How do you link Adam Smith, a holiday to the Isle of Wight and a Honda TV ad? Well, if you want to make your Friday morning easy, don’t try. But if you’re determined, as I am, then some kind of structured approach, a workflow even, would come in handy.
For the September issue of PrintBuyer, I’ve been looking at marketing campaign workflow software, known as Marketing Resource Management systems, or MRMs. These clever little pieces of software have been devised to streamline the process of taking those creative ideas dreamt up in latte-fuelled brainstorming sessions by a bunch of hot-desking, beanbag-lounging creative types and turning them into well-produced piece of print, preferably at rock-bottom price.
As a case study of these types of workflows, Honda uses market-leading MRM Aprimo to coordinate marketing collateral procurement across its network of dealerships. As a metaphor for workflow, look no further than the self-same car manufacturer and it’s classic ‘Cog’ TV ad, the one where the car parts (85 car parts, in fact) roll, bounce and pitch their way across the screen, each forming a little piece of a chain reaction that concludes at the point we’re told to go buy an Accord.
Now that is workflow perfection in action. Every participant and step in the process working without a single fault in one unbroken camera shot. Well, without a single fault on the 606th take. It actually took 605 failed attempts to get it right. You might call them ‘workflaws’.
While Honda didn’t actually use a workflow software product to drive that campaign through to the dazzling incarnation on your TV, MRMs do offer a host of functions to connect the steps on the campaign trail, from strategic planning, budgeting, financial tracking, multi-channel campaigns, content management and performance measurement. They can also improve lower-level marketing activities through web-to-print-style procurement, such as Honda does across its dealer network.
Print workflows take the whole process to the next level. And their efficiency is down to one basic fact – getting rid of the human element as much as possible. Sure, whizz bang types, such as HP’s new SmartStream Director, offer a host of other functions, from web-to-print to personalisation to e-commerce, but in terms of production management and tracking, they succeed by taking over the drudgery and drone work. Computers are simply better at organising things.
If artificial intelligence ever does take over and go homicidal, as in The Matrix, it’d be bad news for we carbon-based life forms, but great for short lead times and process visibility. In fact, I’m currently researching a feature for PrintWeek's Drupa Technology Report about on-press quality control systems for sheetfed presses – the products revealed at Drupa by Heidelberg, Manroland, KBA et al for their top-tier presses are so advanced it’s almost scary. For instance, KBA’s QualiTronic Professional takes spectrophotometric readings of the colour bars on each sheet (at 18,000sph) and constantly calibrates and recalibrates the ink ducts throughout makeready and production to maintain colour consistency within a tolerance of +/-1 delta-E. It can also take a snapshot of each and every sheet and reference any potential faults, such as hickeys, against a datum sheet. Then it can tag any imperfect print with a mark that is read at the die-cutter or folder stage and the sheet diverted out of production.
If the machines ever do rise up, I wonder whether the real Terminator wouldn’t be better epitomised by a German long perfector than an Austrian bodybuilder.
It’d probably be a better actor anyway.
But while computers are still (mostly) tools that remain at our beck and call, I’ll continue to try to use them efficiently to streamline the most mundane tasks, such as planning my holiday. Apparently Brits spend more time looking for a holidays than a new home, which either says a lot about the state of the property market or tells you how much hassle goes with pre-planning a little trip abroad. It’s even complicated just trying to plan a mini break within Blighty; I’m currently trying to organise a trip to the Isle of Wight with a few friends and the string of emails, phone calls, suggestions and timetables that are flying back and forth are just mindboggling, and in terms of everyone actually getting any closer to the Solent, mindbogglingly useless.
It’s like one of those maths questions – take five people, each coming from a different part of the country. They are travelling at widely different speeds using a variety of means of transport and need to arrive at a single destination on a specific day at a specific time. How long will it take them to book tickets?
Now if only there was workflow software for holiday planning…
But for now, it’s down to a purely human organisational structure, which is another flawed flow. Adam Smith, “father of capitalism” and poster boy of the £20 note, realised there was room for improvement when he said you could create value by studying the nature of work itself, and hence gave birth to workflow as a concept.
Maybe Smith became the big daddy of workflow because he needed a way to coordinate his own competing interests, which in true Renaissance Man form spanned economics, politics, philosophy and astronomy. Or maybe it was because he was famously absent minded, one day wandering into a tanning pit in Glasgow, another time telling his London publisher he had forgotten he was the author of that magnum opus on capitalism, The Wealth of Nations.
Certainly another advocate of the beauty inherent in streamlined automation, one Bill Gates, didn’t forget this, giving a copy of The Wealth of Nations to Warren Buffet as a thank you gift after Buffet donated $30,000,000,000 to Gates’ charity.
What do you buy for the man who has it all and has just given it to you? A book on capitalism seems like a barely veiled swipe.