Creo Scitex at Drupa 2000

By Aviva Rosen

DRUPA 2000, the global print exhibition currently taking place in Germany sets the agenda for the print world. If you are not there, you don’t exist. Some conclude the deals of a lifetime by having their products perfectly displayed, and some are there with new products, but which are poorly exhibited, and thus missed by potential customers.

One company that is there with glad new tidings is Creo-Scitex , a merger between a division of Israel’s Scitex and Creo of Canada. The merger was worked out in January but not finally signed until April, leaving the two companies very little time to organize and arrive at DRUPA with a common message.

Creo-Scitex president Erez Meltzer, pre-merger vice president of Scitex, tells how quickly this was achieved. In an age where work on mergers takes years until the companies discover whether the merger has been a success or a failure, such speed can only be achieved if everybody acts in unison toward a single goal. And that, in fact, is what happened. The employees of both companies realized that unless they acted jointly, both parent companies were liable to collapse and they would lose their jobs.

When mergers happen, Meltzer says, many employees become anxious, for fear of losing their position. There are personal and group interests that have nothing to do with the interests of the organization. “In our case,” Meltzer says, “these fears were put to one side in favour of the common interest of putting in a united appearance at the exhibition.”

Meltzer: “There exists quite a large cultural gap. One the one hand, there is a global entity such as Scitex, in which 70% of employees, mostly Israelis, worked geographically dispersed all over the world. On the other hand, there is a Canadian company, with a typical North American mentality. All that remained to the new company, in terms of time, was five weeks of intensive effort to enable us to come fully prepared to DRUPA.

“The merger was finally concluded in April, and by mid-May, we were already prepared to inaugurate our pavilion at the exhibition, and present ourselves as a united company with a product line representing a combination of the products of the two component companies. We had to present a uniform concept, uniform design, people who identified with the merged company and would present it as such. This involved millions of tiny details carried out by people who didn’t sleep for weeks, in order to come ready to the exhibition.

“Ultimately, we have 150 products at the exhibition, a pavilion occupying a huge area of 2,000 square metres. Our equipment is positioned in another fourteen pavilions belonging to other companies. Incidentally, for PR purposes, we distributed 25,0000 footballs with our logo. Every two hours, thousands of these footballs are tossed down from an elevated position, to tell the world that Creo-Scitex is here”.

“Globes”: Did there come a time when you were afraid of not being able to keep up with the murderous pace of your timetable?

Meltzer: “Firstly, we drew up Plan B to have something to fall back on in any event. If we could not come united to DRUPA, we would appear there anyway, as two separate companies. However undesirable, that would be better that a unified appearance of less than the highest standard”.

The hard work involved took place concurrently on three continents, by means of telephone and computer communication, with ceaseless efforts to synchronise everyone’s clocks, due to time differences. For that reason, most activity took place in the afternoon hours Israel time, which is morning in western Canada.

The first thing the merged company attended to was internal communications. From day one of its activity as a merged company, it had a uniform e-mail system with uniform Intranet.

Just one basic message was relayed to employees: here and now, we have something entirely new, neither Scitex nor Creo, but a new creature. Meltzer: “We created a new logo. We even painted the company’s access road in the logo colors of red and blue. That very day, we changed the logo in all the company’s sites worldwide, and all answer machines replied: ‘Hello, Creo-Scitex here'”.

Due to our crowded timetable, management in most cases gave employees a free hand in decision-making. We enabled people to surge forward and do their utmost. We got across to them the message that we relied on them really to put the company interest first, and they came through for us”.

Also, cultural and conceptual gaps among the people setting up the pavilion itself had to be bridged. They were a German designer, a Dutch designer and an Israeli graphic designer. Together, despite coming from different places, they had to shape the company’s uniform message. Meltzer: “It transpires that the task, and possibly also the tight schedule, managed to unite everybody, even though there were differences of opinion here and there. Yes, with all the difficulties, short-term goals also carry distinct advantages”.

Meltzer notes that the first people who had to be recruited in the interest of the common goal were managers. “When the managers ‘believe’, they transmit they faith and optimism to the entire company”, he explains.

It is already apparent that one of the big advantages of the merger is that Creo-Scitex is perceived by potential customers as more of an international company than Scitex. Consequently it is more open to new markets, such as those in the Arab countries. Meltzer: “Two days ago, a Syrian customer came to our pavilion, making enquiries about a possible equipment purchase. That is an achievement of a type we could not have reached in the past”.

Published by Israel’s Business Arena on 25 May 2000