If it's true that good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, three value centers are serving espresso to their employees and customers. Flygt France, Engineered Valves and Goulds Pumps were the winners of ITT Industries first-ever Communications Best Practices Awards. The creative teams, borrowing a page from the operations-focused Best Practices Symposium, shared their winning strategies with ITT communicators from around the world at the Communications Council Meeting in December. Here are more details about the inaugural winners of the Communications Best Practices Awards: Creative Excellence: Engineered Valves Creative/executional excellence supporting a clearly stated campaign strategy Engineered Valves was honored for three separate communications campaigns, all carried out with creativity and resourcefulness. To increase traffic at its trade show booths, the company's creative team created an interactive exhibit/game, called the "Art of Technology." Portraits of Engineered Valves products are painted in the style of 10 famous artists and trade show participants are asked to guess the identity of the painters and in the process learn more about the products. The company's distributor newsletter, Extra Mile, was also recognized for its clear communications and its inventive use of "roadside" language and artwork to reinforce the concept that Engineered Valves is "going that extra mile" for customers and distributors. Finally, the company's branding work for its Pure-Flo line of companies earned kudos. Through acquisitions, Engineered Valves has added a number of businesses that focus heavily on the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical market. To leverage this strength, the creative team further developed the use of the Pure-Flo brand name and integrated two newly acquired companies, Pure-Flo Cotter and Pure-Flo Precision, into the company's booth space at the Intephex Show. Additionally, the acquired companies' literature was transformed to reflect the new brand, and a new Pure-Flo Solutions Group capabilities brochure was created to capture the expanded offerings of the larger group. Now, when customers do business with Pure-Flo Precision, Pure-Flo Cotter or Pure-Flo MPC, they know that it's a strong brand, not just a stand-alone business. Results/Return on Investment: Flygt France Increased business opportunities, improved brand awareness Life Cycle Cost (LCC) is a competitive advantage for Flygt France. Unfortunately, it's also an unfamiliar concept to many customers. LCC asks customers to look past the pricetag and consider the cost of a product over its entire life, including maintenance, longevity, energy efficiency, etc. It's not always an easy sell, so Flygt France's creative team took a unique communications approach. They developed a "road show" which would take the LCC message directly to consultants, decision makers and customers, and allow the company to sell its strengths in face-to-face meetings. A Flygt Systems team held a series of 20 local seminars attended by some 855 market partners in France's municipal water market, giving them a full-day of dialogue and hands-on training with LCC-oriented products such as the new Flygt N-pump and the Technovar-equipped water booster. The effort is supported by LCC communications in the company's customer newsletter, Impeller, as well as advertising, press releases and trade shows. In the three months following each seminar, the number of proposals, orders and sales revenue all experienced healthy gains, more than offsetting the expenses of staging these customer seminars. In the long-term, the seminars will make it easier for Flygt France sales representatives to "sell" the LCC benefits associated with their products. Process Improvement: Industrial Products Group-Goulds Pumps Streamlining a process, taking out cost, developing a new approach to an old method In the past, Industrial Products Group (IPG) would print large quantities of literature on an offset press. If the company wanted to produce a new product bulletin, it might print 5,000 copies, send 1,800 to the field sales staff, and put the remaining 3,200 in inventory to be shipped out upon request. If a change needed to be made, the inventory was thrown away and the process started over. The ITT IPG Print-on-Demand team transitioned this slow, cumbersome and expensive model into a digitally-based process. Print-on-demand changes the traditional equation from "print and distribute" to "distribute and print." IPG can now send out electronic print files to a network of global printers, who can print on-demand, "correct-to-the-second" literature - wherever it is required and in whatever quantities are needed, even down to one copy. "Print-on-Demand stores literature on our server as high-resolution pdf files. Changes to the literature can be quickly and easily uploaded to our website, so that 'correct-to-the-second' information is just a click away from our customers and sales organization," explains John Beca, POD team leader and director of Communications, IPG. "Some 250 different sales brochures, our 1,600 page Goulds Pumps manual and 12,000 pages of pricing information are now server-stored and electronically distributed." Costs of printing, warehousing, fulfillment, shipping - not to mention print obsolescence - were reduced 70 percent. Savings are $700,000 to date, and Print-on-Demand will save the company more than $1 million over the next few years.			Top: To attract trade show traffic, Engineered Valves created a contest that included its products done by famous painters. Middle: Flygt France used customer seminars to sell LCC and LCC-oriented products. The effort involved a large team, including sales associates Audrey Mifsud and Jacques Karaoglanian from the Marseilles sales branch. Bottom: The IPG Print-on-Demand team -- (l. to r.) Adrienne Burgess, John Beca and Darleen Strassle -- helped save more than $1 million by printing catalogs, price sheets and brochures digitally.