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Xplor International held its Xplor22 Conference, an annual event, at the Tradewinds Resorts in St. Petersburg, FL from September 13-15. Vendors, end customers, service providers, and consultants spent several days exploring a range of topics across three educational tracks at this familiar gathering.
While the Xplor team looks forward to planning the next event, this year’s newly renamed Dr. Keith Davidson Lifetime Achievement Award focused on the organization's roots and historical impact its members have had across the industry in print hardware and finishing, variable data printing, web-enabled printing networks, as well as customer communications.
Rather than look at the show in general, we’re going to focus on the winners of this award.
The late Keith Davidson was the founder of Xplor International, as well as president of the company for 16 years. He was also the founder and president of the Electronic Document Systems Foundation. His strategic vision and evangelistic fervor were instrumental in building a worldwide community with thousands of members in over 40 countries.
The following paragraphs detail the history and career biographies of the winners of the Dr. Keith Davidson Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Mind Behind Many Industry Innovations
As a professional product designer, Buck Crawley—a member of the “Who's Who of American Inventors”—is a prolific inventor, industry revolutionary, and business builder. He has developed over 65 commercially successful products for the print industry, been awarded more than 75 US Patents (print, box, and envelop manufacturing and applications make up more than 40 of them), and his inventions have resulted in over $1 billion in sales. He has been a print industry leader for the last four decades and has pioneered packaging industry firsts that include print on demand and books on demand.
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Skip Hank presents Buck Crowley with the first of
four Dr. Keith Davidson Lifetime Achievement
Awardsgiven at Xplor22 |
Crowley has previously founded four successful companies (which have made the Inc. 500 list twice): Lincoln Technologies; Automation Inc.; Buck Automation; and Roll Systems Inc., which pioneered high-volume on-demand printing and mail production autonomous automation.
The Variable Data Print Pioneer
In 2000, Dr. Jacob Aizikowitz founded XMPie and led the company as a global leader in data-driven, cross-media personalization until Xerox acquired it in 2006. Dr. Aizikowitz’s career included positions at Scitex, IBM Research, and EFI. He also served as a Xerox senior executive until his retirement in 2019.
Due to Dr. Aizikowitz's work in personalized business communications, the digital print industry was able to transition from low-value transactional output to higher value and larger volumes of business communications. This transition to business communications accelerated the growth and recognition of digital print as an alternative to offset print.
The Evangelist of Customer Experience in Communications
An outspoken champion of customer communications and customer experience, Scott Draeger has been passionate about customer communications management (CCM) from his first job at National Data Service (NDS) in Chicago. Draeger worked hard to be in the first class of master electronic document professionals (MEDP) and earned his designation. He worked to improve the document generation space and, as a product manager, his innovative thinking led to several significant technology breakthroughs that resulted in new customer experience (CX) software capabilities at Exstream Software, HP, and Quadient.
Draeger established electronic document professional (EDP) designation programs at two companies where he worked to fully fund the EDP certification program—first at HP within the Printing and Personal Systems group (making HP the first major vendor in the document industry to do so), and then at GMC Software (now Quadient) where 21 employees were certified.
He continues to support the industry by serving on the Xplor International Board of Directors and on the Advisory Board Customer Experience a Certification Programs at Rutgers and Seton Hall Universities. At Seton Hall, he works to ensure that CX students are exposed to the wide variety of technology in the CX industry. Draeger also proposed curriculum changes that emphasized the interdisciplinary communication skills needed to advance CX initiatives in the corporate world.
Enabling a Web Printing Services Network
Mark Ferrara began as a manager at Kinkos, the well-known copy center prevalent on college campuses in the late 80s and early 90s. As a member of the transition team when Kinkos was acquired by FedEx Office, Ferrara has been instrumental in the development of web-enabled printing networks and centralized reproduction centers supporting retail locations across the country.
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| Mark Ferrara accepts the Dr. Keith Davidson Lifetime Achievement Award |
As the Market Director for Central US at FedEx Office, Ferrara was responsible for all sales, merchandising, and service operations for a multi-state, $68 million business that included the full-service retail branches, customer facilities, and production-distribution centers. He designed and implemented training and development programs for over 600 retail employees.
He also developed and launched Office Depot's first ever web-to-print solution converting retail copy centers into a nationally scaled digital print network supporting over 20,000 customers and over 1,000 retail stores.
Under Ferrara’s leadership as Sr. Director of Sales and Operations at Office Depot, he helped build a $200M business-to-business print services business through a combination of organic growth, new business development, acquisition, and integration. He assembled and developed a client services team skilled in solutions engineering, large account management, and customer service representation, as well as launched a comprehensive suite of web-to-print storefronts and order management framework.
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