Who Adares wins
PrintMedia Management - August 2008
Adare executive director Alistair Cane talks to Michael Barnett about the QiP Award-winning MC2 marketing portal and life after death for print management.
Few markets within the print media industry have changed as much in the past year as that of print management. Even fewer markets have allowed the companies at their centre to be the architects of those changes, but organisations that not long ago would have slipped neatly into very similar print management shaped pigeon holes are in the midst of revolutionising their businesses - and they are taking very different approaches.
Alistair Cane, executive director of business development and marketing at Adare, believes that his company is in the vanguard of this changing market, and it has an award-winning piece of technology to prove it. The MC2 online marketing portal, customised for clients including international fashion and accessories retailer Tie Rack, earned Adare the QiP Print Management Award 2008, adding to a European Retail Solutions award won just two weeks earlier.
As Cane recalls, the portal was originally conceived as a procurement tool, but developed with the needs of the market into something more: "We had a first version of a print management procurement technology and we wanted to up-skill the capability of that, so we had some workshop sessions with a number of existing clients. We were coming at that stage from a print procurement angle."
What Adare learned was that there was demand from corporate clients not only for procurement functions such as instant quotes and e-auctions, but also for marketing-orientated elements like campaign calendars, online proofing, digital asset management, store profiling, translation/localisation and editable artwork templates. Surveying the market, Adare came to the conclusion that "everybody had some form of print procurement system, and on the marketing side, you could go and buy a digital asset management system"; however, no end-to-end solution met "the requirement of marketers to use some form of portal to help them manage their campaign life cycle".
The initial intention had been for Adare to buy the software from another provider, but since none was available with the required functionality, it led to the establishment of a technology solutions group, which is now partly supported by an offshore development department in Poland. The team works constantly to adapt the MC2 portal to the individual needs of clients, amongst which are Nokia, Fitness First and Tie Rack. Perhaps the most prominent and challenging of Adare's projects, Tie Rack's campaigns comprise 600 or more permutations of printed point of sale material in 15 languages.
The company operates 260 retail outlets of varying sizes in 26 different countries, and took on the Adare portal to manage its entire global campaign. "Before we started work with them, they were managing everything out of Excel spreadsheets," says Cane, "and their biggest problem was that it was taking a phenomenal amount of time. It was a 24-tab spreadsheet as their campaigns are quite complex."
All calculations for purchases of print collateral were made manually from the spreadsheets - a process that Cane says "took weeks". The orders themselves, meanwhile, often did not conform to standardised specifications, because of inconsistent regional practices for describing individual stores. For example, where conventionally windows would be numbered in the UK from left to right viewing the storefront from the outside, in Hong Kong they might be numbered looking from the inside, leading to the wrong sizes of window banners being delivered.
"The key to starting this process for them was getting the store profiling right," says Cane. "They felt they were wasting a huge amount of point of sale collateral because they've got such a diverse style of shop - everything from a railway kiosk to a flagship store. Their categorisation of those stores was very weak so that for some stores they were under-delivering and for other stores they were massively over-delivering and all it did was go in the bin."
Through the MC2 portal, all language requirements; descriptions of window numbers, dimensions and shapes; and information such as the tax status of airside and landside airport outlets can be determined by rules-based drop-down menus, and then locked down. Campaign types are then pre-defined with a particular focus in mind - whether discount-driven or buy-one-get-one-free - and once the duration and locations are selected, the portal starts building the campaign automatically according to the print requirements of each store profile. Artwork is added and messaging edited through the system.
The first campaigns run using MC2 were dummy campaigns to be compared against the manual process, and the only errors found on the system, Cane says, were the result of incorrect inputs from regional managers, perhaps from misinterpreting a category for profiling the stores. Before going live, he adds, all details were verified as "100% accurate".
On the procurement side, the marketing requirements entered into MC2 automatically generate an instant price quotation if the specification meets the criteria of Adare's contracted rates with its roster of print suppliers. If it does not, but is close to one of those contracted print jobs, the client is told what would be needed to meet the criteria. Otherwise, the input from the client-facing MC2 portal feeds into Adare's internal P2 procurement module, and Adare goes out to the market for a price. These prices are logged and made available through MC2, so that if a repeat job is required at a later date, the client can see a price history.
In terms of pure print management, this is where the major cost benefits for clients are seen, Cane says: "For some clients in the past year it has given another 8-9% saving out of our own supply chain, post-P2 versus pre-P2. So the market talks about leveraging spend, but actually leveraging spend isn't about whether you buy £90 million or £150 million. The amount you spend is irrelevant. Leveraging spend is about the intelligence of the data."
Print management has evolved in the last year as its exponents have struggled to eke any more value for its clients from constantly pushing down printers' prices. But as the market for high-volume print has begun to bottom out with progressive consolidation, a "fundamental shift" has occurred in the objectives of the print management business model. "That's being driven as much by the clients as it is by us," Cane says.
"There are still companies out there who have never used print management before and when they try it for the first time, it still adds all the value that it used to add; but when you get to second- and third-generation contracts, clients are saying, 'So what?' and 'What's next?'"
What is next, Cane believes, is a model where web technology is to the fore, being used "to streamline the process and take the administration outside the print procurement process". Savings through intelligent use of data might go to improve a client's bottom line, or might be reinvested into marketing areas. Either way, rather than striving for lower and lower print costs, the print management concept is targeted at allowing the client to utilise its own staff and resources as efficiently as possible, without wasting time and money going repeatedly and manually through processes that can be managed simply online. Adare's procurement people serve the client "almost as consultants to the marketers," Cane says.
In the case of Tie Rack, as well as releasing 36% of the retailer's print budget, the efficiencies achieved through the partnership with Adare freed up two members of the marketing team to focus on core creative objectives as opposed to procurement issues. "When I talk to clients, that is what they want from print management 2.0," Cane continues. "It's more added value advice and support, knowing that the technology and the vendors will drive the best price out of the market."
While some companies are seeking to change the perception of print management as a "black art" by using a 'direct to printer' model, giving clients automated access to the supply chain (and "have made a lot of noise about it", says Cane), Adare is exploiting its technological advantage to streamline the entire process. The numbers - and the awards - suggest that it may be working.
