Eric Vessels: Hi, it’s Eric Vessels with WhatTheyThink and I’m here with Mike Rottenborn who is President and CEO of Hybrid Software. Thanks for joining us, Mike.

Mike Rottenborn: Thanks, Eric.

Eric Vessels: So I understand that you have some interesting case studies relative to workflow automation and web-to-print, going from a web portal all the way through the printing process and how some of your customers are transforming their business and making their businesses more efficient with that.

Mike Rottenborn: Absolutely.

Eric Vessels: Tell me a little bit about that.

Mike Rottenborn: Okay, sure. First off, we all know that the growth of web-to-print has been tremendous over the last several years in all areas. Not just in commercial printing but in wide format, in packaging, labels and even in folding cartons as well. So as the number of orders has increased, the ability to handle those in an automated fashion has become more and more important.

Eric Vessels: An increasing number of orders but also sometimes smaller run lengths.

Mike Rottenborn: Smaller run lengths meaning that there’s less time to absorb the administrative overhead…

Eric Vessels: That’s right.

Mike Rottenborn: Of manually entering that order in your MIS system or billing that order. So what we’ve done for several customers – and we can take a case study. Let’s use a packaging customer.

Eric Vessels: Okay.

Mike Rottenborn: This is a customer that actually sells folding cartons to the public from a website. So these are predefined templates.

Eric Vessels: Okay.

Mike Rottenborn: Of certain sizes of boxes that can be customized online by their customers. Can be previewed online in 3D so that they’re actually able to see the graphics and make sure that the graphics are oriented correctly on the panels of the package.

Eric Vessels: Sure, and in packaging 3D is…

Mike Rottenborn: 3D is critical.

Eric Vessels: An important component.

Mike Rottenborn: Yeah, you wouldn’t want to print a bunch of boxes with the name upside down.

Eric Vessels: Right, right.

Mike Rottenborn: And that’s easy to do in a folding carton environment. So the customer actually designs and approves their boxes and then Hybrid’s Pipeline software pulls that order in through the workflow system all the way through to imposed nested plates that are then output on their press. So they’re able to print short runs of folding cartons much more economically than you could have done in the past.

Eric Vessels: And even some wide format customers – we talked about…

Mike Rottenborn: Absolutely.

Eric Vessels: Are doing the same kind of thing.

Mike Rottenborn: Hybrid has some very high volume wide format customers where we’ll even ingest a full days orders from, let’s say, a major supplier and send those orders through both to the MIS and to the workflow, again using Pipeline. So the orders are created in the MIS system and then sent through to the output device in JDF format.

Eric Vessels: Nice.

Mike Rottenborn: Thanks.

Eric Vessels: Well, thanks for taking the time to tell us a little bit about that. We appreciate it.

Mike Rottenborn: You’re very welcome. Thanks.