Vistaprint 2015 Annual Report Download - page 14

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Our Mass Customization Platform
We believe that we can generate significant customer value by building a mass customization platform that
combines the strengths of the production technologies and processes from all of our business units into a shared
platform we can leverage across all of our brands. This shared platform is under construction, and is being designed
to enable us to aggregate orders from multiple brands to improve our ability to achieve further scale benefits in the
future. Until then, we are operating a set of individual mass customization platforms, the largest of which was
created for our Vistaprint brand.
Our high-volume, standardized, scalable mass customization processes are driven by sophisticated
proprietary software. Our technologies are designed to readily scale as the number of orders received per day
increases. In particular, the more individual jobs we receive in a time period, the more efficiently aggregations, or
gangs, of similar jobs can be assembled and moved to the printing system, thereby maximizing the efficient use of
the production capacity and increasing overall system throughput. We believe that our strategy of seeking to
automate and systematize our service and production systems enables us to reach and serve small-scale
customers more effectively than our competitors.
With the improvements we have made in automating the design and production process and with the global
scale of our production facilities, located in Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Australia, France, Italy, Norway, and
India, we can produce and ship an order the same day we receive it, which results in minimal inventory levels and
reduced working capital requirements. In most of our manufacturing facilities, technology facilitates the production
of complementary customized products in a highly synchronized manner, allowing us to produce and deliver multi-
part orders quickly and efficiently.
As orders are received, we automatically route production jobs to the type and location of the production
system that is most appropriate and cost efficient for the type of product ordered. Our proprietary software and
sophisticated automation solutions combined with software from our suppliers allow us to integrate and automate
the manufacturing process from pre-production through fulfillment. Requiring as little as 14 seconds of pre-press,
printing, cutting and boxing labor for a typical order of 250 business cards, versus an hour or more for traditional
printers, our manufacturing processes enable us to print high quality customized orders using a fraction of the labor
of typical traditional printers. Our quality assurance systems are designed to ensure that we consistently deliver
quality products on time through a variety of principles of world-class manufacturing, such as Lean and Kaizen™.
Supply chain management
We are focused on achieving the lowest total cost in our strategic sourcing efforts by concentrating on
quality, logistics, technology and cost, while also striving to use responsible sourcing practices within our supply