RSK Tech founder Anders Rask looks at why e-business is now finally taking off and how it can be done properly.

RSK Tech has an unusual setup, be it with the location in Dundee and main customer bases in the UK and Germany, its foundation by a young Dane, the eight employees of eight different nationalities, or the fact that it is one of the only hi-tech companies who focus exclusively on the printwear industry. In 2006 RSK Tech has become certified partners of Adobe, Corel and Microsoft.

“Textile printing is sort of in my blood,”

says Anders Rask.

I was born in 1977 just as my mum and dad started screenprinting heat transfers. I was very young when I learned about screen printing and from very early on could even operate the printing machines.’

Eventually Anders became more interested in IT, and between 1997 and 2003 he masterminded a large number of IT investments in NS System. As there were no solutions readily available, he had to develop it himself from the bottom up. In part thanks to the use of information technology, NS System is now the Scandinavian market leader delivering an impressive 75,000 small quantity orders per year with only 70 employees.

The logobank

The products and knowledge that RSK Tech now offer to all companies in the printwear business is based on the experience that Anders attained in his quest for solving bottleneck problems in NS System's workflow. He said,

"I quickly realised that it was all about the logos. To know how much ink you need, what printing machine you can use, how long it will take to print and what the price will be all comes down to the shape, dimensions, colours and other characteristics of the logo being printed.”

This realisation led Anders to create a computer programme that could hold all that logo information in a central database, and it became the platform for a number of improvements and tangible cost-reductions in the workflow of NS System. RSK Tech later developed this concept into a ready-to-use computer programme available for all printers, embroiderers and distributors. RSK Logobank is the right solution for storing and managing logos, graphical files and related information, and it goes a step further by adding so-called automation features.

Anders said,

“Basically automation is about saving expensive time. The inbuilt automation features in RSK Logobank allow you to automatically create PDF files and bitmap thumbnails, or to automatically email PDF files for customer proofing.”

The Webshop

There is a big demand for webshops as they are becoming more and more common in the industry. RSK Tech's sales consultant for the UK and Ireland Senthil Arumugam said,

“At this moment in time the vast majority of businesses in the industry are either already preparing to invest in a webshop or will do so very soon. Obviously a number of printers will keep off the Internet indefinitely, but they will end up serving a rapidly declining market.”

Readily available from RSK Tech is also the industry's most comprehensive webshop solution - RSk Web Express. This offering has modules for selling logos, names, letters and numbers, and garments. For those wanting a complete solution it is worth noting that the solution comes with a user-friendly content management system and that RSK Tech offers server hosting.

Senthil explains,

”Those that are in a hurry can have a full webshop up and running in just a few days. We're even making it much easier to sell garments as we're developing a solution for garment distributors to upload their catalogues to a central server.”

The company also delivers customised solutions that are months in development that are sometimes needed for companies with specific requirements.

The webshop has been developed in close co-operation with customers, Anders explained that this is down to listening to customer feedback.

“RSK Web Express® used to be very logo-centric so to speak, and was perhaps more geared towards business-to-business. But after listening to the demands from a number of customers, the solution is now becoming more geared towards business-to-consumer trading.”

Increasing profits

According to RSK Tech, the way to successfully use e-business as a way of increasing your return is to not only focus on the webshop but to use a more holistic approach. Processes can be re-engineered around software tools and information can be better managed. The result is that increasing sales are produced at lower costs.

”Being a fairly young company there are only a few long-term case studies that we can point to”

says Anders,

”but those few cases are success stories about how the bottom line has been improved by up literally hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

The solutions are available and reasonably priced for both small and big companies. Interested business-owners should register on the website for obtaining evaluation versions of the mentioned software and receive newsletters with case studies of companies who increased their profit by adopting RSK Tech solutions.

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