Best Quality, Price and Service - Get All Three: Built for the Job

Unfortunately, none of what is required for an organization to manage pre- and post-pricing details and break the Iron Triangle is handled by the methods and tools commonly used in procurement. They simply are not built for managing and sourcing custom print projects.

That is why eLynxx exists…to do what common procurement solutions can’t.

Only eLynxx cloud software, powered by the multi-patented eLynxx sourcing method, is purpose-built for sourcing and managing direct mail, marketing materials and all things print. No other solution empowers organizations to go beyond the price acquisition and bid-and-buy sourcing needed for off-the-shelf items to properly manage all of the pre- and post-pricing details custom print projects require. It is only with this level of functionality that creation of an environment friendly to contribution pricing and breaking the Iron Triangle become easy.

eLynxx relieves the burdens of vendor management and eliminates the fear, uncertainty and doubt that come with building a vendor pool that truly meets your needs. Your print vendors are invited to participate and are informed they are always free to bid as they wish based on production capacity. They are asked to submit information and samples used to objectively assign product categories and quality levels in the software. This information, from vendors you know and trust, serves as a baseline enabling easy, worry-free evaluation and inclusion of resources as needed.

Templates and a familiar, guided process enable the establishment of objective, consistent and highly detailed specifications that are as easy to create and manage as completing an online form. These precision specifications set the parameters for determining which vendors are capable of producing the job. That is where the real eLynxx magic begins.

The eLynxx sourcing method automatically matches specification criteria with vendor attributes to select vendors to be solicited for the project. With all vendors on equal ground, the quality side of the Iron Triangle is removed. The selected vendors are then automatically sent identical solicitations with complete and detailed information. A reply with a price means that the vendor can meet delivery criteria, removing the service side of the Iron Triangle. With quality and timeliness out of the equation, price remains the final determinant. Choosing the lowest price breaks the Iron Triangle with nothing more than eLynxx software and the people, processes and vendors you already have in place.

eLynxx provides communication that brings everyone involved in the project, from creative through delivery and invoicing, including vendors and outside partners, together. Assignment, direction and tracking of approvals, both before and after the buy, are automated. Tasks, production milestones, assets, file distribution and change orders are all easily managed and tracked through automated workflow assistance. Robust reporting capabilities allow for retrieval and analysis of virtually any detail of any project managed with eLynxx software.

Users of eLynxx regularly achieve per-unit cost reductions of up to 40 percent, and often more, that offset subscription costs. Add in the 50 percent average increase in efficiency enjoyed by clients and it is clear that eLynxx is the smart choice for managing and sourcing your print projects.

There is a lot more to tell you about eLynxx but instead of rambling on and on, We’d rather get to know about you, your organization and your goals and show you exactly how you can benefit from eLynxx. Give us a call, send us an email or fill out the form here, we can’t wait to meet you!

Best Quality, Price and Service - Get All Three: Built for the Job

Happy International Print Day 2016 from eLynxx Solutions! #IPD16 #printsmart

Happy International Print Day!

Under the hashtag #IPD16, eLynxx Solutions is joining the Print and Integrated Marketing community in reminding everyone that print is everywhere and that there are lots of people creating cool stuff with it. This year our theme is #printsmart. Take a bow, you ink-sniffers.

Two years ago, our participation in #IPD14 was a success in terms of finding new life and civilizations in what we now call the “Printerverse.” That event was the first time my @andysolages handle on Twitter rubbed zeroes and ones with thought leaders like Deborah Corn (@printmediacentr) and online communities dedicated to print and integrated marketing (e.g. #PrintChat). I also did some decent sock puppetry on the @eLynxx handle where I did the company promotion thing while being my own straight man. So IPD is special. It’s a good time to connect with new people, learn things, and maybe increase your follower count if your fragile ego is thirsty.

Across social media you’re going to find great content and examples of print under the hashtag #IPD16. Pick your platforms and enjoy. As usual, we’ll be taking this opportunity to get acquainted with more of the great people who make print happen. And since we make software to help print buyers achieve better results (and have better information) as they work with their trusted printers, we’re going to say “hi” first and introduce ourselves with this quick interview I did with our CEO, Mike Jackson.

***

Andy: Tell us a little bit about your background. How long have you been the CEO of eLynxx Solutions?

Mike: I’ve had a variety of leadership roles in my thirty-year career, all working with companies who offer technical products and services.  I joined eLynxx as the COO in 2008 and I became CEO in early 2014. And are you going to link to my bio on the website?

Andy: Yeah. It has a pretty good picture of you. Should bring all the print buyers to the yard.

Mike: OK, then we’ve solved for that.

Andy: Pretend we’ve never met. What is eLynxx and how can it help the people who give us reasons to celebrate International Print Day?

Mike: Well, people that are in any kind of print production role are dealing with a couple of things. One is a deadline-driven environment, often extremely tight deadlines, so they have to react quickly. The second is that there are so many moving parts that they have to keep track of. What eLynxx has done is to create cloud-based software for print professionals that helps them coordinate, track, and optimize procurement of print projects. It’s purpose-built for these professionals to be able to rationalize all of the complex details and deadlines they have to manage. Things like project specs, changes, production schedules, vendor capabilities, vendor performance, etc. So it really makes order out of chaos and allows them to more effectively respond to tight turnaround times that are inherently part of producing custom print.

Andy: OK, so with that order, I would get information, so let’s say my boss asked for a report on…

Mike: The most common thing we see is that all the information associated with these projects is residing in different places. So you have a fragmented collection of data sources. Trying to put reports together with that usually involves analysts, it involves a lot of time, it involves a lot of effort. In eLynxx, everything is in one place so all of the metrics that are time based, that are cost based, that are qualitative based, all the project specifications, vendor performance, everything resides in one place. It’s in one database, and we offer a reporting module within the eLynxx software that allows customers to assemble that information and report on anything they want to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEjkqjlpmc

Andy: The King of Pop’s shadow looms large every time you first meet someone. But let’s put “Michael Jackson” to the side for the moment. I understand you grew up in a town called Bel Air. May I call you the Fresh Prince?

Mike: No.

Andy: Fine. Be that way. How can people contact you?

Mike:  I invite anyone who wishes to learn more to visit our website, elynxx.com or call our office at 717-709-0990. I’m a bit of a moving target, but any member of the eLynxx team will be ready to listen and give a sense of how our software can help. And if I can add value to your life with my monthly tweet, follow me at @eLynxxCEO.

To learn more about International Print Day, visit Internationalprintday.org

Happy International Print Day 2016 from eLynxx Solutions! #IPD16 #printsmart

eLynxx Solutions to Provide Print Buying Software to Johns Hopkins University

eLynxx Solutions is pleased to include Johns Hopkins University among the clients using its flagship eLynxx software. eLynxx is cloud software that is built for print buyers to streamline and simplify the specification, sourcing and management of custom printed communications. eLynxx is well suited for higher education where insight to autonomous print buying across many areas is desired.

eLynxx will be used across all colleges and administrative departments at Johns Hopkins. The software will handle marketing, student, faculty and business communications as well as outreach, scholarly and research publications.

Print procurement at most universities, including Johns Hopkins, is spread across the institution. With upwards of 200 vendors, insight into procurement activity, spending, vendor qualification, quality assurance and efficiency is challenging. The range of materials, number of individuals involved and diversity of audiences pose additional challenges to centralized procurement and make the case for departmental print buying.

eLynxx provides a single tool that enables institutional level insight while retaining the autonomy of departmental print buying. Unlike alternative solutions, eLynxx will not replace the people, processes or vendors already in place at Johns Hopkins. Rather, eLynxx empowers those people, strengthens processes and works with the vendors they trust to ultimately achieve better results in quality, service and price.

“Higher education is one of the more complex print buying environments,” said Deborah Snider, executive vice president at eLynxx Solutions. “eLynxx software has proven its value to higher education institutions where print procurement is spread out and insight is desired. Our software allows many different users to work in their familiar capacities while capturing all of the details of each project and providing a centralized source or reporting and analytics. We are excited to be able to bring that value to Johns Hopkins University.”

eLynxx clients achieve cost savings of up to 40 percent per unit and gains in operational efficiency of over 50 percent. More specifically, higher education clients using eLynxx have averaged per-unit cost savings of over 35 percent.

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eLynxx Solutions has been providing innovative products and services for helping organizations manage projects and connect with vendors of custom-produced graphic communication, direct mail, marketing materials, publications, labeling, packaging and all things print since 1975. Born, raised and still located in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania along the east coast’s graphic communications corridor connecting Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New York City, today’s eLynxx Solutions is a leading innovator and provider of project management software for the marketing supply chain. As a software boutique, eLynxx Solutions tailors its cloud software to fit the needs and requirements of its customers, providing the functionality of custom software with the economy of out-of-the-box solutions. eLynxx print procurement software empowers an organization’s people to work with their own vendors and strengthen their own processes to achieve better results. For more information regarding eLynxx software, please visit eLynxx.com.

eLynxx Solutions to Provide Print Buying Software to Johns Hopkins University

No Matter How You Slice It…

As a advertising and marcom geek of great magnitude I take an active interest in what others are doing. I yell at commercials like some people yell at sports. I read ads like I’m proofing them and I don’t just look at the direct mail I get; I study and analyze it. I recently received a promo for a credit card. Inside the envelope I saw this:

What initially drew my attention was, of course, the creativity and uniqueness of it. It’s different. It looked like a slice of bread among all of the other usual contents of a credit card pitch. I’m sure that was the intent and it worked! Realizing that this thing must have had one hell of a detailed set of specs was, however, what kept my attention.

This is a complex little piece. Since I am only a recipient of it and have no connection to its creation or production, I can only speculate that it was well specified. Given its inclusion in a prospecting mailing for a credit card, it was certainly distributed in healthy quantities. However, there is a reference date on the flipside of it, so has a use-by date of sorts and probably was not printed by the trainload for use over the course of a decade. A full-color job, printed on both sides on a hefty cover stock with a very smooth matte finish, it’s quality is more than respectable. None of these characteristics are particularly uncommon. But, without the right planning and specifications, quality, price and ultimately impact, could have suffered.

Knowing the nature of this piece’s use, I can’t imagine that ‘pricey’ was a characteristic its producers were seeking. With that being said, uniqueness was obviously being sought. Incidentally, uniqueness, especially in terms of shape, is what could have driven the cost of this piece through the roof!

Not too long ago, die-cutting with custom-fabricated dies,would have been the only means for attaining this unique shape and it would not have been cheap. Today there are alternatives to die-cutting that have the potential to be far more economical. Unless this piece was reverse engineered to utilize a bread-shaped die that was already existing, it’s specs would have needed to be detailed and clear as to both the shape and the process used to achieve it.

No matter how you slice it specifications are the heart and soul of successful marketing material production. It goes without saying that you need killer creative. And, of course, you want the finished product to look as awesome in real life as it did in the creative meetings. Kickass specs, however, ensure that your killer creative becomes awesome output without blowing the budget.

People who realize that specifications play a direct role they play in successfully connecting the message with the audience realize that precision specs, and the ability to create them with without worry or hassle, are truly, to borrow a phrase, the greatest things since sliced bread!

No Matter How You Slice It…

Change We Can Embrace

Once we feel we have a process in place that accommodates the unique complexities of one of our marketing operations, the next step is to figure out how to make it work. It’s one thing to know what roles, steps, assets and decisions an operation requires. It’s another to make all of the connections, enable the collaboration and retain some level of control over making it happen. Much of the time we are forced to turn to what we have at hand – spreadsheets, email, phone calls and general-use project and resource planning platforms – to try to make the process work. Suddenly the process that seemed so masterfully tailored becomes a pain to put into action.

Understandably, we don’t want to change a process that has been created around the specifics of our operation. Unfortunately, when we go looking for ways to make carrying out our process less of a pain, we are faced with options that would alter, if not scrap, the process or even hand complete control over to a third party. That’s the point at which acceptance of pain that’s familiar wins out over the pain of starting from scratch. It’s also when marketers become reluctant to change the way we do what we do.

That’s not to say that such resistance to change is right, wrong or indifferent. It does, however, answer the question, posed two days ago, of why marketers are reluctant to change when it comes to the way we do what we do. It also brings to mind the rationale that we should not universally avoid changing the way we make our processes work.

While it may not seem as such, there are solutions for marketers, purpose-built for specific jobs, that adapt to the processes we already have in place. Change does not have to mean starting over. Change can simply be an exchange of one tool for another that is more efficient; for one that enhances the process and makes it work like we know it can and should. Change in the way we do what we do as marketers is not always something to resist, fear or avoid. When it’s right, when it works with us and for us in the way we want it to, internal change is something for marketers to embrace as much as we hope we can effect change in the marketplace!

Change We Can Embrace

Do We Fear Change...Or Something Else?

Some may say the reason that we as marketers and marketing operations professionals are reluctant to change in the way we do what we do is fear of the unknown. That’s a cop-out. Marketers aren’t afraid of the unknown. We regularly charge forward, damned near blindly, into the unknown. If we fall flat on our face we’ll try something different and call it A/B testing! Well, okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, but still there is almost always some element of the unknown in marketing and it doesn’t hold us back.

It’s not fear of the unknown that gives us the cold sweats when we think about making some internal change to the way we do what we do. I’ll tell you what it is, because after many years, I can finally and freely admit it.

It’s fear of the ‘pain in the ass.’ Or, perhaps more accurately, fear of a different ‘pain in the ass.’

Let’s face it, marketing is a complex machine and operations within it are bound to be equally intricate. There are many different people, in nearly as many different roles, all with different concerns. There is a seemingly endless stream of details, deadlines and moving parts; all requiring decisions. Even when an organization recognizes the unique parts, connections and flow it needs, making the process actually happen is a pain. But it becomes a familiar pain. Unfortunately, as long as it results in some level of organization and effectiveness, the pain becomes not only familiar but also accepted.

When change promises to alleviate the familiar and accepted pain, we see it as merely swapping one pain that we already live with for another, the pain of starting over. Why would we want to do that? In cases where change impacts the actual process – the parts, the connections and the flow – fear of trading one pain for another might have some validity. But what about change that impacts the tools used to make the process happen and not the process itself? What about change that actually makes the process work better and easier, like it’s intended to work? Perhaps there is a worthy trade-off?

We’ll explore that more, stay tuned.

Do We Fear Change...Or Something Else?

Do We Fear Change...Or Something Else?

Some may say the reason that we as marketers and marketing operations professionals are reluctant to change in the way we do what we do is fear of the unknown. That’s a cop-out. Marketers aren’t afraid of the unknown. We regularly charge forward, damned near blindly, into the unknown. If we fall flat on our face we’ll try something different and call it A/B testing! Well, okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, but still there is almost always some element of the unknown in marketing and it doesn’t hold us back.

It’s not fear of the unknown that gives us the cold sweats when we think about making some internal change to the way we do what we do. I’ll tell you what it is, because after many years, I can finally and freely admit it.

It’s fear of the ‘pain in the ass.’ Or, perhaps more accurately, fear of a different ‘pain in the ass.’

Let’s face it, marketing is a complex machine and operations within it are bound to be equally intricate. There are many different people, in nearly as many different roles, all with different concerns. There is a seemingly endless stream of details, deadlines and moving parts; all requiring decisions. Even when an organization recognizes the unique parts, connections and flow it needs, making the process actually happen is a pain. But it becomes a familiar pain. Unfortunately, as long as it results in some level of organization and effectiveness, the pain becomes not only familiar but also accepted.

When change promises to alleviate the familiar and accepted pain, we see it as merely swapping one pain that we already live with for another, the pain of starting over. Why would we want to do that? In cases where change impacts the actual process – the parts, the connections and the flow – fear of trading one pain for another might have some validity. But what about change that impacts the tools used to make the process happen and not the process itself? What about change that actually makes the process work better and easier, like it’s intended to work? Perhaps there is a worthy trade-off?

We’ll explore that more, stay tuned.

Do We Fear Change...Or Something Else?