InformationWeek

June 7, 1999

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Digital Imaging For Business

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PetSmart Inc., a Phoenix company that operates more than 500 stores and a direct-mail catalog selling pet-related products, uses Mavica MVC-FD81 digital cameras to help get some product lines to market in record time--30 days, instead of two to three months. Marcia Meyer, president of PetSmart International Supply Co., a division of the $2.1 billion concern, says the cameras aid in streamlining communications with overseas suppliers from more than 20 countries.

Rather than sending suppliers' samples of fabric colors, styles, or details to use in a new product, buyers can snap digital pictures of items that inspire them and upload the JPEG images stored on the diskette to suppliers using QCS Corp.'s QCS.net catalog and transaction Internet service. Similarly, suppliers can send PetSmart digital photos of the works-in-progress for approval.

Meyer says the ability to collaborate electronically on these designs has not only improved time to market for products since the project began 18 months ago, but has also saved the company money on overseas sales trips. The five cameras, which can take images at a resolution up to 1,024 by 768 pixels, represent an investment of just $4,500.

"A great retailer responds to what customers want," Meyer says. "We now have a better set of criteria in how we select products and create packaging. We've become more sophisticated in how we make decisions about products."

Spinelli of NFL Properties also sees an opportunity to use digital cameras to bring consumer products to market more quickly, especially for once-a-year events such as the Super Bowl. Using digital cameras could let NFL Properties release a Super Bowl commemorative book at least a day earlier than usual, for example. "The interest is huge before the game. You have a limited time frame to excite someone after a game," Spinelli says. "Digital cameras can get to print more quickly. That's the key to profitability."

More Work For Less
Some companies find that digital cameras allow them to save money by eliminating the middleman. Take Niemand Industries, a Marion, Ala., food-packaging company with $40 million in annual revenue. Niemand was looking for a way to avoid paying $40 to $80 an hour to graphics shops to handle the job of creating prototype labels for packages. It found a solution in the $800 Canon PowerShot DCS digital camera.

The camera lets Niemand do the prototype packaging design of food labels for grocery and food-company chains in-house. Images ranging from plates of spaghetti to taco dinners are snapped with the camera and fed into Macintosh systems, where they're manipulated with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Then they're printed out and pasted onto one or more containers the company manufactures, for presentation to the client.

"On a limited budget, we can now develop a presentation-quality prototype for our customers," says John Baugh, technical services manager at Niemand Industries. Instead of paying $200 to $300 to a professional graphics house for a prototype, it costs $10 to $15 per prototype, he says.

Baugh says he's had only one problem since the company began using the Canon camera in 1997-- having enough RAM on the computer to handle image sizes. For Niemand's prototype projects, Baugh has had to upgrade one of its Mac systems to 128 Mbytes of RAM.