Page 61 - Print21 Jan-Feb 2020

Software
“A new PDF engine will enable a complex job that previously took 37 minutes to go through the data engine to now take just 33 seconds, or 70 times faster. The file size is from 4GB down to 21MB, and all this was achieved on a regular server that costs $2 an hour.”
– Ward De Lange, chief technical officer, Chili publish
with data, and it still enforces corporate design and technical guides. And based upon the data, it can either be served in self-service, or it can be fully automated lights out.
“If we now can think of a template where we don’t have to define size ahead of time, we would greatly improve our costs and speed to market without anything else. But not only do our templates mature and grow, also, we have grown and matured.
Chief technical officer De Langhe said a new PDF engine would dramatically speed up jobs and shrink file sizes.
“We wanted to tackle the performance, we wanted to increase the throughput of an engine. And we wanted to do something about file size. And that was a successful project,” he said.
“We went from 37 minutes to 33 seconds. And that’s about 70 times faster. And if you look at the file size, it’s even more impressive –
it went from four gigabytes to 21 megabytes. But you’re probably thinking, yeah, they probably set this up on AWS on this super exotic configuration. Expensive. No, we used a common setup. So it has one server with three processing units. And they are not even the most expensive ones. The server cost is $2 per hour.
The Spicy Talks conference is clearly a key part of the growing influence of innovative software in the print environment. Cutting out cost and time from the process, as well as eliminating the possibility
of mistakes, is what the industry is looking for, and what companies like Chili with its Smart Templates are delivering. 21
Chili mission
Goeminne said the Chili mission was to create the best experience, reduce waste and improve productivity and creativity. He said, “My favourite cookie in the whole wide world
is Oreo. Brands like Oreo needs
to produce a massive number of visuals, visuals that they use both in their online and offline strategy. Chili will reduce manual design waste, and free up a massive portion of budgets.”
He said that according to Gartner Market Research, any brand or company in the world spends about 11.2 per cent of its budget or revenue on marketing – and 24 per cent of that is spent on manual labour.
“To put this in perspective, if you have a company that’s doing about $100m in revenue, that’s more than $5m every year that we’re spending on manual labour, which is costly, time consuming, and error prone,” he said.
Goeminne highlighted the error by pointing to the Aussie $50 note, which misspelled the word responsibility, and printed it 40 million times before actually realising there was a mistake.
Goeminne says that a medium- sized design team of anywhere between 20 and 50 has to manage up to 3000 different campaigns. He said, “That’s massive, I don’t
know how they get this done. On top of that, the blended hourly rate according to this report is about 73 euros. And that is why we feel it’s time to free up designers.
“To put this again in perspective, in a company of 100 million euros revenue, that means about 36,000 hours that are spent on manually creating all the visuals that we all want to communicate. So for us, it’s time to free up.
“To be focused on our mission, we need to first of all speed up things. We need to automate everything that we can, and we should connect to data systems as much as possible. The glue to all of this is Smart Templates – they are the weapon in simplifying and automating graphic production,” he said.
A Smart Template is a graphic design that will force the user to respect design and technical guidelines. Simple repetitive tasks will be automated, so the multiple sized and shaped templates will place all the elements in the appropriate location within the template.
Goeminne said, “Today we will be introducing Smart Templates, with fully flexible layouts and data sources, so documents have the flexibility to be output to any size or channel. Without being defined ahead of time for that specific channel, or size, it still connects
Centre:
Automating document creation: Chili CEO Kevin Goeminne talks to Print21 editor Wayne Robinson at the Berlin conference
Above:
Web-to-
coffin design: Australians Lynn White, general manager LifeArt, and Mike Grehan, CEO LifeArt, at SpicyTalks
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