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“Print Streams Are Irrelevant,” Declares Compart CEO Grumser at Gartner Print & Imaging Summit
Wednesday 17. December 2008 - Insightful look at trends includes shorter runs, decentralized print, and piece-level control
Compart, a leader in Print File conversation and ADF Output Management, delivered an unexpected message at its breakout session, while also receiving recognition from Gartner at the Print & Imaging Summit last week in Bonita Springs, Florida. The Print & Imaging Summit is a gathering of print executives to share industry insight, meet with the Gartner analyst team and attend breakout sessions targeted to the participants focus.
Compart CEO Harald Grumser startled his breakout audience with his perspective on Output Management and Comparts Digital Coexistence strategy. When asked about print streams and output types, Grumser surprised his listeners by stating, “Print streams are irrelevant.” Irrelevant because the skill sets in the enterprise have changed, and output requires extensive flexibility.
Skills have migrated away from intimate knowledge gained though directly coding an application in AFP to commercially available composition software, he explained. However, that often means more and varied types of output from an even greater number of sources are generated now that it is easier to create output. Typically this results in the requirement to normalize or convert the output for efficient processing in the mailing and finishing operation, or for web presentment and archival requirements. Grumser noted that his remarks were contextually focused workflow from composition output through delivery.
In his session, Grumser examined several other trends affecting digital printing. He acknowledged the trend of shorter runs, but he also addressed the resulting requirement to effectively mix and aggregate those smaller jobs together whenever possible, enabling more efficient processing.
Along with the trend of shorter runs, decentralized print was also discussed as a universal trend. And much like shorter runs, decentralized print requires more production flexibility and tools that accumulate Office documents or SAP output and optimize and convert them for fast efficient web presentment or printing, regardless of source.
The trends of print stream irrelevancy, shorter runs and decentralized print come together in the final trend: piece-level control of output. This allows for reconstructing new output files based on business criteria, postal optimization, delivery channel and scheduling rules, regardless of source, size or number of files. This piece-level control enables absolute accountability, with the highest degree of efficiency for postage and production. Managing documents on an individual document level independent of source, output type or delivery channel is the only way to achieve Comparts vision of true Digital Coexistence.
Compart Also Received Positive Rating from Gartner
Dovetailing into Comparts message of Digital Coexistence, Pete Basiliere, Gartners Research Director for Hardware and Systems, announced that Compart earned a highly regarded Positive Rating in his presentation “Using ADF 2.0 to Help Your Company Grow.” Gartner recently published its findings in its MarketScope for Automated Document Factory 2.0 Software publication.
“This highly regarded recognition combined with the Digital Coexistence solutions of our DocBridge Mill product family position Compart as the premier global document, print file and output management company,” said Mark Maragni, Vice President of Sales, Compart North America.