Take a Critical Look at Your Business, Idealliance Urged Assess your company’s strong points and where it needs to improve. A presentation at the Idealliance Theater (Booth 1009) got GRAPH EXPO 16 off to a sensational start Sunday afternoon. The occasion was Idealliance Managing Director Mike Philie’s program on “Strategic Business Assessment: Taking a Critical Look.” In the wake of the merger of Idealliance and Epicomm, the now-merged staffs of the two organizations are seeking to address management and technology needs of their member companies across the entirety of the visual communication supply chain. Today’s environment for printing companies offers no shortage of obstacles, Philie said. The hurdles include downward pricing pressures, declines in legacy business like offset printing, legacy salesforces, legacy thinking and processes, and the inability to attract new employees, among other headwinds. “Everyone prints today,” Philie commented, adding that as different sectors enter each other’s business, lines of competition are being blurred. When companies get in trouble, certain triggering events tend to be the catalysts for outreach. There’s a failure to attract new people, the company owner may take ill, or there could be stagnant sales growth. “When you later ask yourself what happened to that $100,000- a-year customer that now is $10,000 a year, it’s too late,” Philie explained. It’s essential to take advantage of technology to build velocity, and take jobs through the production process more quickly, he noted. Print providers have to land the right talent, everyone from promising newcomers to managers who can take the company to new levels of profi ts and success. “And we have to manage our companies through changing environments,” he stressed, adding, “we know many companies are often 70% into the buying process before they want to talk to a provider.” What Philie called “The IDEAdvisor Trilogy” from Idealliance includes the eKG Competitive Edge Profi le, Leading Indicators Competitive Benchmarking, and Management and Best Practices Assessment. The eKG Compet it ive Edge Profi le is a competitive tool that can help identify when a company is falling short against its competitors and the steps it can take to increase the “value gap” between it and its competition. Leading Indicators is a free Mike Philie, Idealliance Managing Director online fi nancial profi le and allows companies to not only benchmark but see trend lines in their areas of business. “If your competitors are fl at and your revenues are going down, that’s a concern,” he said. The Management and Best Practices Assessment, Philie says, allows companies to drill down to clients’ discipline, policy consistency, and fi nancial metrics. Companies complete the assessment, designed to learn about their unique business attributes, sales process and strategy, barriers to growth if any, how they’re adapting to a changing market, and where they “knock it out of the park.” They then send the assessment to Idealliance for grading and a recommendation of next steps. “You have to have a base line for where you are before you can get it done,” Philie concluded. MGI Bridges Commercial and Industrial Printing Kevin Abergel, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, MGI Digital Technology Attendees at GRAPH EXPO 16 can witness the North American debuts of several new MGI (Booth 2149) products that push the limits of what can be achieved in print—and it’s no surprise that at least three of these have garnered the company MUST SEE ’EMS awards. The company is branching into new industries beyond graphics. MGI recently acquired a company called Ceradrop, a leader in 3D-printed electronics, which provides some idea of where the company is headed, at least in part. “A lot of our focus is on the future of functional inks for smart printing,” said Kevin Abergel, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, MGI Digital Technology, at a press conference held yesterday afternoon. “It’s not just printing that looks beautiful, but printing that can communicate.” MGI has also bolstered its relationship with KÖra-Packmat, which is the company that manufactures the MGI equipment, and with Konica-Minolta (Booth 1801), which will distribute the MGI portfolio in North America and elsewhere. But it’s the new products that have been unveiled that provide the real excitement. The Meteor Unlimited Colors Press Series, one of the company’s MUST SEE ’EMS Award winners, is a digital press that can print a wide variety of foils, be it traditional gold and silver, as well as hologram, refl ective, Pantone, and other specialty foils. “Not only can we use the foil as our base color, but we can also re-register and print in perfect register on top of whatever foil we deposited, which will then alter the look and feel of the actual toner,” said Abergel. The result is, he added, “‘unlimited colors.’ People can go way beyond a fi fth or sixth color by using all these different kinds of foils.” One specifi c new application this enables is “variable-data digital holograms,” suitable for security printing and packaging. Another MUST SEE ’EMS—voted Best in Category—is the new JetVarnish 3D Evo Series, capable of handling substrates that are 20", 25", and 29" wide, which will allow users to go after different segments, from commercial printing to packaging. The new press is also designed to be as “touchless as humanly possible,” said Abergel, requiring an operator for little more than feeding and stacking. The 3D Evo also features the AIS Scanning System, which improves registration. It scans the entire printed sheet as it goes through the machine, compares the scan to the original digital fi le at many key points, identifi es every pixel that differs—“showing exactly where the paper is breathing and stretching,”—and modifi es every sheet, so that each sheet is custom-registered, eliminating waste and registration setup time. MGI is also introducing the JetVarnish 3DW. Designed for the label and packaging market, it is a 17" 20-to-40-meter per minute rollfed press that can print spot and raised UV, foil, and variable foil, allowing users to print variable-data foil on labels. Additionally, MGI is offering a sneak peek of a future project the company is developing called Alphajet, a B1, six-color digital press with white, varnish, foil, and printed electronics capabilities—for example, nano-conductive inks, allowing users to print chipless RFID for interactive and smart packaging, among other applications. “It not going to just print on paper or plastic,” said Abergel, “but also glass and metal.” In one test application, the unit is printing OLED on automotive windshields. The Alphajet will also print directly on three-dimensional objects like golf balls, offering, said Abergel, “all the advantages of a wide-format press combined with the throughput of an offset press.” The Alphajet is slated to be formally introduced toward the end of 2017. 14 | September 27, 2016 | GRAPH EXPO 16 Offi cial Show Daily | PrintingNews.com
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