Eye on Display’s Post

Transcript

So I'm here with Tom from 4. Peace. Hello, Tom. Hello, Jack. Hello, nice to meet you. Tell us a little bit about four P4P's actually has evolved over the years, originally from being a distributor of software selling to resellers to becoming much more and more of an integrator. And I think that today we try to position ourselves more and more as a. Still transformation and automation agency specifically for the print industry, OK. And so if you ask Phil, what does that mean? Well, we, we typically help printers in all the different segments in the print industry with any digitization and automation problems going from order intake to connecting orders and artwork, automating that up to the printer or the press, but then also providing feedback. Information that can come from the machinery but all the way down to logistics as well, push that, push the information through, but also pull the information back in so that all the different systems are properly connected and you can have an all-encompassing view of the entire manufacturing workflow. So the whole thing. So what sort of companies size what you say or print companies where they were kind of so size wise we typically say it doesn't make sense. Below or turnover of about 5 million, whatever currency that is in. Yeah. And we also say you know anywhere upward from. 1520 orders per day, Yeah. If if you look at the companies that we do deal with that there are the the more recent companies, new companies that have a relatively small team and that see the benefit of digitizing very early because as we all know, it is not necessarily very easy to find proper staff and things like that. But then we also see bigger companies that already are more advanced on the automation and digitization. Track, but still see room for ongoing improvements. OK. So what, what are your kind of USP's in this area where what are you giving us with? So I think that what you see in our industry is that there's traditional graphic arts resellers and those are the ones that sell machinery and consumables, inks and consumables. And happened to sell software with that, right? Yeah, because the machine comes with a piece of software and they might have a technician that does something. Some of these companies have evolved. Some of them have maybe a dedicated dedicated software team, but then typically that team is very small. And also you have a number of other smaller software resellers that as it says they resell the software very often. They don't necessarily implement it. What we see is that if you look at digitization and automation, very often printers have all the technology that they need on the shelf sitting somewhere. However it is not properly implemented, OK. And so when you ask what is it then that we do, we actually implement it and we have a methodology built around that to properly implement. So Simon Pin Company I maybe I take it, I'm getting getting bigger, I'm taking orders, I'm struggling making mistakes and what's the process for sort of identifying, deciding the four pieces. Is the application for them. That's a very relevant question because when you talk about automation, there are many printers that come to us and say, I know I need to do something, but I don't know exactly what. And So what we do when I said when I talked about the methodology is that we typically start with an analysis and specification phase. It's a paid service where we spend about 3 days analyzing where it hurts most and then out of that. Becomes a fairly technical specification, but also a mix of products and services that in which we kind of define what are we going to do in the first phase and what might we do then thereafter? OK. Software. It helps, but it's also a big it's a big decision, it's a big plan to take your business to that level. You could say they you do this sort of analysis which needs, Does that go all the way through to the implementation to the running? Once you've installed, I mean how, how do you look after your customers once they're installed and running? Yeah. So when you talk about installation, you have and your cloud based on you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not necessarily. But you you might have a little bit of a traditional view on how software is run. Yes, there is software that you might still install and we still install legacy software I would say on premise software. I think it is not about installing the software or training somebody on it. When you talk about automation, it is really about how do you configure it, how do you connect it. That is the implementation part. And very often that's where we add the value. OK, good stuff, so. So as a company, where, where are you going from here? Well, presumably you're constantly developing whether any sort of new things you're announcing here. Well, you mentioned clouds, yeah. And so on February, the beginning of February, we actually announced a cloud platform that we've launched called Atomics. I think that what we've seen as we've evolved from a distributor to an integrator. Kind of sat back and and and looked at different suppliers but also at at what who else is out there in the market and look at where the movement to the cloud was going to go. And we didn't really see anybody stand up. And then the feedback was ohh, but we don't get any demand for cloud. I understand that we don't. There's no demand for cloud, but I think that at some point or there there might be less demand for cloud because printers do have a somewhat traditional approach to things. Yeah. However, one of the things that we're seeing is that run links in general are going down. And when you look at an overall trend in the industry, what what we see and what others are also telling us is that you're actually see a transformation going from mass production. To mask customization right, rather than printing 10 million of one thing, you're printing 10 million individual difference variable data and all that. And this is something you can build in and. That is something that we actually already do with some of the existing tools that that we deal with. However, in order to fully support that, you need to be able to go to the cloud. Why? Because traditional software does not scale in the same way that the cloud can scale. And in order to deal with that extremely variable production, you also need to have a technology stack. Variably scale with that, OK. How does that look from the, from your customers point of view, you doesn't affect them particularly other than to make that decision. So if I'm a printer that I'm, I'm working on my system, I'm working in the cloud, what difference it make to me, the difference that it makes you is that from and there is if we look at Atomics, there's different elements to it. It's actually we launched it as one product, one platform. Three different products, yeah. And so I would say at the core is atomic atomics manage. Atomics manage is then what you'll see in the other industries being defined as an integration platform as a service where we connect all these different pieces together, where we transform all the information to be unified bunch of information that then people can look at in a uniform way. And so the fact that. You have a cloud based system that accompany with potentially multiple sites or things like that can easily access is one thing. The second part is atomics prepare and atomics prepare would best be described as an artwork processing API. There's two types of data in the print industry. There's all the administrative information or feedback that comes from machines and then there's the artwork. Yeah, processing the artwork. If you want to make that scalable again, it is something where you can stack up servers at some point. But we today live in a world where you actually can scale back and forth the infrastructure when it is in the cloud. You don't need to manage licenses, you don't need to manage infrastructure. All that is being managed by the platform itself. So that's then what Atomics Prepare does and then the third element, which is at this moment. At least advance, but is you have the individual artworks, you have that overview, then the question is how can we optimally combine different orders together today that is a core technology that does ganging, nesting and in position, but where we'll also see information come back from with regards to pricing and costing and things like that, right? We're here at Fespa and I see you're part of Festival Netherlands, presumably a little bit about what are the benefits to you. This company of being part of this, right. So I think that what we're what we've tried to build up over the recent years is that FESPA in its origin is an organization that wants to promote their members to look at technology, to look at what is moving in the industry as much as possible. Suppliers are part of that. And what we've tried to do rather than doing that on a global level is what is interesting in, in the last couple of years is that some of these local branch organizations have transformed in local chapters of Fespa in those countries where we're present at. And that's Belgium, the Netherlands, France and in the UK where we have local representation as a company, we try to work with the local chapters to provide that technological insight. OK. And so how's the show? Game so far it's been good. Yeah, it's good. Good Crowd. It's good. Yeah. Look, thank you very much. Pleasure talking to you. Same here and I hope to see you soon. Super. Stop.