Morten Reitoft from Inkish talks to our own Ray Duval regarding the importance of Inkish Flow, which is more software related than the regular industry events.
They also talking about the changes in the print industry over the years. Automation and the expansion of Ultimate’s products are some of the things they have a discussion about.
They discuss the challenge and the relationship with manufacturers. This relationship is especially important because every change in equipment, new or improved machines or features, requires a software adaptation.
Good morning everybody. This is Morten from Inkish.
Hello everybody or bonjour. This is Morten from Inkish and I don’t know my French, but I’m talking to Ray from Ultimate Tech who just told me that he lives in Quebec City. I knew that he was from Canada and from the French-speaking part of it, but Quebec is apparently Quebec City is apparently a city that is the most French city you can find in the world. Or is that not entirely correct, Ray?
Oh, you’re spot on. Bonjour as I would say or ‘Hej’ to be polite. Um yeah Canada is bilingual French and English. So my mother tongue is French. But obviously English is by nature how I speak to everybody around the world.
I was just about to say that if your tongue is French is the rest of the body English. But I will leave that to the church. Now Ray, we have known each other for many years and it’s always a pleasure talking to you.
Ultimate Tech was one of the first companies in the world that that did imposition using computers. I mean since then till today, first and foremost your portfolio has extended dramatically, but what I mean since you joined Ultimate Tech what has what has the major development be just in a short perspective?
What are the biggest takeaways if you look on the last say 10-15 years?
Yeah, that’s an extremely good question. The industry obviously evolved quite a lot with what we know today, which I’m not going to repeat but I joined 21 years ago Ultimate Tech the company inception is 1989, so we went from providing more automation in the film, CTP, making plates world printing on offset presses transitioning to digital and you’re probably in the right timing 15 years ago, 18 years ago, we definitely invested development wise on providing more automation capabilities to this transition going to digital printing back then cut sheet strictly and then moving to continuous feed, wide format and then improving functionalities to downstream automate bindery or finishing as well. So it’s really about transforming the industry to be more automated, more productive and you know we’re lucky it’s still the case today. People want to automate further and it’s just a continued path towards that.
I mean I think that one of the things I really like about Ultimate Tech is that you have not been resting on the laurels because you have identified for example the large format or wide format
area you have been very instrumental also as you say in the digital space, you have in in the bindery I hear more and more people talking about Bindery as a very interesting product and I remember the first time I met you, I think that that when you said you were for Ultimate Technographics at that time, there was not a bell that rang because I was thinking about Impostrip because you were more known for Impostrip or being Ultimate Tech and in that period of time you have created fantastic branding.
You have created more products. Impostrip is still essential part of your portfolio and it just seems that you keep developing in also in the relationships with the various OEMs.
So tell me a little bit about how this relationship works for you guys.
Well, it’s always being on the forefront of what the industry is developing, you know, as we are working with these manufacturers toward the transformation that is still happening today of printing companies investing in more powerful, faster, bigger presses and printing devices.
There’s new equipment, new machines that have more advanced capabilities, variable frame length capabilities, a lot of different things that the newer equipment can do.
So being in close relationship with these manufacturers allows us to build functionalities so that when these new equipment reach the market there are solutions like Ultimate Impostrip to
generate the print files with the complex marks, the complex barcodes, communicating with the digital DFE’s to control the press and push a lot of the you know the print ready files you know towards those presses. So it’s the same thing with wide format being there to be able to bridge same thing there printing capabilities on flatbed or roll devices going to finishing devices providing an end to end workflow where you can automate production not just for printing but also for finishing.
So, I mean everything you say sounds like natural iterations also in customers industry and how you as a company grow when you look at the let’s say the business challenges out there and you look at least the three four different segments that you operate in are the challenges the same across the different segments?
I would say as a general answer yes. I personally believe as you know in automation in the way of creating more capabilities to be more productive to have business growth right to grow your revenue or grow your profit or both. And the biggest challenge among all the segments is human. How do you empower your team, your partners to invest in in technology and software that will actually transform and change? The biggest problem in pretty much any industry, right, is change. human, they do not like change. And when you have, for example, in a small print operations, two persons generating print ready files using tools like InDesign or whatever it is with a lot of manual touch points. And as a business owner, you envision or you know because you’re there at the wall that you need to invest to automate that if you want to even survive, not just grow but survive in the moment because your competitors are doing print production faster than you do.
The question is; what do I do with person A and person B? And that’s the human part of it where it’s just not the human person reluctant to changes, but also as a business owner, how am I going to deal
with my team transforming what they do daily? And sometimes the challenge that’s the biggest challenge is right there.
I agree. And as you know when I meet you and your colleagues at trade shows I often ask, because every you know software companies I actually spoke to Julie about when I was in Montreal just a few weeks ago where I said to her that I think that a lot of the challenges for software companies is that they take a lot of things for given that people know what they need and they know what they are talking about or that software vendors sometimes focus a lot on the technology. ology rather than the business side. And I also asked a lot of time saying that okay every time you bring new features to one of your products does it make it easier for customers or does it just make more complex to understand the scope of the entire software?
I don’t know about you but I’m I don’t like using Microsoft Word and Excel. And you know, if you look at Word as a product writing in, it is as good as my Apple Pages and it has so many buttons that I have no idea what they do. And what I like about the my Pages is that it can only do a few things, but it does it really good. And I was just wondering because you see software getting more and more complex, achieving more and more tasks, but from that perspective, maybe also becomes more complex. Is that something that also resonates with your stuff?
Yeah, what you’re saying resonates to me a lot because 21 years in the company, I saw a lot of changes also to our development direction and how we approach as you say, new functionalities and you know if we think oh orange is going to be the new thing so let’s go with orange. Sometimes a vision like this is really clever because you know the industry is going to need something, but the opposite meaning learning from your customer base from the users themselves is really good. And if you remember back in 2019 we launched our current generation of Ultimate Impostrip. So the foundation of the technology the core technology was there and we just improved it, but the user interface was totally changed in, and in part was because what you just mentioned a lot of buttons a lot of things that were there for the legacy you know film setters and plate setters and this and then people were in digital printing were like why do I need OPI and trapping like what’s this and what’s that and you know it’s basically why we went from the legacy version as we called it to the current generation. Revamping the approach to the UI interface making it simpler and being close to customers allows us to for example, strictly in a segment like mailing digital mailing producing on rolls or sheets mail jobs operationally. When you do, you know, in many countries in the world, mail jobs that are in the thousand, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of records, you have people at the end of production that will sort and push zones in in stacks, bins, trays, whatever it is. And that operation for most mail houses is browsing through, you know, what you printed, looking at postal codes or zip codes, and then saying, “Okay, it ends here.” And you push it there. All those seconds adds up to minutes, hours, days, and that’s excluding the errors pushing the wrong zone in the wrong bin. So we listen to customers and we developed a feature called mail batch that actually adds separations; banners with color you know very meaningful for an operator to see that’s the beginning of a zone the end of a zone so that it’s faster errorfree to push in the different sacks or trays. And that’s one of our ways of approaching development to make it simpler but also as you said to really benefit a and solve a problem that our customers are having.
You decided to sign up for our Flow event in Germany and you also know me well enough that I have said in public so many times that we have too many trade shows and then we introduce another one. What was your view on that? Were you just, oh, another trip to Europe or how did you how did you see that approach?
Well honestly I looked at the map and said like where is that in Germany? Uh but that to me was like the center right the center to me being Canadian the center of Germany you know a place in Europe that is very central that you can travel to many big cities uh airports that are nearby train stations and the name resonated to me and to Julie and to the company flow and honestly we said let’s go with the flow and it’s natural for what we you to be there and discuss the advancement in any ones workflow to provide more automation and to talk robotics and to talk how we can advance our industry uh to be to be more productive with the technologies that exist and of course by then we’ll have some new stuff in technologies to uh to talk about but that was that was an easy decision.
Now I’m asking because uh you know we have we are not a show organizer as such. So for us it was also of course a big decision to do this and together with proper it was a little bit easier because they can do a lot of help with the infrastructure of thing. But the reason why I did it was because I was thinking you know you and me we meet each other at various trade shows all the time. And I think that, I think that these trade shows are tremendously important, but I also think there is a tendency that they focus a lot on hardware and when people go there, they see oh there’s a new software but they don’t have like 1 hour 2 hours to sit down and really get into it. And then we were like, okay, in these times where people are maybe a little bit more reluctant on big cap axes, maybe this is a good time where people can really focus on automation and robots and all the new software things that can breathe new life into existing equipment, increase the productivity of the companies and that was what the reason why we thought that okay Flow is something that we need to try and we need to see if we can get first and foremost some of the exhibitors to participate and of course even more important see if we can get people to sign up for it. So that was the motivation for doing it basically, right?
Yeah. And it’s right on point workflows, having your job flow in production towards your capex, you know, presses and new finishing equipment or new building because you’re expanding the software component and everything related to more automation and robotics, whether it’s moving paper on the floor, picking up book blocks to push to the other machine, is something essential. And you know where you can have a group of leaders in the workflow environment to be together, present their integration capabilities, how they can bridge each other technology together to provide a tailored solution to a print production business environment is going to be a success. Definitely that event is going to be successful.
I hope so and think and thank you. It’s also funny just before rounding up this one I just think it’s also interesting because I spoke to Martin Ayer from Cloud Printer and he said I’m equally eager to present Cloud Printer to the attendees but I’m also equally interested in meeting the other guys of the software guys because that is how the collaborations often start between companies and I think that we have created a frame where there’s time for it, and I think that time is such a critical resource today that if we can make it a two-way kind of show, why not just take advantage of it and just see what happens? Maybe even better software comes out of it, right?
Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
So, Ray um I want to I want to make a little not a joke with you, but a little something. So, I you have a saying every time I meet you and we end our shows, but we’re not ending it 100%, but you have a saying that has become your kind of trademark. Can you just repeat what that is?
Yes sir. Automation. Automation. Automation.
See, that was what I wanted you to say. And then I had to ask you a question because would it after Flow or maybe even before, would it be ‘orchestration’ ‘orchestration’ ‘orchestration’ or what do you think it will be the next? Because I mean when I talked to Tom from Atomics for example he talked about that if you talk about orchestration that it of course also includes the workflow part of it and the
automation part of it but also extends to both the supplier side and the customer side and that integrates more vitally. So where do uh Ultimate I was just about to say Impostrip, where do Ultimate see yourself in in in the orchestra, so to speak?
Central point, because the creation of print ready files, regardless of the segments that a print service provider is in, and bindery automation again, is at the central point of pushing your finished
goods out the door to your customers. So definitely the centerpiece of the orchestra.
Thank you very much, sir. And I look forward to see you probably both in maybe Chicago and Las Vegas and definitely in Bad Hersfield in the winter time, right?
Yes of course, see you very soon.
Source: This interiew was done with Morten B. Reitoft, Editor in charge of INKISH News and INKISH TV