The keynote on the topic was delivered by Gabriel Matsliach, senior vice president and general manager of productivity software, EFI who spoke on EFI’s transformation in terms of productive software for the market and highlighted key global trends

“As a company we have seen a transformation on how our software offerings have been brought together under the productivity suite. At the same time the market has also seen a major transformation with niche solution providers growing in strength and at the other end we also see printers diversifying and the role of a printer largely changing into becoming marketing service provider” said Matsliach.

E-commerce and marketing services, Mastliach believes would be the game changer for the industry.

“A productivity solution is not always about MIS but how does the solution help in the growing areas of marketing, acquiring new customers greatly increasing efficiency and also providing intelligence to aid the company to steer towards reaching goals” he added.

Sanil Nair, senior director of engineering for EFI’s productivity software presented the possibilities of big data and predictive analytics techniques as a futuristic trend to be employed in print industry.

“The manufacturing industry has benefited hugely by employing predictive analysis on big data especially for purposes such as demand forecasting, fault detection and failure prediction and ability to arrive at precise costing models using these approaches. The print industry can greatly” said Nair.

He cited the cases of Staples and Lenovo who have benefited with better ROI and better detection of issues in products for lowering warranty costs respectively using predictive analysis.

PrintWeek India also presented findings from their online survey which gave an insight on what the industry expect from their ERP/MIS solution. According to the survey, a massive majority said they believe an ERP is critical to their business.

The findings of the ERP Survey will be published in a forthcoming issue of PrintWeek India.