Mimeo Blazes A New VDP Path

Originally appeared in GATFWorld magazine, August 2008
August 2008 Edition

By Chuck Gehman

If you’ve been reading this magazine for the last several years, you may have seen an article or two that I’ve written. This piece is kind of a watershed event for me personally: it is officially the first article I’ve authored for GATFWorld Magazine as a Printer. The most exciting thing about this for me is that my new employer, Mimeo.com, embodies many of the characteristics and attributes I’ve been writing about in this magazine for all these years. So I was thrilled when I was asked to write a piece for this issue about Mimeo, and talk about some of the exciting things we’re doing.

To me, the most important trends going on in the printing industry are Web-To-Print on the front end, serving customer needs, Personalization and VDP, creating new document types and applications; and Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), addressing the printer’s needs for backend efficiency and its resulting profitability. Mimeo is a great example of all of these concepts put into practice. Obviously, personalization is a very significant trend the industry has embraced wholeheartedly, and Mimeo believes in it very strongly. Before I get into some of the nuts and bolts of what we are doing with VDP (Variable Data Printing), let me explain some of the background that got Mimeo to where it is today.

Mimeo: The History

Mimeo is a 100% digital printing company. We were founded in 1998. Substantially all of our orders come in over the Internet. Our headquarters is in New York City, in close proximity to many of our largest corporate customers. We operate a very large facility in Memphis, Tennessee that is located at the airport. We’re very, very close to the big Federal Express hub there, so we can deliver finished printed products for shipping very late in the evening, and have them on the customer’s desk or at a meeting location very early the next morning. A growing number of our shipments are international, too. At the time you read this, we will be opening our second production facility, also very large, in Newark, New Jersey. All of this seems pretty simple and straightforward until you try to do it; and while it doesn’t appear to be rocket science, we do have a few rocket scientist-types on the payroll.

Mimeo.com is the innovator of online, on-demand document printing and distribution. Our mission has always been simple: To delight our customers with the fastest, easiest, and most reliable way to print, manage, and distribute documents.

Mimeo: The People

There are a number of things that make Mimeo a great company, making a contribution to our customers and to the industry. Being a technologist, my first call would have to be our technical resources: we have a large number of people employed in product management and software development. These are very creative and talented people who operate with an agile mindset. At Mimeo, nothing is impossible and in my short tenure, I’ve never heard anyone say “that’s not my job”. We live in a creative, problem-solving environment that makes it fun and exciting to work here. And these people are not just here to solve day-to-day printing issues. They are here to build better software and processes, and grow the company’s intellectual property—and that’s a key focus of our technical staff, from CTO David Uyttendaele, one of our founders, down the chain of command.

Of our key managers and directors, there is an interesting mix of individuals with printing industry experience, and experience outside the printing industry. For example, Ben Shaw, our VP of US Production, comes from an industry background, whereas Marc Hollander, our VP of Application Development has run global programming teams for major non-printing industry organizations like AOL. Another exciting thing that’s happened here is that a lot of people who come here from outside the industry quickly become experts in printing, because they are smart, and motivated and the expertise of our printing experts rubs off on them. Great examples of this include John Delbridge, my boss and our COO, as well as CEO Adam Slutsky. I’ve never met someone with as close a finger on the pulse of the business and understanding of all the nuances of running a print business as John has; Adam, on the other hand, is just a genius who would excel running any company, and yet is truly engaged in print.

We’ve done a lot of hiring lately (the author included). When you join a company that’s moving as fast as Mimeo and growing at the double-digit pace we are, it’s reassuring to see a large number of people who have been here for five, six, or even eight years. There are two big reasons why we can retain great people, besides how much fun it is to work here: we promote from within, and we have a world-class HR organization led by Chief People Officer Coleen Smith.

Ben Shaw, and his boss Skip Trevethan (another great example of someone who came from outside the industry- Kozmo.com, and FedEx, but is now a print expert) are always looking for ways to improve our shop floor technology. They went to Drupa to scout out new, innovative machines, and you’ll surely see them at GraphExpo looking for more, and meeting with peers in the industry to learn best practices (Lean is a focus.)

At the same time, Mimeo is an Internet shop. We’re on the cutting edge of customer-facing ease-of-use in our Web-To-Print applications, as well as in the development of alternative ways to access our capability: the Mimeo Platform and our MimeoConnect APIs, which will be discussed a bit later in this article.

Mimeo: the Web Applications

When you look at the products in the Web-To-Print application area today, they are generally divided into two major categories: Job Submission, and Catalog ordering. Mimeo has both. We started with Job Submission, which is the technically more difficult application to accomplish. Our Catalog product, called Mimeo Marketplace, came later as a result of customer demand.

Mimeo’s job submission, which is the core of the Mimeo experience, is focused on helping customers create files and submit them into our workflow for production. The customer starts with a document on the screen of their desktop computer, in their favorite application (Word, Powerpoint, InDesign, etc.), and then sends it to us for production. Often, customers will use our “File-Print” technology, which we call ExactPrint. This is a proprietary technology that Mimeo pioneered, and which we believe we are better at than most printing or technology companies. This fall we are releasing a major new version of our “File-Print” driver, which adds several important new features; it is in beta now. Beyond getting the file into the shop, there are two other really important considerations in job submission: helping the customer describe how they want us to produce their job, and showing them a proof so they can be confident they will receive what they want.

Mimeo has developed a world-class capability to allow customers to describe what they want us to produce, without any technical knowledge of print. This is a key to success in Web-To-Print. This fall, we will begin to roll out our next generation user interface, which has been in development for over a year. The new interface will bring about a new level of ease-of-use and expand the range of products that can be specified via a web-based interface.

Proofing has also been an intense focus for Mimeo, employing what we call our EZViewer. Mimeo never provides hardcopy proofs, we use 100% softproofing. When a large percentage of orders enter the workflow at 7pm for delivery at 8:30am the next day, there is no place for hardcopy proofing. Fortunately, Mimeo’s proofing technology (another important internally developed component) brings the user as close as possible on the screen to holding the printed product in their hand. It shows the pages; how the text will flow; any visually apparent issues with graphics or fonts. Finishing options like binding and tabs are portrayed in a realistic manner. For example, if you’re asking for three-hole punch, and you didn’t specify enough of a margin, you will see if the holes punch through text.

Catalog applications are usually more like “business to consumer” (b2c) web storefronts selling anything from books to jeans, and in designing Mimeo Marketplace we looked to those type of sites for best practices. The customer accesses the catalog web site, navigates through a storefront shopping experience, and chooses a print product they wish to purchase. This item could be a static print-on-demand document, a pull-from-inventory fulfillment product (whether print or non-print), or a template-based VDP item (which can take several forms), which the ordering user would customize online and ask us to produce. The MimeoMarketplace catalog storefront offering differs from others in that it supports a few distinct business and relationship models for our customers. We communicate Marketplace to our customers as “the web storefront for your community”, because it helps them use their documents with their own constituencies—whether customers, employees, agents, franchisees or other cases.

At the end of the day, Web-To-Print is specialized e-commerce. We strive to make our systems extremely easy to use so that impatient customers will enjoy the experience, trust us, and naturally gravitate toward us when it comes time to buy print. From an e-commerce standpoint, we understand the business models our customers have in place, and we’ll work with them to get them the reporting and billing they need from our e-commerce infrastructure. We will plug into their Intranets, and we will connect to their e-procurement systems with punch-outs or data feeds, to add value to our relationship.

Mimeo and VDP

What we’ve been doing with our Internet technologies for the last several years has effectively laid the ground work for some sophisticated new applications to be layered on top. Similarly, our investments in digital printing and fulfillment capabilities can be applied to a growing range of document, publishing and marketing applications from collateral, custom bound documents, educational materials, and posters to personalized kits and marketing materials.

The benefits to our customers from utilizing our Internet technologies and digital printing infrastructure include reducing costs, and more importantly, improving results as we help deliver higher quality, more focused and timely communications that directly address their business goals.

Anyone who has built a project or campaign with one of today’s sophisticated VDP solutions knows that they are far from easy to use. They generally require knowledge of graphic arts technology, some programming expertise, and database skills. While these applications are getting somewhat easier, and at the same time more sophisticated, it’s still asking a lot of customers to expect them to understand all these things. They may understand part of the application, for example, the databases (since marketers use databases as perhaps their most important tool), but they won’t know graphic arts technology and they won’t know how to program for VDP templates. The result is a lot of risk and cost for customers, which limits adoption of VDP.

This gives us two choices as a print service provider: we either need to take customers designs or ideas, and build the VDP templates for them, and then execute them, or make it incredibly easy for them to turn their own documents into templates and populate them into our web interface for their users to order. We see the latter as the big opportunity for Mimeo.

For all the technology we employ at Mimeo, we take the build vs. buy vs. partner analysis very seriously. We employ a ton of off-the-shelf technology, both industry specific and in the horizontal IT area. So when it came to making decisions about our VDP strategy, we took that same approach. Our team has become close friends with virtually all the major VDP vendors in the market today.

What we found is that the mainstream VDP solutions from popular vendors offered some very rich functionality, much of which we do not need right now for our applications. And they are all missing things that we DO need. Furthermore, for the most part, they would require a lot of effort to integrate with our own software, which I hope from reading you now understand is so very important to our success. The result of our analysis is that, at the moment, we are not employing mainstream VDP technology from any of the known vendors. This could easily change as we add print applications over time, but our strategy right now is to partner with some basic technology providers and leverage their capabilities with our own development to serve our customers’ immediate VDP application needs.

Customer-facing VDP is initially built into our Mimeo Marketplace catalog application, and will soon move into the core Mimeo job submission applications. Variable data content formats have generally been proprietary and different from those used in office or even graphic arts applications software. As a result, we’re focusing our efforts on addressing this inconsistency, so that our approach to VDP matches our incoming document types and our internal production workflow.

Once orders enter our platform, we employ an end-to-end PDF workflow which includes support for personalized printing. While virtually every job that goes through Mimeo’s platform is a custom, one-off product, the technology to support 1:1 VDP applications is an emerging one for Mimeo.

We’ve streamlined our print production operation utilizing a single workflow for all job types: job-submission, static, catalog-based print-on-demand digital, and VDP. This provides us with reliability and flexibility, while at the same time providing new opportunities for growth and to offer enhanced products to our customers.

MimeoConnect: The Integration Strategy

Mimeo’s platform combines the advantage of the scale of our production facilities and geographic reach (by virtue of our distribution partners) with capabilities to take advantage of digital technologies to tailor customer communications to audiences of one, in new applications, faster: through our web sites and new powerful Internet based APIs, as part of our MimeoConnect integration initiatives.

MimeoConnect is a series of solutions to common challenges faced by our customers. They provide standardized ways to connect customer systems to the Mimeo infrastructure. This allows us to support new applications, with a flexible, extensible architecture. It’s a new front door to our production environment.

The APIs came about when we realized that, because documents and content reside in a wide variety of systems at our Enterprise clients, interfacing those systems so customers can take advantage of our capabilities would streamline their operations, and result in more business for us. This is a key part of our VDP strategy, because corporate systems are generating personalized content without even thinking about it as VDP.

This is a story that business managers, procurement staff, IT people and developers at customer companies immediately embrace. In addition, we’ve begun to attract a community Internet software developers and entrepreneurs who are creating new companies with business models around content and community—Web 2.0, as this has generally become known—that are highly compatible with, and complemented by, Mimeo’s offerings.

MimeoConnect is composed of several methods for connecting to Mimeo:

· Global Standards-based Web services available for Enterprise developers to access Mimeo capabilities.

· Enterprise Integration– Integration available “off the shelf” from Mimeo to allow customer systems to access Mimeo capabilities. These include Single-Sign-On and E-Procurement Punch-outs

• Custom integration– “One-off” integration created by Mimeo to interface with a customer’s proprietary system

• Mimeo Developer program– making the APIs available on the Internet for any developer or Web 2.0 Entrepreneur to connect

MimeoConnect makes it easier to do business with Mimeo by integrating Mimeo printing and fulfillment with customer’s business document creation in a streamlined inter-company workflow. Managers like it because improves end user productivity in the Enterprise. Users also like the seamlessness and the fact that they don’t have to remember yet another username and password. At the same time, it increases their document quality and makes the specification of the documents automatic. Difficult to implement applications, like VDP, can become simple (at least from the user’s viewpoint.) Costs can be reduced in multiple ways: because of the streamlined workflow, and because end users can automatically take advantage of corporate pricing.

Summary

The VDP landscape is changing rapidly. It is inevitable in any technology adoption curve that major disruptions will occur. While VDP means many things to many people, and there are a large number of applications, it is becoming pretty clear that there is no VDP without IT and Internet technologies, and that includes the kind of applications and integration we discussed here. Mimeo is not the only company that is taking this approach—you’ll see our like-minded peers at the Converge conference.

Printing companies need to focus on their customers, and their own goals when implementing a VDP strategy. Those goals aren’t always aligned with what hardware and software vendors are explaining—not because they don’t mean well, but because they aren’t necessarily looking at the business the way printers do. Technology is moving very rapidly in the world, and it’s essential to create the ability in your company to get out in front of it. That is the key to VDP success.

Reprinted with permission from the 2008 GATFWorld. Copyright 2008 by the Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (www.gain.net) All rights reserved.