Too Many Conferences, Too Little Time. Part 1
A key Xplor difference is that conference sessions are typically informative and pleasantly pitch-free. Although vendors are welcome to speak and share expertise, they are not allowed to pitch their wares. Instead, attendees hear about the document production challenges in insurance, banking, healthcare, financial services, utilities, and more, and strategies for addressing these issues. Every session I sat in on was full or near capacity, with a couple being standing room only.
Topics covered the migration of paper documents to digital media and the opportunities this offers, along with recommendations on how to handle the challenges that come with this transition. Ensuring compliance with constantly changing regulations was another recurrent theme because companies are under pressure to ensure all their customer-facing communications comply with new requirements. Compliance was also tied to risk management and workflow optimization. Together these concerns drive the need for software solutions that are data stream agnostic, scalable, non-intrusive, and adaptable. Then there’s the ADF. The automated document factory concept is hardly new, but the advent of full-color inkjet presses and more powerful software has rekindled interest, especially with the elimination of pre-printed forms via a white-paper-in printing strategy. Xplor featured several sessions covering on this topic that is becoming increasingly important as billers seek ways to manage documents efficiently while reducing and controlling costs.
The value of conferences is the information and insights one gains by hearing other people’s perspectives on a host of topics. Xplor was excellent for this, and the absence of product-pitches in the presentations made it far more informative and interesting for attendees. In this pitch-free zone, something I noticed was that very few people walked out on any of the sessions I attended. It was all solid, useful information that gave perspective to attendees’ challenges and the insights they needed to ask smarter questions when investigating the solutions offered on the show floor.
