PRINTING United Alliance is grateful to serve its members who make such significant impacts on the printing industry. Through our Member Spotlights, we continue to recognize our members, and help our community get to know their peers better, both professionally and personally. The following is a Q&A and video interview with Ernie Crawford, president and CEO, Crawford Technologies.
Please provide a brief history of your company and its core mission.
Crawford Technologies was founded in 1995 with a vision to help organizations manage, transform, and deliver customer communications securely and efficiently. Our goal from the beginning was to build solutions that truly make a difference in how businesses manage their most critical outbound documents.
After 30 years of innovation, our mission has evolved to become even more focused: We make it easy for businesses and agencies to communicate with each person they serve in the way that works best for them.
Today, we’re a global company with more than 170 employees serving more than 2,000 leading organizations worldwide in financial services, insurance, healthcare, government, utilities, and print service providers. Our core offerings include solutions for print stream management, document reengineering, automated workflows, accessible communications, content archiving, and omnichannel delivery—all designed to help enterprises bridge legacy systems with today’s communication demands.
How is Crawford Technologies helping to modernize or transform the traditional print industry?
The number one issue we hear from organizations today concerns staffing. Losing key resources with specialized knowledge is especially challenging when trying to manage hundreds, or even thousands, of unique workflows. It’s like trying to manage a bowl of spaghetti that can become a huge, chaotic mess. Unfortunately, new automation tools alone don’t address the problem. Rather, you have to look at how your workflows are structured.
That's where our concept of "Intelligent Workflow Consolidation" comes in. We help clients design a single, standardized workflow and use it for processing all their jobs. What used to take days or weeks for an experienced programmer can now be done in hours with far less specialized knowledge. You eliminate manual touchpoints, reduce errors, and accelerate onboarding. The beautiful thing about it is your operators only have one standardized process to learn and follow, making it easier to onboard new operators. This game-changing practice saves serious money, time, and frees up valuable human resources, truly delivering automation that performs.
Beyond that, we're helping print service providers unlock new revenue opportunities through our services for language translation and large print. With new regulations and the demand for inclusive communication, PSPs are getting more and more requests for accessible documents, including those in different languages, braille or large print (aka large format or reflowable large print). Our Document Accessibility Services team enables PSPs to easily offer these crucial, value-added services to their clients. It’s a good opportunity to grow their business and truly become a full-service communication partner with the ability to meet their clients’ compliance needs and serve a broader, more inclusive market.
Can you elaborate on a recent innovation or product launch that you're particularly proud of?
There are two innovations that stand out for us: our SmartSetup solution, for both output management and accessibility, and our growing cloud/SaaS offerings.
SmartSetup is a true game-changer. It leverages our AutoSense technology which uses machine learning to completely transform document onboarding. For output management, it helps PSPs onboard new jobs and migrate applications incredibly fast—what used to take days, they now do in hours. And AccessibilityNow® SmartSetup uses that same technology to automatically detect elements in high-volume documents, drastically reducing the manual effort for setting up document remediation. It mitigates the costs of managing document accessibility at scale.
Additionally, we’re making our powerful output management solutions available in the cloud through SaaS offerings. Our cloud/SaaS capabilities, offered through our PRO DocNow solution, give organizations incredible flexibility and scalability. They get robust document re-engineering and optimization from anywhere, without the IT burden. It's all about providing that same secure power, but with the agility and cost-efficiency of the cloud.
What are some steps you've taken to reduce waste or increase operational efficiency for your clients?
We see more and more communication providers struggling with declining job sizes. With the increase in digital delivery, what were once large, consistent print runs are now significantly smaller. This is causing inefficiencies, higher costs per job, and reduced margins. In some cases, providers find that it is not profitable to process the work at all. That’s where we can help.
Our “Intelligent Concatenation” solutions make those small jobs profitable by combining multiple smaller jobs of the same or different format, into larger, optimized runs. This cuts down on press and finishing changeovers, maximizes equipment uptime and ensures users make money even on smaller jobs. The great thing is, it doesn't require any upstream job changes, or any hardware upgrades.
What are some future goals for Crawford Technologies? Are there any upcoming features or developments that your clients can look forward to?
Our future goals are focused around continuous innovation, driving automation, and expanding the value we bring to our customers through even deeper AI and machine learning integration. We're currently leveraging AI to automate more decision-making, provide predictive insights, and significantly improve organizational efficiencies across the board.
We'll also be rolling out enhancements to improve the user experience for our clients. This means creating even more intuitive interfaces, streamlining workflows to reduce steps, and providing clearer insights so that managing document processes becomes simpler and more efficient.
Why did you decide to join the Alliance? What resources do you plan to or have already utilized through your membership?
Joining PRINTING United Alliance was a natural fit for us. I believe strongly in the power of a unified industry and the Alliance represents that strength. For us, it's about being part of a community that's driving the future of print. We plan to leverage the Alliance's extensive market intelligence and research, which provides invaluable insights into industry trends and challenges. Most importantly, it's the networking and collaboration opportunities with other leaders and innovators in the print space that I find most valuable. It allows us to collectively address the industry's evolving needs.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
It’s important we remember that the evolution of communication is constant. While digital channels are proliferating, traditional print remains a vital and often preferred method for many critical communications. Our focus at Crawford Technologies is on bridging this gap, ensuring organizations can seamlessly deliver communications that are personalized, compliant, and accessible across all channels.
The power of AI and automation is truly revolutionizing how we approach document management, making processes that once took years achievable in months, and significantly enhancing the overall customer experience. We are excited about the future and our role in helping our clients navigate this dynamic landscape.
For more information on Crawford Technologies, visit their website at https://crawfordtech.com/.
Ernie Crawford, president and CEO of Crawford Technologies discusses how his software company has grown into a global provider serving more than 2,000 organizations across six continents. He elaborates on their "Intelligent Workflow Consolidation" approach and how this has led to significant cost savings for their clients, how the company is using AI to streamline accessible document setup, and the value of a PRINTING United Alliance membership.