Tom Peire on Inkish TV: Implementation is the Missing Link in Print Automation

24 Oct 2022

Four Pees was at Printing United 2022. Morten Reitoft of Inkish TV interviewed CEO Tom Peire. They discussed how implementation is now the biggest success factor in efficient automation rollouts.

Read an excerpt of the interview below.

"Implementation is the Missing Link" - interview with Morten Reitoft of Inkish TV

Before we talk about anything else, why Four Pees?

Four Pees has been around for about 15 years, originally as a distributor. Now we're doing more and more integration work. That's why we've come to Printing United: to talk to customers, to discuss their automation needs and to see how we can help them.

We're not a software company in the sense that we do not develop standard products. We are a software company in the sense that we sell and implement software products, and we also build bespoke solutions around software.

Okay, we are here in Las Vegas, but you are from Belgium... so why are you here?

Well, when you talk about automation, you are typically looking at industrialized markets. We have those markets in Europe. We also have them in the US. The question is, who is serving those markets?

With our history as a distributor, we have seen that the landscape of people doing implementations has changed. We used to have graphic arts resellers that were selling hardware, consumables and software along with that. The focus of those traditional resellers has shifted to really focus on the hardware and and the consumables.

At at the same time, if you look at the technology from a software point of view, it has both broadened and deepened. And so it is very difficult for those traditional resellers to do full scale implementations on those different products.

The expertise that your company has gained is the implementation part?

Exactly. We want to make sure that customers don't limit themselves to a particular piece of automation, but talk to us about what they want to achieve.

Too often in our industry, people are looking at a product to solve their issues. While products and technology are certainly a part of the solution, all too often people buy products that they only partly use. They don’t get all the value out of their investment because they're not accompanied in the right way.

That's what we try to change. We initiate a relationship with a customer, typically with a discovery session. In such a session, we do show them what the possibilities are with technology, but at the same time we go deeper to discover what the actual needs are of the customer. Delivering the right solution for every particular situation is the goal.

Four Pees serves customers globally. Can software integration and implementation be done remotely?

Everybody by now has realized that COVID has normalized remote work. Before COVID, we would have been inclined to fly out more. Today we can very easily say that for the type of projects we do, most of the time there is no on-site presence required.

Have you seen people at Printing United that you only met online before?

Yes, definitely. We have been speaking to a lot of people who we have either done projects with already or are preparing project for. People who have downloaded a product here or there are also coming to see us to talk about how we can help them more.

Just this morning, somebody came up to us and said "Oh, you're the guys who are developing Switch apps. That's great!", and so we started talking to them about how we could assist them to further optimizing the automation they already have implemented. Remote work is useful, but it is still great to actually meet people and talk face to face.

Watch the full interview on Inkish TV.

Want to learn more?

Drop us a line at info@fourpees.com

We'll get the conversation going.

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