Cirqit.com--Making the Dotcom Move

A spinoff of L.P. Thebault, Cirqit.com is focusing on Fortune 2000 accounts.

BY ERIK CAGLE

There is no denying that Cirqit.com is a product of the cyberspace times. However, there is a method to the madness of "dotcomology" for this son of a printer—not just a move to cyberspace for the sake of being technologically chic.

Formed in July 1999, Cirqit.com marked the beginning of what would ultimately become a web, if you will, of alliances, services and supply chains bound together by a single mantra: offering the ultimate in end-to-end solutions. In essence, Cirqit.com—an application service provider (ASP)—stands shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the sexiest, smartest e-business, technology and supply chain leaders in order to stand alone.

"Our vision," states Mark Hausser, senior vice president of client services and one of four men who set the original framework for Whippany, NJ-based Cirqit.com, "was very much client-driven. When we looked at what our clients were asking for and where the Internet was going, it made good business sense to spin out of L.P. Thebault (LPT) a dotcom solution as a separate entity to serve the growing marketplace of online print and procurement needs."

Hausser, Cirqit.com CEO Jeff Kaufman, Steve Flood, vice president of operations and customer relationship management, and Craig Garno, vice president of information services, joined Thebault two years ago to help identify the future of its business. It was here that Cirqit.com's original strategy to leverage the Internet to automate the processes of procuring print was formed.

"At the time, a Fortune 50 telecommunications company had come to LPT and asked it to develop an extranet application to automate the process of all their print procurement," Hausser notes. "Thebault was also using the Internet as a vehicle to develop one-to-one marketing campaigns by capturing data off of Internet sites and driving that to variable print devices."

Cirqit.com emerged with $28 million in funding, 100 years' worth of domain experience and a suite of services that embodies the ideal end-to-end solution.

The services:
* Order-It: Aimed at individuals responsible for print procurement, Order-It is an automated, online ordering system that enables companies to streamline the purchase of printed collateral, reduce time to market, enhance storage efficiency and decrease warehouse costs.

Online estimating and job tracking are other attractive features of Order-It. Suppliers are also linked to this technology and are able to collaboratively work through projects. Price-It, a component of Order-It, is an automated, online pricing engine that enables companies to input their job specifications and receive back a real-time price estimate from suppliers, reducing the time from days to seconds.

"One of the key differentiators in the ordering component is Price-It, our real-time pricing engine," states Hausser. "Models in the marketplace today—even the most sophisticated ones—just provide rate-card pricing, where you're able to put in standard rate cards that all suppliers support. We built a dynamic pricing model where suppliers can manage cost pricing on a client-by-client basis. A Fortune 2000 procurement or marketing executive can go in for budgetary reasons or for ordering, put specs into our estimating engine and receive back online, real-time pricing from suppliers.

"The automated pricing engine, Price-It, can provide pricing for nearly 50 percent to 60 percent of all printed items within the Fortune 2000 company's print process," he adds. "Price-It can reduce the amount of time, from days to seconds, of the entire ordering process, making traditional estimating practices, such as those done over the phone, obsolete. Other online systems still take days for a printer to respond back to a price estimate."

* D.A.M.-It (Digital Asset Management): A browser-based digital asset management system allows companies to store, search and track digitally created materials, such as logos and brochures, to maximize all print production and distribution processes, and enhance brand equity.

"Corporations are trying to get their arms around and secure the whole intellectual property issue," says Judy Guido, chief marketing and communications officer for Cirqit.com. "We think that this is going to be a significant, competitive advantage for us.

"You hear so much about people trying to create global brand management," Guido observes. "We really feel that our Digital Asset Management is a critical tool that will help companies to enhance, as well as create, that global brand management."

* Fulfill-It: An online catalog of printed communications and premiums that are available to enable clients to distribute collateral to their appropriate destination. Users order their business communications from an online inventory listing from which the user can select delivery and shipping requirements. The option is integrated with all major third-party shipping companies and provides online tracking of customer collateral inventory, distribution orders and shipment status.

"In the traditional model, this would be a telephone or fax process—cumbersome, time-intensive and very error-prone," Hausser remarks.

* Customize-It: Users can create customized printed communications by selecting predesigned company templates, graphics and text stored in an online library. It allows users to drive highly targeted sales and marketing campaigns by creating customized print, premiums and packaging.

"This is targeted toward sales and marketing organizations," Hausser notes. "They can come online and build collateral using components, text and graphics. It can be logos, paragraphs of text or photos.

"This is being leveraged within sales organizations today; they have regional sales focuses in many cases, and this allows them to select the graphics and text that is most appropriate to the audience they're targeting," he adds.

* Personalize-It: A customer re-lationship management (CRM) tool that allows customers to construct customized sales and business communications through an Internet, extranet or data stream, as individual print or digital pieces. Clients create or modify master templates, customize existing templates with appropriate text and images, and preview documents electronically before printing to create pieces of personalized collateral.

* Integrated Services: Cirqit.com provides a number of services, such as program and campaign management, translation and training services, and direct marketing support. Direct marketing support services include data capture and mining from Websites, call centers, business reply cards, data profiling for use in personalized print materials, and integration of text and data to create personalized communications.

The Supply Chain
One attractive option that Cirqit.com offers is its in-network and out-of-network models in regards to the supply chain. Clients may either choose to leverage Cirqit.com's growing worldwide integrated supply chain or integrate their own supply chain into Cirqit.com's technologies.

"Speed to market is a critical competitive advantage for our customers," Hausser notes. "It's driven through more efficient turnaround of quotes, order confirmation, product and project management time. Organizations get their product to their customers quickly and they reduce their cycle time from weeks to days. Accurate information, limited rework and supply-chain integration are all the critical value propositions Cirqit.com possesses."

Cirqit.com has an impressive Fortune 2000 client roster. Customer markets include the financial, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, marketing, technology, advertising, document services, media and automotive industries.

While L.P. Thebault is a separate entity from its offspring, it is a member of Cirqit.com's supply chain, providing commercial and digital printing services. Among its other supply chain partners:

• Curtis 1000, which furnishes envelope and on-demand digital printing, along with custom labels, mailing and packaging solutions.
• Corporate Printers offers commercial sheetfed printing, with electronic prepress services, and full-service bindery and shipping.
• Harpers Print, a commercial printer with complete prepress, digital, fulfillment and graphic services.

Among Cirqit.com's technology partners:

• Scient is a major player in the stable of technology alliances forged by Cirqit.com and played a role in the creation of the suite of services offered by Cirqit.com.
• Level8 integrates complex technologies and manages workflow for both customers and suppliers.
• Flexstor.net offers storage management systems for DAM.
• Luna manages electronic agreements between customers and suppliers on the network.

"Our approach is that we're not just a technology company working in the e-print space," Guido stresses. "We really amassed a group of expertise—customer relationship management, print, fulfillment and marketing expertise—in addition to software development and digital asset management. Those are the people we've sought out to help create the entire solution for our customers."

Moving forward, Cirqit.com is using its client-user group to provide feature function review and feedback to its technology, as well as eliciting a Q&A in regard to how the users view the future.

"We see a change, with workflows eventually getting off the desktop and into people's hands," Guido remarks. "We think the move to the wireless, hand-held activity is going to be really critical. We also look to establish relationships on a global basis (London and the Pacific Rim are initial targets). The world is getting smaller and smaller, and we want to be a part of that."