Avanti Computer Systems recently added an eighth programmer to push more research into its Management Information System, which evolved from 22 years of software development out of its Greater Toronto Area office. With over 350 installations, Avanti focuses its software in printing-specific activities for sheetfed, web, digital, large format and binderies. PrintAction spoke with Patrick Bolan, Avanti’s president and CEO, for a closer look at a Canadian company that is building unique modules and Job Definition Format tools to compete with vendor giants vying for the future of printing software. Avanti’s efforts have netted big-name clients like the United Nations, University of Illinois, Best Buy, City of San Diego, Paramount Pictures, R.R. Donnelly, The Print Network, and the United States’ Senate.

 
Jon Robinson: Why did you acquire Parsec?
Patrick Bolan: It gave us an enormous jump in our base of somewhere between 500 and 700 printers across North America, predominantly in the U.S. Of that, there are about 300 still and we are just slowly getting out to the majority of them. It also gave us a branch in the U.S. We kept the Denver office open and kept the majority of the staff. [Parsec was] about the same size as Avanti about five years ago, but at the time we took a different direction into the hybrid shop – digital and offset – while Parsec stayed mainly in offset web and really, I think, the owner started losing interest in the business and so they slowly started to decline.

Why did Avanti begin going after hybrid printing customers?
I really attribute that to the original founder Richard Wallin and Avanti’s relationship with Xerox. We developed a product specifically for digital estimating. We do very well there. Now some of our competitors are doing it, but our advantage is that we are now in our 7th generation of software for digital estimating. The first versions of software are okay and then you refine it in year two and then re-refine it in year three. By three or four hits you are starting to get good at it.  

What do printers need to understand about estimating for digital production?
I visited a shop in Denver that had bought Parsec about six years ago when they were completely an offset shop. About two years ago, they shut down all of their offset equipment and became completely digital. They were struggling with Parsec’s estimating system: they had to literally walk through eight screens to enter an order and that just doesn’t work well for a digital order. [The owner] commented that they usually finished printing before they could even enter the order. I showed him Avanti and he was amazed with how slick it is – how fast we can enter orders. They have a new plant and when they get a new budget they will be moving to Avanti next year.

What is Avanti’s best piece of software?
Definitely our CRM module. If you look at the contacts, for example, many people get a huge contact manager like an Act or GoldMine, which provides a key listing of your prospects, to communicate with your prospects with user-defined fields so that you can add additional information that is not in your MIS.
 
I faced a decision about a year and a half ago about whether to hold onto GoldMine and maximize it or alternatively to build our own. We elected to build our own.

Why build your own CRM module?
There were three main reasons. First, if you look at the note system and let’s say that you are a printer and you have a large customer: if you look at that customer and all of their notes in the system, you might have 100 or 200 notes for when things happen in the print shop. They either happen around an estimate or around a job. If you are in ACT, it doesn’t think in terms of a job or estimates, but Avanti has a system with which you can filter the notes by job or by estimate. Now  you can type in the job number when you are in the note scale and see all of the notes related to a specific job. It is a tremendous advantage.

The other thing with our CRM module is that it includes everything about that customer, not only notes and user-defined fields and contacts like in Act or GoldMine, but also estimates or jobs, outstanding invoices, buying history, etc. All of that information is already [input to the MIS], so we have brought that forward into a single screen.

How have printers reacted to your CRM concept?
When we originally took it to market looking for beta sites with existing Avanti customers, I thought we would probably have to approach 20 to get five. The first five printers who we showed it to bought it, either on the spot after the demo or the next day. The product came out at the very start of 2006. 

If a printer has a sales rep who leaves, typically, they are going to lose anywhere from 10 to 100 percent of that salesperson’s customer base. If you implement our CRM it is just part of the Avanti modules. It sits on your server and is being backed up everyday. You have all of the data so at least you have a fighting chance. When I say that to printers a light bulb goes on and they say, “Yeah, yeah, they do have all of my data. I want that data.” On the positive side, you also want to give your committed salespeople access to data across the entire company.

What about forecasting from CRM?
[The module] allows printers to forecast up to 90 days, as well as the ability to build marketing campaigns. Printers are extracting data from Avanti and buildling a traditional print marketing campaign, or an HTML marketing campaign. They can base it on sales history or user-defined fields. And then they are actually tracking return on investment on the marketing campaign. It is all integrated and seamless.

Where has Avanti gone with JDF?
Probably the most important update that we have been working on for a couple of years now is JDF. We first came out onto the market with JDF integration about two years ago, but these original implementations were one-off, specific JDF integration for products like Creo Preps. We have built a JDF framework to more quickly do major integrations into all of the major manufacturers whether it is Creo Preps, Prinergy, Xerox Process Manager, Heidelberg, K Station, Man Roland, etc. You hear JDF, JDF, JDF; everybody is talking about it but nobody is doing it. We have real implementations of JDF. We invested a lot of R&D time into JDF.

Avanti is not an Agfa or Heidelberg, so can a smaller software vendor make big R&D risks?
If you compare us to a Heidelberg, Agfa or Microsoft, we look like a small company but when you compare us to the other MIS players in this space we are probably the second largest in North America. It is hard to say because there are about three or four of us around the same size, but, looking at our number of new wins, from what I can see we are getting more implementations than anybody else. EFI [is the largest] because of the Printcafe rollout when they bought Hagen and PSI. If you look at Hagen, EFI has tried to go down market, but we have placed Avanti into a few Hagen sites.

How is Avanti software built?
We have two components to our product: the production management side and our Web-to-print component, which are fully integrated. The Web-to-print is written in ASP and the production component in Microsoft VB6. Now all of our new modules are being written in .NET, so VB.NET and ASP.NET. 

Why is .NET important?
It is Microsoft’s next generation of development tools and they want all of their developers to now move to .NET. It has been out for three or four years, so it is a very stable product platform, and we moved to it quite strongly this year. It doesn’t really open up any more doors from a sales and marketing standpoint, but from a technology standpoint we are able to do more, to embed more Microsoft technology into our products. There are many pieces of functionality that we can provide to our customers now, and they love the better look and feel.

What advantages does your Web-to-print bring to the market?
It has been out for five years. It is really a catalogue-driven system. The key advantage that we have over our competitors is that our Web-to-print is based on the exact same database that our production system is residing on, so everything is happening in real time. When you look at a lot of Web-to-print systems, they integrate an MIS and have touch-points so some things may be happening in real time but most are uploads and downloads. Ours is actually reading the exact same database, so if you are a CSR inside the print shop or a customer out on the Net and somebody makes a price change, both will actually see that change at the exact same time. It is beyond integration – it is reading the same data tables out of our sequential database.

What are Avanti Dashboards?
The Dashboards present information to an executive at a very high level. Let’s say your month-to-date sales are $1 million, but maybe your sales quota is $1.2 million. So you are a little behind and that is going to show in red. You would ask, “Why I am behind,” and click on that month-to-date figure of $1 million. The next screen will list all of your sales reps, their month-to-date sales and their quota. You can see who is behind and who is ahead. 

You can then drill into the sales rep information and see all of their sales and which customers they have sold to. You can actually set a budget for each customer and see if some are behind. You can drill into the customer and see all of the orders they have placed. Then maybe you will want to drill into a specific order. This gives the executive visual cues, where green shows everything is good,  yellow is a warning, and red if something is bad. It applies to sales statistics, quote  statistics, on-time jobs, all of the key metrics within a shop are displayed within our Dashboard. It is all done with just one click. 

What predominantly draws printers to Avanti’s applications?
Probably the most successful technology of the company is something called Activity Wizards. Everything starts with the estimate for a press – whether it is digital or offset, most of our competitors, like ourselves, are very good at doing offset estimates. We shine because these Activity Wizards allow you to model any piece of equipment or any activity within the shop. If you have an unusual piece of finishing equipment, we can model that and we can price it.

In Wisconsin, we have a customer called NCL Graphics with one of the most complex finishing technologies I have ever seen, called Z Fold. With something like a giant map, Z Fold can fold that down into a credit-card size and we are able to model that and do proper costing. As printers dig into what systems can and cannot do, they see Avanti’s strengths come out and that is in the Activity Wizards, which we have had over the last decade. It has helped us with a lot of sales.

We recently signed a deal with the U.S. Senate, which is very significant as a Canadian company, and one of the reasons [why they went with Avanti] was because they have a lot of mailing activities. I suspect they do more mailing than anybody else in North America – mailing for all of the senators – and we were able to model all of it. We also did very well on the press side and on the Web-to-print side for them.