Home » About » Case Studies » Cypress
HubCast’s Cloud Print Service has enabled us to reduce the cost of each printed piece by 35 percent.
Print collateral is a critical component of Cypress Semiconductor’s sales cycle. The company’s 23 international distributors and 195 global sales representatives rely on sell sheets and brochures to sell a diversity of products ranging from simple memory devices to complex programmable solutions. But, the amount of sales and marketing collateral grew exponentially as Cypress expanded its product portfolio. Printing, warehousing, and shipping the volumes of literature was expensive. “We were spending $1,000 a month just to warehouse our collateral,” explains Jon Atterbury, Senior Marketing Communications Manager.
Cypresslooked for a solution that would reduce costs and provide its international sales force with premium-quality print collateral, on-demand. With HubCast’s Cloud Print Service, Cypress found the quality they needed, at the price they wanted – plus next day delivery anywhere in the world. Now Cypress is:
Cypress Semiconductor Corporationdelivers high-performance, mixed-signal, programmable solutions and is the world leader in USB controllers, high-performance memories, and programmable timing devices. Headquartered in San Jose, California, Cypress is a global corporation with 195 sales representatives distributed among 27 sales offices and 16 countries around the world. The company provides high-performance, mixed-signal, programmable solutions for numerous markets including, consumer, mobile handsets, computation, data communications, automotive, industrial and military.
As Cypress’s product mix transitioned from commodity products to more complex solutions, their collateral needs changed dramatically. “We went from a product sell to a more complex solutions approach, requiring a different level of collateral,” explains Atterbury. “With the fast pace of our product developments our collateral materials were out of date in as little as two months. Keeping inventoried materials up-to-date was costly and wasteful. Print on demand allows us to keep materials up-to-date in near real time.”
For Cypress’s sales force, it’s important to get the latest information to customers and prospects quickly, so a delay in getting up-to-date sales collateral to the field can be an issue. “It took time to ship collateral around-the-world,” says Atterbury. “On occasion, sales representatives printed materials on the office inkjet, just to have something for the customer. That’s not what we want to happen because we lose control of the quality and our brand. We need to make sure our sales force always uses materials that reflect the high quality of the Cypress brand.”
It also was becoming more and more difficult to predict which collateral the sales force would find most popular. “It was impossible to forecast how many copies of a brochure we would use, especially when we needed to order far in advance of a product release to meet printers’ lead times. We found ourselves with backorders on popular brochures and an expensive inventory of unused, less popular collateral.”
Shipping was another major expense. Cypress was paying to ship materials twice; once from the printer to the warehouse and then from the warehouse to where the collateral was used. “We had a warehouse of brochures in Los Angeles, and we were shipping them, as needed, to places like Hong Kong and Paris,” explains Atterbury. “That’s very expensive.”
“We made a strategic decision to move to cloud printing to reduce costs,” declares Atterbury. “Now, we print only what we need and eliminate the expense of warehousing and shipping. In just a short time, HubCast’s Cloud Print Service has enabled us to reduce the cost of each printed piece by 35 percent.
HubCast’s Cloud Print Service enables Cypress to protect its brand and ensure all sales representatives have next day access to accurate, professional quality collateral. “HubCast is completely calibrated so our corporate colors are consistent on every print job,” states Atterbury. “We maintain a single copy of the .pdf in a central location to ensure the accuracy of all information. With HubCast, we can make changes to the .pdf and be confident that only the new version of collateral will be printed. We don’t worry that customers will receive outdated materials.”
“HubCast represents an intelligent mix of human printing and automated printing. When we don’t need a human involved, the process is automatic,” continues Atterbury. “But, if we have a question or a special order, we have immediate access to HubCast’s customer service and they have never failed to get things done. “Recently, we needed a number of print pieces at the last minute for a large tradeshow and we needed them overnight. HubCast printed thousands of pieces for us and delivered them in less than a day. That’s a feat.”
Cypressis printing about 8,000 pieces a month with HubCast’s Cloud Print Service. To make it easier to track which sales representatives are using which print pieces, Cypress worked with HubCast to develop a custom web interface, which lets Cypress’ sales force order print materials directly from Cypress’ online store. HubCast processes the order and delivers the materials. “The sales force knows they will receive the latest, professionally printed version of any of our printed collateral within 24 hours, whether they’re in California or India, so there’s no more need for short cuts. Our sales force really likes the flexibility to choose the literature they want and they appreciate the responsiveness.”
“We have made a 100 percent move to HubCast’s Cloud Print Service,” concludes Atterbury. “HubCast enables us to be more responsive to the needs of our sales force and we are confident we are saving money. For printing, HubCast has proven itself to be the best.”