Delayed from May, the annual Solimar User Conference moved to the virtual world this week. The conference spanned three days, delivering a couple of sessions per day. The shortened schedule was no doubt welcome by customers who are balancing their work and other commitments remotely. This year’s event centered around the tagline of “evolved” to highlight how Solimar Systems solutions are evolving to meet the needs of the industry—but also pushing print service providers to evolve their businesses.
Pat McGrew, principal of the McGrew-Group and industry evangelist, kicked off the keynote by challenging the audience to evolve their workflows. If the workflow is optimized and efficient, then more time can be focused on serving customers, entering new markets, and delivering new clients. McGrew also challenged the participants to define their unique value proposition (why customers use your products and services versus another provider). Those differentiators can be applied to tangential markets like catalogs, which are the “comfort food of the advertising industry”, according to McGrew.
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| Solimar Chemistry Suite of Functionality |
The Solimar suite of solutions continues to evolve for its existing customers, while also reaching into new printing segments. Earlier this year, Solimar released updates for Solimar Print Director Enterprise (SPDE) Essentials for job management through a simplified solution as well as SOLitrack to include piece level tracking. Two other intriguing announcements relate to the launch of Secure IPP Print Server and the evolution of ReadyPDF Prepress Server. Secure IPP Print Server secures data at rest and in transit using the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), which is important to secure critical data and sensitive customer information in regulated industries and printing environments. ReadyPDF is a tool to simplify the data structure of PDFs to optimize printing and archiving. In lab testing with Keypoint Intelligence, ReadyPDF has shown up to 14-times reduction in file size through real world testing. While Solimar’s legacy may be in supporting transactional print companies, ReadyPDF is a tool with universal appeal for any printer in a PDF-based workflow—particularly those using high-speed digital printers for variable data printing.
An all-time favorite of the Solimar User Conference are the panel discussions, where participants share their production hurdles and use of Solimar products to address those challenges. One case study was presented from Borns Group, Inc., a provider of offline and online marketing solutions based in South Dakota. Using a combination of Solimar tools like SOLFUSION and RUBIKA, the company has been able to increase revenue while decreasing costs by over six figures.
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| Realized Workflow Benefits from Borns Group |
Although industry events have been put on pause for the foreseeable future, the virtual Solimar User Conference is a good reminder that the industry still needs places to connect, exchange ideas, and learn how to evolve their business.
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