Israel Diary Day 5: HP Indigo Plant in Kiryat Gat (+photos)

March 30, 2013 2 Comments

day_5_coverToday’s agenda is scheduled from start to finish by HP, and is focused on events at the Kiryat Gat Indigo plant.  At 7:45, a bus picks us up to take us on an hour’s journey.

On the bus, I meet Frank Hood, who runs InfoVine in Houston, Texas.  We have a great conversation, and end up seeing quite a bit of each other over the next few days.  Frank is working on his second company, having built and sold the first a few years back.

At the plant, we are scheduled to see various parts of the facility, demonstrating the enormous amount of innovation and engineering that goes into supporting the Indigo.  We start by hearing from Alon Bar-Shany, who runs the entire Indigo Division.  After Alon, we hear from various parts of the organization, and I pick up a lot of interesting ideas.

For example, I learn that HP has a support mechanism called “shared support,” which Frank explains to me is devised to motivate clients like him to invest in training their press operators to a designated level of competency.  When the operator reaches that level, the support fees charged by HP drop considerably (something like 60%).  The idea resonates with me, and I immediately think about how we might be able to apply that to our multichannel marketing automation.

In the evening, HP arranges for dinner at Reading 3, which is at the Tel Aviv port.  We have an enjoyable dinner, and are treated to a show by a local group of entertainers.  Plenty of laughs ensue!

We arrive home around 11:30, and although I’m a bit wound up, sleep is necessary, as tomorrow is filled with more HP activities.

Here are some photos from the day; click to enjoy!

Arriving at the HP plant!
This is Lisa, one of our Clients, taking a picture of me as I take a picture of her 🙂
Alon giving everyone an update.
Most of the presentation focused on the HP Indigo 10000
Simon discussed the history of the 10000’s development and led a customer panel discussion
Alon’s presentation included many interesting stats
Inside the plant, there was a visual history of Indigo, stretching back to the start in the late 70’s
Many of the buildings I was in had a shelter like this one
A beautiful facility
We got to tour the plant, and hear from various people about how the Indigo is built
This is where the ink is made
The entrance to the building

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[VIDEO] MindFire & HP SmartStream Production Center Integration

March 26, 2013 Leave a comment

At last month’s DSCOOP in Nashville, we unveiled integration we’ve been working on with the HP SmartStream team.  It’s been fun working with their team, as they’re dedicated, passionate, and very hands-on (as you’ve seen from the Israel diary, I got to spend some quality time at their office in Israel).

In short, our marketing automation workflows can now easily output print-ready PDFs (via the HP Composer), and those PDFs are sent to HP’s Production Center for print on the Indigo.  This is what our Marketing Studio looks like, and an example of marketing automation workflow:

multi-touch

Our Marketing Studio, which is a drag-and-drop environment for creating multi-channel workflows

We invested in this integration because both MindFire and HP believe that marketers are rapidly adopting marketing automation technology to optimize their lead generation.  While most marketing automation campaigns use digital channels (like email, mobile and social media), print is sometimes underutilized because of workflow complexities.  (Or in some cases, not used at all!)

This is why we made it our goal to enable our mutual users to generate a triggered print piece as easily as a triggered email or text message.  While there’s more work to do, I certainly think we’re on our way.

Above is a short video the HP team put together on their Production Center, showing how marketing automation print pieces are prepared for print.  Enjoy!

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Sales and Marketing Tagged with , , ,

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