inkchaser is the leader in automated quoting technology for the printing industry. Using the company's QuoteChaser solution, corporate print buyers can easily obtain quotes for printing jobs from their suppliers in real-time. QuoteChaser is not a collaboration tool that merely passes job specifications between a buyer and supplier. QuoteChaser's complex business logic actually calculates quotes automatically based on supplier parameters. The cost savings the solution generates is significant. The current process time to obtain a quote is 4-6 hours for buyers and the suppliers. With the inkchaser solution, this process time is reduced to only 5-7 minutes. QuoteChaser is also available for printers. Jan Sevcik is the CEO and explains more about this dynamic company. The first question I have to ask is, who is inkchaser? Our company was founded in 1999, during the hey-days of dot com mania, but we resisted the temptations to make business decisions that were not founded in reality and instead focused our efforts on developing a great solution. We operated like a start-up from prior time periods – our office was in the basement of a building in San Francisco and we spent our early efforts primarily on development. Our belief from day one is that with technology as with any other product, you have to deliver a solution at a value to the customer at a price the customer is willing to pay. This means two things. You have to have a solution that delivers that value and you have to control your costs to be able to deliver that solution at the price the customer is willing to pay for that value. Of course, this is nothing new, but was mostly forgotten during the last few years. Why do you think that e-commerce in the printing industry has seen so many failures? Eighteen months ago, the prevailing thought was that the Internet was going to change the world overnight and that you had to implement a solution or you were history. Of course, that was not correct, but it would be just as incorrect to conclude that because there have been failures, e-commerce in printing does not work. I’ve always found it interesting that although other industries may be adopting and embracing similar technologies, people in that industry tend to believe that it won’t happen in their industry because it wouldn’t work because its too complex or whatever. Technology is going to change this industry because there is tremendous inefficiency in this process that can be reduced or eliminated. Furthermore, there have always been failures in any new industry. A lot of the early technologies just did not deliver enough value. How is your company’s software different from the others? There is one key difference. Using our software, a buyer enters their job specifications and our solution automatically generates quotes in real-time from all suppliers in their supply community within seconds. Consider that every time a buyer requests a quote from three printers, this entire process consumes 4-6 hours between the buyer and the staff at the printing companies. Our software reduces this process down to about seven minutes (to enter the specifications and get a quote). I will concede that not every type of project can be quoted this way, yet, but many can and this number will keep increasing. When I refer to automated quotes, I am not referring to a pre-set group of projects that have to be quoted in advance by the printing company. Our application can price many thousands of projects automatically. So tell me how this works? Our software has a buyer interface, a supplier interface, and the business logic. The buyer enters the specifications which include paper, printing, and finishing options into an interface. The buyer interface also includes error checking that alerts the buyer if they have selected incompatible specifications. Suppliers enter their pricing information into an interface which only they have access to. Suppliers also have the ability to have different price structures for different customers and jobs. When a buyer requests a quote, the solution searches for suppliers that are able to print the project based on equipment considerations and then generates quotes for all of these suppliers. It also automatically calculates shipping costs and adds this to the quote. What other benefits does this provide to the Enterprise? Our software also increases the ability to manage contract pricing more effectively, provides a number of reporting options, and identifies similar types of jobs being printed throughout the organization. Who is your Customer Focus? Our solution is targeted primarily to enterprises, but printers can benefit substantially from our solution as well. What has been your company’s primary focus since day one? We focused very intently on the customer experience for both buyers and suppliers. We started with a vision of how to improve the current process and brought in a development team to make that happen, not the other way around. In printing, there are too many issues that arise which can only be answered by having knowledge of the industry. What’s next for inkchaser? There are some upcoming features that use technology well beyond where we are today that will provide phenomenal benefits to both buyers and suppliers, but of course I cannot discuss them. However, aside from that, I will tell you that there is a lot of integration that needs to be done. It’s still one of the biggest challenges ahead for us and everyone else.