Print BI operates by asking which country or segment you would like to find new prospects, and then allows you to filter further for service, product, machine brand, and industry served. For example: you could select the UK, offset printing, flyers, HP Indigo, and then hospitality. At the end of your search, you will see the numbers of printers that match each criterion.

The database then offers you all of the details for the company, including all printing products, all service types, every industry served, and all equipment onsite.

Yaron Shifman, chief executive officer at Swathly, which is the parent company of Print BI, has a rich history in the print industry and has spent 18 years living in different parts of the world and gaining experience with Scitex and Kodak.

Shifman explains: “We created a big database with capability of business intelligence in order to break the industry by service segment, by print product, the brand of equipment that exists onsite, the industries served, and by geographic location.”

He continues: “In the end, this provides actionable leads with exceptionally detailed information. For example, a customer could be looking for printers in Germany who produce paper bags. This search then gives you the name, the address, the phone number, all of the email addresses, and many details about their operations.”

Barbara Elstein, chief marketing officer of Swathly, comments on why this new product is an important innovation in the print industry. She explains: “In print, it’s ironic that there is a huge amount of technology involved in production, but the use of popular technologies such as data mining and business intelligence is relatively undeveloped. Our vision is to empower the print industry with advanced technologies that help buyers and sellers find each other more efficiently.”

On the Print BI solution, Elstein explains: “One of our customers is focused on pre-press, so we know that its targets need to have offset machines. The Print BI tool identifies offset printers and allows them to filter further to see which ones are located in a specific country, produce a specific product, serve a specific industry, or even use a specific brand of offset machine. In this way, our customer is able to develop prioritised prospect lists based on deep intelligence into their target’s operations. In addition, we can perform detailed analyses of industry segments or competitors leveraging this information.”

The tool has been launched recently, and both Shifman and Elstein will continue the expansion of the database and hope to grow it to include over 100,000 printers across the globe.

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