Precision Proco has recruited Steeve Roucaute to join its board as chief technology officer. He worked for Precision for a decade, leaving in 2016 to join Cimpress and most recently has worked at leading video conferencing company 8×8.
That experience, underlined by the proliferation of online meetings in the last year, has convinced him that print will not be disappearing any time soon. “Any virtual company needs some physical output,” he says. “A lot more human interactions will be carried out remotely and the need will be to seal that with something physical. Print is excellent at delivering that.”
Roucaute will operate across all the Precision Proco sites, though expects that Dagenham will be the base. While he had worked for Precision he left before the move from Barking, so the environment there is new.
CEO Gary Peeling welcomes his return: “Our strategy to deploy the most forward thinking and innovative technology will help cement our place as the industry’s leader in workflow automation and utilisation.
“With Steeve’s direction we will be able to drive forward our plans, including development of our in-house marketing technology, Siteflow enhancements and overarching group technology programme.”
Roucaute underlines a previous point that Peeling has made, namely that Precision Proco “is a technology company before it is a printing company. Technology is the enabler for printing with the volume and the utilisation as the resources that we have.”
The new role will be to manage this, to roll it out across the existing and any future operations, to make use of data analytics, machine learning technologies, artificial intelligence and so on. “That’s where my skill set comes in,” he says.
There will also be links to brands and other users of print and marketing services, among them the emerging crop of what he calls technopreneurs – start up businesses that are using ecommerce sites to sell products, products that are either based on print, like books and cards, or use printed packaging. In either case, they will be able to link to Precision Proco through an API that the print and delivery business will provide.
He says: “I believe that independently deployable and scalable technology will be a crucial success factor in executing our growth plan, abiding by three principles of technical excellence: teamwork, customer centricity and a data driven mindset.”
