A Quick Note From Print Oasis 2008

Good Morning from Amelia Island FL.
The weather has been incredible these past few days...Sunshine, Warmth, the Ocean Breeze! The conference is busy and active as usual with great speakers and LOT's of Exhibitor's.
There are more exhibitor's at this years show than at least the last 4 years reaching more and more Print Buyers. It is 8:30 in the morning and the lecture I am sitting in is full of attendee's. My rough count is 250. The show floor is busy and filled with Print Buyers looking for everything form the latest in promotional items to variable data printing formats and technologies. There are Printers, Office Supply companies to Software Solutions providers exhibiting at the show. Tonight is the Paper show where some of the leading paper companies will be displaying their goods and materials for all to consider.
I am currently sitting in on Steven Lance and Paul Kurnit as they discuss branding 2.0 The session is focused on advertising and the print industry. The show is full of great information for all print buyers across any industry. Steven and Paul will be doing a book signing later today on the exhibit floor. Well time to get back to the show! Wishing you were here!

Print Oasis 2008 this weekend!

This weekend is Print Oasis 2008 being held at Amelia Island Plantation resort in Amelia Island Florida. The show begins Saturday and runs through Tuesday, with opportunities for Print Buyers and Suppliers to mingle and gain knowledge of the latest happenings in print procurement. This is a great opportunity as well to talk with print buyers from all over the country and gain insight into the needs of print buyers. James Tower will again be exhibiting at the show. I will be there along with one of our sales reps to discuss Cross-Wind and our many other services we provide to print buyers. If you are at the show please stop by and say hi and tell me what you think. You never know you might just get mentioned in my blog! Hope to see you there!!
Information about the show can be found at: www.printoasis.com

New Customer Implementation for Cross-Wind

I am sitting in the Newark airport after leaving a new customer implementation that I have been on all week. It is Raining and flights are delayed so I thought this the perfect time to update the blog.
I have spent Monday through today in the customers office setting up print product templates to meet the customers specific needs and to add their supplier base and the buyers into Cross-Wind I will try to give you a breakdown of my week and the customers response to all of this.
Day 1
was spent understanding the customers current purchasing processes and mapping out Cross-Wind to fit that process. In addition, I reviewed a demonstration site with the customer to show them how their process would look once their application was set-up. I also added all of the customers suppliers information into the system. One of the great things about Cross-Wind, is the ability for the customer to put their specific vendors in the system.
Day 2
Set-up of modules to fit the customers need, I added the customers buying team and assigned access permissions, from there we reviewed product templates and inserted attributes for the customers templates, we applied pricing structures for their templates and we built the templates to be used.
Day 3
We reviewed the templates and pricing applied to each and then created the product-to-supplier associations. When this was completed we did a final over view of the administration tools and then began a complete walk through with the customer of their application and made minor site adjustments on the fly.
Day 4 TRAINING DAY
8:00 AM we set-up for Buyer training which was split into two sessions to allow for supplier training in between. We trained the buyers in the process of creating a project, specifying the product, selection of suppliers, and submission of the RFQ. At this point the suppliers were receiving quotes within the system and allowing them to begin review so we immediately went into supplier training. The suppliers called in to a conference bridge and a LiveMeeting demo of how to respond to quotes. The supplier training session was completed in one hour and all suppliers were able to login and begin sending responses to our training quotes. After lunch the buyers were trained to review the quotes and how to submit proposals to their customers and how to submit purchase orders back to the suppliers. The buyer and customer training was complete by 3:00 PM and the buyers spent the rest of the day practicing.
Day 5 System Live Day
When the buyers reported to work this morning they began entering live quotes within the system and began receiving quote responses from their supplier base. I answered follow-up questions and helped the buyers with any problems they were having in navigating the system. I thanked everyone for their time and the opportunity to learn another customers processes.
Overall, What a great week! The customer is extremely pleased with how Cross-Wind works and how flexible it is for them. I will follow-up with them most of next week to ensure that it is functioning in the manner they expected and I will return to their location in about 6 weeks to do a follow-up and to show them how to use the custom and scheduled report features. In addition we have tentatively scheduled a 3-day session to implement another of their buying facilities into Cross-Wind in the next 6 weeks. I can't wait to reveal the customers name, but until approvals and finalized contracts are complete I cannot. But it will show how flexible and wide ranging our customer base is.
Well I hope all have a great weekend and It looks like my flight will only be 2 and a half hours delayed!!
John

Busy, Busy, Busy, Are you busy too?

Good Morning!
Or is it afternoon I am not sure! It has been a very busy start to 2008 for me. I hope your 2008 is starting out with a bang as well. I was at the Corporate Express National Sales Meeting last week. What a great show! The Keynote speaker was Astronaut Jim Lovell who talked about his experiences on Apollo 13. A very inspiring talk. I got the opportunity to visit with almost all of the Strategic Suppliers for Corporate Express and talk with them about their experiences with Cross-Wind and how it is working for them. Almost all of them were very pleased with how it works and expressed that it helps improve their processes when quoting to their customer. In addition, the Strategic Sourcing supplier manager did a supplier survey in early December asking for the suppliers input and the preliminary analysis is showing that an overwhelming majority of Suppliers are please with the tools. I hope to have the raw data soon and to share that analysis here as well. While the weather wasn't the greatest (Cloudy and rainy Wednesday through Saturday) it sure beat the Minnesota weather I came home too (-10 degrees) on Saturday.
Next week I am off to New Jersey for another customer implementation of Cross-Wind and hopefully I will be able to announce very soon the customers name. I am out of the office all next week but will have some time to start keeping up on this blog! As always if you have questions please feel free to send me a note.
John