 19, 2014
CoreBridge is a cloud based, multi-tenant software solution whose business model is subscription based. Like pure technology startups, CoreBridge’s pricing model is easy to understand, available on their website, and allows you to start small and grow with CoreBridge through volume and/or functionality.
Published November 17, 2014
First impressions of your business matter, especially to new prospects. More and more first impressions are online. How does your online presence compare to your offline one?
Published November 13, 2014
Unless you are a large public company who needs to “protect their brand” and produce appropriate messaging for Wall Street (otherwise known as corporate marketing), the primary role of marketing in your organization should be lead generation.
Published November 10, 2014
The raw potential of what technology can do for our business is unlimited, like a book a matches there is great possibility. Execution is about determining which match (project, goal, objective) you are going to put your energy into to ignite and then sustain your focus to create real change. Dreaming helps you think big, executing forces you to act within the constraints of your environment (resources, market, customers, and budget).
Published October 31, 2014
I am involved in a lot of conversations where companies and people are trying to solve a business challenge with software. Communication is so compressed nowadays, people’s time is limited, and we are almost always communicating across multiple time zones and frequently across cultures. This makes a common understanding difficult and opens up lots of opportunity for confusion.
Published October 27, 2014
Online search has replaced the Yellow Pages as the primary way local businesses get found. This change requires a very different approach by businesses and a steep learning curve. The online world requires you to compete to be “found” for a lion share of the search traffic. The competition is constantly changing, therefore local businesses need to make a sustained investment.
Published October 24, 2014
Change evokes fear in some, excitement in others, and dread in many. What we can all agree on, change is picking up the pace.
Published October 22, 2014
Jennifer Matt rants about what she hates about software technology demonstrations.
Published October 20, 2014
Efficiency requires the segmentation of your workflow into at least three different workflows: self-service, light-service, and full-service. Each workflow applies the appropriate amount of labor and technology to deliver on the promise to the customer in the most efficient manner possible.
Published October 8, 2014
Jennifer Matt talks about how to think about marketing for printers. Start with the very simple premise - who are you going to market to? Don't skip over this critical step because its required for everything else you do in marketing.
Published September 29, 2014
Change is difficult for most people; everyone travels at their own pace through a process that starts with resistance and for most finishes in acceptance. You can improve your chances of success by communicating a lot in the beginning, providing emotional support in the middle and then becoming more of a coach once people are starting to accept there is really only one option – adapt or leave.
Published September 29, 2014
Web-to-Print and Print MIS vendors have always been represented at Graph Expo mostly hidden amongst the presses, wide format devices, and finishing gear. The trend we are seeing is less heavy equipment at the show, hence more room for software solutions to get the air time they deserve.
Published September 26, 2014
This product spotlight focuses on three areas of the PageDNA offering: the store building wizard and project management approach to configuring new storefronts, their open approach to integrations, and the flexibility of their services model.
Published September 24, 2014
Jennifer Matt talks about redirecting your marketing focus on your customers first, then use the social media tools that your customers use.
Published September 19, 2014
Adapting to the new realities of our digital world is a challenge for all industries. Digital Darwinism impacts all of us because the rate of change in technology and society is outpacing our organizations. Change is inevitable; the pace of change has to accelerate if you’re going to be on the survivor side of Digital Darwinism.
Published September 19, 2014
Jennifer Matt talks about what might be the cause of your repeated failure with web-to-print solutions.
Published September 17, 2014
Jennifer Matt simplifies and defines the topic of online marketing in terms of two very simple ideas; driving traffic and converting the visitors who show up.
Published September 17, 2014
This product spotlight focuses on three areas of the EPMS Print MIS offering: the continuous expansion of Print MIS direct users, the support for an industry that is aggressively diversifying, and the ability to make EPMS work uniquely for your business through customization and integration.
Published September 8, 2014
The three top reasons web-to-print projects fail; the lack of business leadership, the sales team fails to sell the solution, and the customer fails to adopt the solution.
Published September 2, 2014
We confuse tools for solutions. Print software is a required tool that is part of an overall investment in making your business more productive, profitable, and competitive. The business results come from your vision, your plan, and the deployment of your labor who utilize the tool to deliver the business results you desire.
Published August 28, 2014
Lots of Print MIS systems have added CRM modules to their offering. This makes sense, the Print MIS should be your system of record for all the interactions you have with current customers, adding a layer on top of your Print MIS would give you access to all the business the customer transacts with you.
Published August 25, 2014
Would you put your Sales department in charge of your next IT project? Heck no! So why do you put your IT department in charge of your web-to-print projects?
Published August 21, 2014
Jennifer Matt talks about how web-to-print can enable printers to extend their value beyond the shipment of printed materials. Web-to-Print allows you to start providing marketing logistics to your customers.
Published August 18, 2014
Customers expect more from their vendor partners than simply delivering the product on time and at a fair price. As the print industry continues to contract, differentiation is required to remain competitive. Printers are at risk from print-manufacturing independent service providers because customers are looking to reduce the number of vendors and engage with vendor partners who make doing business with them very easy.
Published August 14, 2014
Published August 14, 2014
Jennifer Matt talks about the topic of print software integration, how to ask the right questions during the sales process, and how to understand the key components of integration.
Published August 11, 2014
Customer preference is trending towards self-service, yet most printers continue to offer only one way to do business with them – a full-service order entry process that involves multiple back and forth communications between customer and printer via e-mail/FTP.
Published August 7, 2014
Print Software Section Editor Jennifer Matt talks about the common causes for web-to-print systems that are under utilized or not used at all.
Published July 31, 2014
Jennifer Matt talks about the importance of selling software solutions in the form of benefits to the customer instead of the features of the product.
Published July 24, 2014
Print technology of all kinds; presses, production software, Print MIS software, and web-to-print technologies have one thing in common – they are constantly changing. This one factor probably causes the most pain in the purchasing process. As a buyer you want to feel confident with your purchasing decision, yet the very thing you’re investing in is in a constant state of change.
Published July 24, 2014
Print Software Section Editor Jennifer Matt talks about why you would want to integrate with a customer's technology. A key to building customer loyalty is to decrease their burden to do business with you.
Published July 17, 2014
Jennifer Matt gives some key tips on how to brand your web to print offering by telling your story and not using the term web-to-print or the software solution you are using.
Published July 10, 2014
Jennifer Matt discusses how to approach winning a big print sale by asking your customers to make a series of little decisions. Big decisions send your sales process up the food chain, cause delays, and often result in pricing concessions. Taking the path of a lot of small decisions can get you to the same place with less resistance.
Published July 9, 2014
A printer e-mailed me recently and said, “the Vice President of Procurement at our biggest customer is open to a meeting but she wants to know what I can do to save her money.” Of course she does, she’s always wanted her vendors to engage with her in a way that solves her business challenges and makes her look good.
Published July 1, 2014
Your sales team creates customer demand for your products and services, your production team fulfills that demand by manufacturing quality printed products on-time. Both your sales team and your production team need to be SOLD on the strategic, long-term importance of creating digital connections to your existing customers and using digital connections to win new customers.
Published June 24, 2014
Customers have challenges; the best way to increase your sales is to provide your products and services wrapped into solutions to your customer’s challenges. Solution selling is an easier topic to write about then it is to execute on. Too many people write about the idea without providing guidance on how to get from where you are today (selling print jobs) to selling print programs or solutions.
Published June 17, 2014
Last week I was in Bali, Indonesia, speaking at Dscoop Asia. The event, the travel, and the reading I did along the way came together with a common theme which can best be summed up by a quote from the book I read on the way home.
Published June 5, 2014
When you are the customer, you’re always right – correct? Maybe not always but the relationship between customer and vendor is a tricky one.
Published June 3, 2014
A web-to-print site is all about customer convenience, enabling your customers to order from you in a self-service fashion. One thing to understand about your customers is whether they are ordering or shopping.
Published May 29, 2014
WhatTheyThink's Jennifer Matt talks software implementation and the concept of "lean startup". Jen argues applying the lean startup concepts to web-to-print implementations can help improve the speed and effectiveness of the process.
Published May 29, 2014
We think we know our customers, we think we know our market; we think we can predict the future, we can’t and we shouldn’t invest lots of money without building in the ability to test our assumptions with data rather than opinions and theories.
Published May 15, 2014
Jennifer Matt, Managing Editor of WhatTheyThink's Print Software Section, asks one of her favorite questions: "How would you sell against yourself to your biggest client?"
Published May 13, 2014
Web-to-Print is a sales and marketing project that happens to involve technology, yet most printers delegate the leadership of web-to-print projects to their technical resources. We are collectively as an industry putting too much emphasis on the technology and not enough emphasis on the sales and marketing aspects.
Published May 6, 2014
There are several marriage mistakes that lead to divorce: cheating, dishonesty, addictions, and major changes in priorities. What does this have to do with your print management information system (Print MIS)? I am suggesting that your Print MIS is your most important business partner.
Published May 5, 2014
Welcome to Print Software, WhatTheyThink’s new special interest section. Because software is the primary tool of the information age, we wanted to create a specific area dedicated to this topic. Virtually every decision you make about your business involves some software technology or the requirement for connectivity/integration.
Published April 30, 2014
The sales process sets up the critical transition period from lead to customer. Customers remember what was said in the sales process and they often use this to guide their approach to implementation. Don’t inadvertently focus your soon to be customers in the wrong direction.
Published April 21, 2014
Activity does not equal results. You can be really busy, work really hard and fail miserable because you were busy doing the wrong thing.
Published December 17, 2013
The online world enables good online marketing to escort prospects through the sales process (know me, like me, trust me, and pay me). Online marketing is a path to scaling your sales reach.
Published December 3, 2013
Technology promises great potential to create leverage in our business. Leverage isn’t created in the purchase of technology; real leverage comes from how the use of the technology changes the behavior of the people who use it.
Published October 11, 2013
When I interview print sales representatives and ask them why their customers do business with them, they almost always say because we have a great relationship, our service is great, and our people are great. Relationship selling is a very common way to sell.
Published September 24, 2013
The default for decades has been, when you want to communicate something (a marketing message, information, education, compliance message, etc.) you contacted your printer and discussed the timeframe, manufacturing specifications, and quantities. Printers could be passive
Published August 27, 2013
Outbound marketing is promotion-based; spread the message about my company, my products, and my services to as many people as I can interrupt in the hope that some will find the message relevant. Print examples of this are blasting out huge direct mail campaigns to strangers, newspaper advertisements, and billboards.
Published August 20, 2013
A 2002 Standish Group study of software projects found that 45% of features were never used and only 20% features were used often or always. We base our software investment decisions on the number of features a product has and then we fail to utilize 80% of those features. Does that make sense to anyone?
Published July 30, 2013
We collectively make a lot of poor software decisions, according to my very bias and unscientific research we make way more mistakes in this area than we do with other business decisions. What is it about technology that causes a collective brain freeze when it comes to making good decisions?
Published July 23, 2013
For many years I cringed every time I heard someone in the print industry say, “printers need to become marketing service providers.” My initial reaction was always, are you kidding me?
Published July 2, 2013
I was involved in an RFP-like process recently, the organization made the following statement which I haven’t stopped thinking about since it dropped into my consciousness.
Published June 18, 2013
The number one best answer to any question posed by a prospect during the sales process is a clarifying question (hopefully several of them). The two best clarifying questions are, “what business challenge are you trying to solve?” and “how would you define wild success?”
Published June 4, 2013
Doing business online requires an infrastructure investment. Your business needs to be able to control content, commerce, and customer engagement online from your home base online – your domain.
Published May 21, 2013
A commitment to real change requires real risk because you have to be all-in for it to work. Too many technology projects fail because nobody was committed to bring forth the change necessary for success.
Published May 7, 2013
Technology alone does not create value, differentiation, or competitive advantage. It has to be combined with strategy and execution (by your people) – that’s where real differentiation happens.
Published April 9, 2013
Business-to-business commerce may not be getting the headlines in the print industry, yet across all industries in the US it’s nearly twice the size of the business-to-consumer market. It’s vital that printers understand the B2B opportunity and not confuse it with jumping into a price war with retailers online.
Published March 12, 2013
Web-to-print is a product that should do a “job” for you and/or your customers. When you look at technology purchases through the lens of “jobs” you focus on what’s really important.
Published March 4, 2013
The greatest investment you can make in your business is to assure you living the example of a lifelong learner for your organization and then surround yourself with other lifelong learners.
Published February 12, 2013
Too many mistakes (big ones) are being made in our industry around software purchases at a time when nobody can afford expensive mistakes. Virtually all of these mistakes are preventable.
Published January 21, 2013
There is no shortage of talk about web-to-print technologies; there is too little talk about printer’s online strategies. Printers can talk for hours about how this or that web technology has failed them or this or that technology is what made all the difference.
Published December 7, 2012
We have a choice how we react to mistakes/failures. This is an area where we can learn from the technology startup world. Mistakes are learning events; sometimes very expensive but invaluable learning opportunities which should be analyzed to get everything you can out of them. Learning from mistakes requires you to remove the moral mindset to your reaction and replace it with an economic mindset.
Published November 16, 2012
The print industry is facing a tectonic level change in the communication business. You have to chart a new course that takes these changes into consideration in order to remain competitive. There are many options; the only one that isn't viable is the status quo.
Published November 5, 2012
Cary Sherburne speaks with WhatTheyThink contributor Jennifer Matt about what she calls the "getting real stage" of web-to-print.
Published October 29, 2012
Jennifer Matt talks about mistakes printers make in selecting a web-to-print technology and how to avoid the pitfalls.
Published October 19, 2012
Being busy does not equate to delivering results. We are so caught up in the culture of busy we forget to reflect on why we're doing what we do and how it contributes to the results we seek.
Published October 5, 2012
The web-to-print market is fragmented and hard to determine clear leadership or market share. EFI's acquisition of OPS consolidates the market (slightly). EFI's market share will grow, their product offering will be more comprehensive, and OPS will benefit from EFI's well developed channel partnerships.
Published September 14, 2012
Web-to-print has to become the set of tools that enable printers to be competitive on the web. This is a whole lot more than a B2B business card site. It requires us to rethink the way we shop for solutions and partners.
Published August 17, 2012
Who do we respect most in business? The individuals or companies who talk the best game or the individuals or companies who execute?
Published July 30, 2012
Much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for humans, printers need to elevate their offerings above quality, service, and price in order to stay competitive.
Published June 19, 2012
Software is the tool to remain relevant and integrated with the new communication methods. The print industry’s future will depend on embracing software like we did manufacturing – creating new reasons to print and optimizing and integrating existing applications.
Published March 23, 2012
Why has marketing been given such a long leash for so long or, in most cases, the only leash is the budget? Spend as you wish, hope it has a positive impact, and stop when the budget is gone. Marketers are good at pointing out their impact but when pressed, they typically can’t identify which part of their spend had the desired impact.
Published February 17, 2012
Technology on its own cannot solve your business challenges. It can play a part, it can enable your strategy, it can free up your labor but the real benefits of technology come from the people and the processes around it.
Published December 6, 2011
If you’re walking around trying to push your products and services on potential customers, you’re asking them to give you a slice of their pie (their business). This is a hard sale because you’re dipping into a limited resource.
Published June 7, 2011
Every established business works with previous decisions, no matter their subject (technology, business strategies, or personnel), they all share a common challenge to change. You are faced with moving from a certain state (your legacy decision) to an uncertain state (the better results you seek).
Published May 17, 2011
Innovation can increase the size of existing markets by expanding the addressable market size. While many printers are looking to expand outside of print, there is still room to expand the print market into previously unaddressable segments by leveraging technology.
Published April 8, 2011
Sales isn’t just about being able to meet the stated needs of the prospect. Sales is a dance that starts with a gut feeling. First gain trust and show respect. Only then will your prospect be tuned into your intellectual pitch.
Published March 17, 2011
Sales is the start of every business process, this is where expectations are set. The temptation to say “yes” to everything has repercussions downstream especially with technology sales.
Published February 25, 2011
The business process of print spans the needs of several technology solutions. Whenever multiple technologies exist, there is potential overlap and the need for integration. Get clear on what each technology’s core purpose is and then determine your source of master data throughout your workflow.
Published January 21, 2011
Where does your business transition start? Changing WHAT you do or HOW you do it? The first step to evolving your business in the digital economy is to transition your existing business from an offline business to a primarily online business (HOW you do your business is leveraging the digital infrastructure).
Published October 4, 2010
These days software companies are building products that they know will get used in larger “mashup” solutions. The trend in software has moved towards simpler, interchangeable apps with fewer features but better functionality. The recent Mimeo-FSI partnership highlights a great example of an existing company getting dragged into the present to make the adjustments necessary to be competitive.
Published September 7, 2010
We hear a lot about cloud computing being the next big thing. WhatTheyThink’s Jennifer Matt explores how this new platform is impacting printing, and how three major players are planning to use it to change how you get your printing done.
Published August 10, 2010
The modern marketing budget has many more choices beyond print, and some of these choices are essentially free to implement. What are the roots of this massive change and how does it relate to the print industry?
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