Xerox Refocuses On Its Customers

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Ed Wooten, Nuvera product manager, and leader of the team that developed the dual-engine machine, invites engineers along whenever he's meeting with customers. "The big thing we have to teach the engineers is not to go in with the problem already solved," says Wooten. "For engineers there is a temptation to quickly get to the answer. But you have to leave possibilities open and be able to constructively listen to what the customer is saying, or else you might filter it out. As we get our engineers to do that, we'll come up with more creative solutions." To underline the importance of the initiative, Vandebroek has created the post of global manager for customer-led innovation. Researchers have responded enthusiastically. "There's been a groundswell from the staff, both engineers and scientists," says Hoover.

Bridging the Gap With Technology

But there have also been challenges to making it work. Foremost among them: matching the right researcher with the right customer. So Vandebroek's group has designed a Web-based tool in which researchers enter the topic they would like to discuss with a customer; a team of customer experts matches those goals to the appropriate customer. The next major challenge is training both sides to see the meetings as research. "This is a dream and not something that's on the market today," Vandebroek says. She is trying to use technology to bridge the customer gap in other ways too, maintaining a blog and a wiki where customers can enter feedback. In virtual world Second Life, Vandebroek's avatar urges customers to dream with the company at its Innovation Island as well.

Whether that all pays off will ultimately rest on products like the dual-engine machine. In its case, Xerox involved customers every step of the three year development. ColorCentric's Lacanghina reviewed drawings of the proposed machine in early 2005 and, more than two years later, still meets with Xerox engineers every Tuesday morning at 9 to discuss the performance of his beta machine.

Since early 2005, more than 1,000 customers have been consulted about the machine. One of their greatest contributions, says Wooten, was identifying early some of the key technological challenges. Customers loved that the dual-engine machine was likely to spend less time out of commission, for instance, but the image quality still needed to be perfect. At a meeting early on in development in Gonic, N.H., Tad Parker, president of Odyssey Press, told Wooten he worried the engines would wear differently, meaning that pages in the same book would look different from one another, depending on which of the two engines they'd passed through. No perceptible difference would be acceptable to the publishers who buy $5 million in high-quality, short-run digital printing from Odyssey each year.

Getting Rid of Drift

Engineers call this problem "drift." Because no two engines age identically, Xerox would have to figure out a way to monitor and correct for the divergence of the tandem motors. Solving that problem took them close to 18 months. Even determining what would and wouldn't constitute too much drift wasn't a given. If you look at a series of prints of the same photograph, they may each be fine individually, but put together they may not match up. Xerox had to figure out a way to measure the results from each engine, both as independent images and in comparison with each other.

But what constituted too much drift? Customers shown printed examples of different amounts of drift declared them O.K.or unacceptable, providing researchers with the data to set control parameters against which images are evaluated by sensors inside the machine. (And though its development didn't start in the lab, the process has been patented.) The next challenge was measuring drift on the fly as the prints zipped past the sensors, and then communicating the adjustments needed to nudge the printers back into alignment. In the end, Xerox software and hardware engineers designed a constant closed loop in which the measurements were taken.