Xerox hosted an event in Rochester on May 7, bringing about 50-60 customers and potential customers from all over the country to learn about Xerox’s workflow and automation at the Thought Leadership Workshop.

After arrivals, guests were taken to the Genesee Brew House – a recently renovated building that’s part of the Genesee Brewery, an “institution” in the scenic High Falls area of Rochester. Networking events like these are always a great way to meet peers and even competitors.

The actual event kicked off early Wed. morning at the Gil Hatch Center for Customer Innovation in Webster NY.  1,250 customers come through the Gil Hatch Center each year and Xerox has other innovation centers in Europe, NYC and soon Palo Alto.  After some introductions from Gil Hatch GM Dale Allen, VP Kevin Horey addressed the crowd and laid out the plans for the day.

Xerox brought in noted industry workflow consultant David Zwang to start things off. David helps companies (commercial printers, publishers, etc.) increase productivity, margins and market reach and he’s one of those people that are true experts in his field. David is an entertaining and engaging presenter. According to David, “this is one of the best times to be in print and print publishing.” He went on to say “we’re in this new growth phase…if there is any constant, it’s is that <things> are going to continue to change.”

David shared some slides showing the potential for digital color page growth. So how can printers take advantage of this kind of growth opportunity? Automation. David showed a video of a very well known online print fulfillment company that has automated their processes from beginning to end. David said, “they don’t consider themselves printers they consider themselves manufacturers.” Indeed, the video showed processes that were completely automated from the beginning of the job to the end where the job was boxed and sealed – all without human intervention. The point is, taking the labor costs of our processes is one of the easiest ways to increase margins.

After David spoke for about an hour about automated production workflow and their benefits, Kevin Horey came back up on stage and told attendees about Xerox FreeFlow Core. Nice Segway. Kevin began with a discussion around customer strategies needed to succeed in 2014. He then spoke about offset and how customers are moving from it. “Will offset go away? No…”

Kevin discussed how Xerox has partners to bridge technical gaps in their own portfolio and to make their products more seamless with customer workflow. It kind of shows how far Xerox has come. The days of “Docublobs” and proprietary architecture are over. Today’s Xerox understands they need to play nice with everybody in order to make their products and services more useful to their customers.

Kevin shared a couple of interesting pieces of information:

• For every $1 spent on direct print, another $3 are spent on production workflow.

• 60% of print service providers state it’s a priority to automate their print production workflow. (InfoTrends, 2012)

Print is a mature market. Operational efficiency is key. Workflow determines efficiency.

After the presentations, we were taken into the product area – a massive space where Xerox has a large number of presses and workflows set up for demonstration. We were split into small groups and taken to different stations were we were given overviews on color management, FreeFlow Core, workflow, etc.

This is the second smaller customer event like this that I’ve attended at the Gil Hatch center this spring. The groups have both been an interesting mix of large and small print operations ranging from fairly basic set ups to the most cutting-edge. The one consistent thing about these printers is that there’s nothing consistent about them. They all have different hardware and different software from just about every major vendor. For example, several of them may print books but no two do it the same way.

Today’s group was pretty enthusiastic about the event. When we walked into the product area and saw all the machines the guy behind me whistled and muttered under his breath “oh yeah…I could use this production floor.” I heard a couple of others later joking that “my wish list is growing.”

It’s one thing to hear a vendor talk about their strategies and what they’re doing. It’s another thing to see customers salivating over products and that’s what was happening here.

Hosting networking and learning events like these gives Xerox the ability to pick customers’ brains while at the same time, marketing their products and services. But instead of simply trying to sell hardware and solutions, Xerox takes an almost advisory role with the customer. It’s not “buy this so you can print,” it’s more like “buy this and we’ll show you how you can make a lot more money with it.”

These intimate events seem to be a new trend with Xerox and the customers and prospects that have attended have been fairly impressed in my opinion, both by the hospitality but also by the high touch feel they received in sitting through presentations from vice presidents and product demonstrations given by product managers and engineers. I have no doubt that Xerox will close business as a direct result of bringing these customers to Rochester.