Q&A with Manish Haria, CISO & CIO of Johnson & Quin—Their Inkjet Revolution

Q: Manish, congratulations on adding your 3rd color inkjet! How has inkjet changed your processes at Johnson and Quin?

A: As inkjet technology has continued to improve, we have kept investing in it. We have recently added a SCREEN Advanced ZZ to our fleet and retired our monochrome laser printers. With three lines of inkjet presses, we have added greatly to our capacity and this shows our continued focus on inkjet.

Color inkjet technology has transformed our printing and personalization operations completely and for the better:

Postage savings

• The biggest positive for our customers has been the ability to do infinite versions and combine them for much greater postage savings. Along with 4-color personalization on envelopes using MCS color inkjet technology, we are now able to combine versions that traditionally would have had to be run separately at much higher production costs and postage.
• We combine these technologies with our postage optimization capabilities to get the deepest postal discounts possible using various logistics options and optimal delivery times. These have enabled us to attain the best final per piece prices possible for our customers.

Risk Management

• From risk perspective, color inkjet has helped us move quite a few of our color QC checks upstream in IT and Prepress departments. This in turn lets our operators focus better on running production and consistently produce high quality.
• The risk surface for us and our customers has greatly decreased by eliminating the conventional printing operation.

SLAs

• Throughput of modern color inkjet technology greatly surpasses conventional printing tremendously helping satisfy tight SLAs.
• Setup times have greatly reduced resulting in faster production runs.

Integrity

• Integrity of the Signoffs process has greatly improved compared to conventional printing. Signoffs for conventionally printed work had personalization artificially overlaid on the shell. Now with full-color process, what the customer sees in Signoffs is what we print.
• There is better integrity with dynamic perfing since registration of print and perfing can now be done simultaneously.

Q: How does your Solimar workflow software benefit Johnson & Quin?

A: With our final move towards becoming a white paper factory, all imaging is now done with PDF technology. Having Solimar workflow products Rubika adds a big tool chest to our processing capabilities. The automation features in Rubika have enabled us to set up the spoilage reproduction process in a completely lights-out manner without additional hardware investment.

Q: Another congratulation, you were promoted to VP, CISO, CIO (which sounds like 3 jobs!) How has your role changed and empowered Johnson and Quin’s success now and into the future?

A: My focus has shifted further towards strategic initiatives looking at technology and information security trends and evaluating which ones will impact/benefit the organization in the long run. As an example, we have recently adopted cloud technologies for certain operations and invested in quite a few security initiatives.

Q: Manish, we’re grateful to have you as a member of the Solimar Customer Advisory Council and excited you’ll present at our upcoming CAC conference in Chicago. How important is security to Johnson and Quin in safeguarding your company and your customer’s data?

A: Our customers trust us with their marketing lists and expect us to safeguard this sensitive data in our custody. Neither them nor us want to be in the news due to a breach! We have always conducted our operations in a secure fashion and it is now more important than ever in today’s world of endless attacks. We continue to add barriers for the bad actors out there. After achieving SOC2 Type 1 attestation from an independent AICPA accredited CPA firm in 2018, we are on our way to achieve SOC2 Type 2 in September 2019. With Type 2, we successfully demonstrated that our security controls have been operating consistently to safeguard our sensitive data and operations. It is equally important to safeguard other company sensitive information. We annually get our overall security assessed by third parties. Getting assessed/audited by independent parties not only gives our customers confidence in our security setup, it also helps us keep up with emerging security threats.