The people of Phototype set a goal for their company a few years ago: to become a trusted advisor to all of their clients, not just another vendor. The reasoning was simple: Clients of trusted advisors are happier, more engaged, and invested in a long term partnership because they derive measurable value from the relationship.
But how does a company make the leap from being a vendor to trusted advisor? For Phototype, which provides integrated graphic solutions to consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, the answer lay in data: Phototype would provide its clients with timely, actionable data and reporting that would help them improve quality and make better decisions.
The challenge, however, is that the data their clients need comes from hundreds of printing plants around the world. (More about that in a bit.) At first, Phototype tried using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to collect and distribute the data, but they simply couldn’t keep pace or handle the volume. They needed a more powerful and scalable solution that would allow them to create and automate embedded analytics. After a thorough search, they turned to Actuate and BIRT iHub.
The successful result, an integrated Print Quality Management (PQM) solution called Phototype BizIQ™, was recently recognized by Ventana Research with an Information Technology Innovation Award for Location Intelligence. Shown above, Nobby Akiha, senior vice president, marketing at Actuate, accepted the award from Mark Smith, CEO and chief research officer at Ventana Research, on October 22 on behalf of Steve Carter, senior vice president, technology at Phototype.
Mark Smith praised Phototype on presenting the award: “Steve Carter and the Phototype team demonstrated that data and location intelligence really can be competitive differentiators,” he said. “We congratulate Actuate and Phototype on the use of BIRT to bring together data from many sites and then make it available in many formats to a variety of users.”
A “Transformational Product”
Large CPG companies may have packaging printed at dozens (or even hundreds) of different plants, and on a variety of materials including metal cans, paper labels, plastic bottles and waxy cartons. In spite of this diversity, CPGs demand that their packaging be consistent – for example, that their signature colors appear the same regardless of printing location or material. Those colors are central to their brand identity.
Phototype uses BizIQ to monitor and manage that consistency. Printers sample their runs (physically or digitally) at regular intervals and transmit that information to Phototype; BizIQ uses BIRT to organize, analyze and report that data. The reports are consumed by a variety of users inside and outside of Phototype, including financial experts, account managers and project managers. A portion of sample BizIQ dashboard is shown below; to learn more, download a detailed Actuate case study here.
In the 15 months since BizIQ rolled out, the application has grown dramatically and evolved in many positive dimensions. “We see this as a transformational product,” Carter says. “It mushrooms, it blossoms, and continues to morph into something that we hadn’t necessarily anticipated.”
“For one thing, the number and variety of reports generated with BizIQ has exploded,” says Doug Smith, senior application developer at Phototype. In addition to expanded reporting on basic details of print quality, Doug Smith and his team are using BIRT to check the integrity of data from printers and notify users when data issues arise. “That’s something that we didn’t know BIRT could do,” Smith says. “But we figured out how to make it happen.”
Supporting Every Request
Within Phototype, BizIQ has been adopted by so many employees that Doug Smith and team now have a backlog of requests for user- and case-specific reports. “It’s very popular among our internal employees, who use it to help do their day-to-day jobs,” Doug Smith says. Requests in the queue are prioritized by ROI, he notes; he also says that BIRT has been able to support every request that users have made.
“That’s one nice thing about the Actuate product,” Carter emphasizes. “It’s so flexible. We can have one user looking at BizIQ in one way and another user looking at it in a totally different way. But behind the scenes Doug doesn’t have to do three different things to make that work. It’s the same data, just different ways of presenting it.”
Uptake among Phototype’s clients also is growing dramatically. “Most clients started with BizIQ by receiving automatically generated reports as emailed PDFs,” Carter says. “But then they find that Doug could link those reports to live data in their queues, and they say, ‘Well, let me just log in.’ And so we start building dashboards for them, and the next thing we know BizIQ becomes part of their day.”
The number of external users interacting with live, embedded analytics in BizIQ began small by design, but has tripled in just one year. Whether they’re tapping live data or viewing static reports, Phototype clients are thrilled with the data – and, as Carter hoped, they’re perceiving Phototype as a trusted advisor who helps them improve the quality of their work. “Our customers can see that we have their best interests at heart, and we’re getting more work from them because of it,” Carter says.
For example, one client – a packaged foods company – formerly sent Phototype about half of its work and spread the rest among other vendors. Once it saw the benefits of BizIQ, that company decided to consolidate all its work with Phototype. “That’s a significant amount of new work, and that example is just the tip of the iceberg,” Carter says. He adds that the bottom-line business benefits from BizIQ are snowballing: “When they buy more from us, and do more work with us, they also tell their peers, ‘Hey, you ought to see what Phototype’s doing,’” he says.
Data From Everywhere, In One Place
These business benefits, and the BIRT technology platform that powers them, led Ventana Research to recognize Phototype with an Information Technology Innovation Award. Specifically, Phototype was recognized for its use of location intelligence, which Ventana Research defines (in part) as using “location and geography to improve its operations and decision-making capabilities.”
Phototype’s work is, by definition, location dependent: Its offices are in Cincinnati, Ohio but its customers and printing plants can be anywhere in the world. BizIQ helps these remote locations work together as one: No matter where clients are, they can use BizIQ to see data from every plant where their jobs are printed.
One large Phototype client currently receives data from almost 100 locations worldwide, and plans to incorporate data from 587 locations around the globe by the end of 2016. “Another customer, a big confectionary company, gets data from plants in Mexico, Canada, the U.S., China and Malaysia,” Carter says.
BizIQ enables Phototype to aggregate all data from multiple sources, then segment and display the data any way the customer wants. “We can see how a plant in Mumbai compares to a plant in Italy and a plant in South Africa,” Carter explains. “We can see if we have issues in any part of the world, then drill down and see data specific to Mumbai, and data specific to a project that was run in September.”
This level of detail not only helps to continuously improve the quality of printed jobs; it also gives Phototype clients objective insight into their own operations and choices. “It positions us so we can provide them data that helps them make changes in their own processes,” Carter says. “So by our ability to mine data from their systems, we become their trusted advisor.”
“We’re getting better transparency and understanding on things that make a difference and that helps people take action,” Doug Smith agrees. “It’s not just, ‘Here’s a bunch of pretty graphs or pictures or statistics.’ It’s data that’s useful, meaningful and actionable.”
Read more about Phototype and BizIQ in this Actuate case study. Learn more about the Ventana Research Information Technology Leadership Awards.