David Murken: David Murken, the National Sales Executive for CDS global on Demand Solutions Group.
Ken Williams: Ken Williams, Executive Director of New Business Development for Smart Money Magazine and Smart Money Customer Solutions.
David Murken: Ken, as technology has changed over the last several years with print-on-demand and communication on demand, one of the things that we worked together on and that CDS Global has got a unique application is our bindery and finishing operations off of the delivery and or our IGN III. We’ve been able to work with Xerox and Board to create a perfect binding unit off the tail end that guarantees a perfect bound book will be matched all the way through.
Let’s talk a little bit about how your team and your client have been able to utilize that technology and that workflow to create some very unique applications for their end users.
Ken Williams: Well, the cover driver workflow that you mention is very important to our clients because we utilize personalization in our materials and we work with financial services companies as well has healthcare companies and it’s very important that if you are producing personalized materials that are personalized to that recipient from front cover to back cover, it’s very important that Mary Smith’s guts are aligned with Mary Smith’s cover. So, as you can imagine with just of all the security issues in the environment and even just the disclosure of personalized information unintended, it can cause a lot of problems if all of a sudden, you know, Mike Jones’ cover – Mike Jones gets his cover, opens it up and then there’s all Sally Smiths’ personalized data, all the information on her salary, her investment holdings or her health issue, so you know, that causes obvious problems when you leak that type of personalized data in the marketplace. So, one of the applications that we built with CDS to accommodate that and just provide some efficiencies in the operations of developing these raw materials or welcome kits, and so forth, was the cover driven workflow where it’s actually looking at the individual’s data in building that book from, sort of like, the back forward, right, based on the information that’s contained in the bar code.
So, in the past, it was a two-part process where we would print the personalized materials, the interior of the book, we print the personalized cover, and then we’d marry them up using, you know, some pretty sophisticated technology to make sure you didn’t get a cover/guts mismatch. But, you know, it was a manual process. At some point in the process and you invariably you would get some errors, which you just can’t have in today’s environment. So, the cover driven workflow eliminates that because everything’s done in one print stream, one fell swoop, and you’re assured of making sure that Mike’s cover is with Mike’s interior guts and all the data is complete.