I’m going to invite one of my very good friends to come along. And this is Diego Diaz from smartpress.com in the U.S. Diego, first of all, a very, very warm thank you for coming to Copenhagen for this. Tres non-event.

Thank you for having me. This event is crazy and it’s a lot of fun. So thank you.

Are you enjoying yourself so far?

Oh yes. Yeah, absolutely.

So what is smartpress.com?

Smartpress.com. We are basically a leader in online custom manufacturing. You get anything from-

When you say manufacturing it’s printing basically, right?

Small format, large format, but we can do some crazy things. We have a manufacturing arm of the business. We can do some plastic work and metal work and some fun stuff that you wouldn’t expect.

Okay. And when you say smartpress, that is actually part of the Bernard Group, right? And the Bernard Group we visited two years ago now. In January two years ago. And that was when we became friends basically, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

And for the audience, I just want to tell you that this guy and I… I know that you don’t care, but we share passion for Norwegian music and Icelandic music right now, right? So-

Can’t get enough of it.

We don’t want to talk about print. What kind of music of the ones that we have shared do you like the most?

You have had me stuck on a Aurora kick for-

Aurora. She’s so nice, isn’t she? She’s an artist.

I haven’t stopped. That is nonstop now on my playlist.

And that’s why you said that your wife, she was sick and tired of Norwegian music.

Yep. Yep. And Highasakite is another one that-

Oh, she’s so brilliant, too. I was actually thinking that at one point, because we are now introducing country pages on INKISH and we have of course federations, print media, printers. I think we should have a music tab as well where we have the hottest artists in our opinion. You and me opinion, we will rule the world who is the best, right? Are you all for that?

I’m right there for it.

I appreciate that you took the time to get here. One of the things that our audience can look forward to see very soon from you is that you are actually a hands on guy when it comes to workflow. Just for as a reference, I think that the Diego is maybe… I think actually you one of the most experienced people I know because there’s a lot of people in the industry that talks about workflow, but you are not talking about it. You’re doing it. And you will soon release 10 articles on INKISH.NEWS about workflow. What is your pitch on this? What is your approach on it?

Oh, I want to share some of the experiences that I’ve had over the years working with a lot of… I’ve worked with a lot of large Fortune 500 companies that I’ve consulted with, and it’s one thing to consult and take all those great ideas and it’s another thing to actually get to implement them. And more than that, I take the best things I’ve seen from one place and another place and another place. And now I’ve put them all together in Smartpress to really see what works, what doesn’t, and the road that you need to go down to get there.

So to be honest, it’s just the playing field for you basically, right?

Yeah, well it’s all been a learning experience. It’s all been a playing field, but now I’ve gotten to take all the best of that and put it down in a place where I’ve gotten to see that all implemented at once and I’ve got to see it really, really work. More than anything, walking that road and seeing what went into getting there, what you had to actually do to pull it off.

One of the things… I’m sorry to interrupt you. I think yet one of the things I believe that a lot of printers are concerned about is that the promises of automation and workflow automation in general is that it sounds sometimes a bit too promising to be true, but you have actually experienced on your… I was just about to say on your own buddy, but in your own company at least, that workflow makes a lot of sense. Right? Can you just give a snippet of an example on a very, very tiny little thing that made a huge difference to you and your company? I know I didn’t ask you in advance.

Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I think something that most people probably wouldn’t pick, but it’s made one of the biggest differences is going ticketless. The fact that we’ve been able to automate all of the impositions, the tickets, sheets. We’ve been able to automate everything so now the expediters can see where to go. Everyone can pull up the information live. When you’re in this quick turn business like we are, we’re in a quick turn business where we’re shipping out most things in 24 hours, 48 hours at the longest.

And just in reference, you’re a 650 person company? So you’ve got a bunch of work everyday, right?

Yep, yep. Thousands of jobs every day and we’re shipping these out super quick turn. Everything changes and things change really fast. Things change while things are in production and being able to see that live because-

And that’s with the ticketless system that makes that change that you can’t change.

Exactly. Now you can see it on a screen and it’s live updating as it’s going. It’s improving the production plan as it’s going and it’s picking different equipment as it’s going and that’s all things that you can’t do with a paper ticket. With a paper ticket, it’s all decided a long time ago and some-

Which version of the papers should you use.

Right. When some planner or scheduler figured it out and there’s nothing dynamic about that. You can’t be on your feet, you can’t react. And being 100% ticketsless allows us to be dynamic and react as we’re going through the production process as things change.

And I think that one of the things that I really like about the Bernard Group, is seems that some people can fear that when you invest in automation that you lay off people, but basically what you’ve done, you’re just making sure that people work more efficient. You have nonrepetitive jobs and you actually keep employing more and more people all the time because you get busier and busier. Right?

Absolutely. And it’s not even about making… The word efficiency comes out all the time when automation is talked about, and I’ve got a thing against that word. It’s not even about efficiency. It’s let do what people do best. Let people talk to people. Let people innovate. And when you have someone doing repetitive tasks over and over and over again, they’re not innovating. [crosstalk 00:06:09].

Exactly. They’re not innovating. They’re not doing creative things, they’re not doing social things. And that’s, that’s what people do really well. So, we’re highly automated and the purpose of highly automating is we give our customers that experience where they’re going to get talked to on every single order. We are highly automated to free people up so that we can have thousands of orders a day and they still have access to an individual human being all the time. Our customers do. It’s not some nameless thing. And that’s because of automation. Automation freed up the people.

And is that what to expect from the 10 articles that you’re writing for us?

Yes, absolutely.

So, tune into INKISH.NEWS to find Diego’s articles. I think that we will have it just after new year or something like that? Fantastic. Thank you for coming to Copenhagen. I really appreciate your time here and thank you very much for the nice talk. So thank you so much.

Thank you.