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Take Me Out To The Stat Game

May 21st, 2018 - Posted by Ellen Hurwitch, Director of Operations - The Americas

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As any one of my friends can tell you, there are 3 things that I absolutely love. Travel, Flamingos, and Baseball.

Although Baseball is known as the game of the boys of summer, it really starts in springtime, and this year even earlier than those past. A bit on the cold side, which always affects the players, especially the pitchers.

Spring training takes place in warmer climates, either Florida or Arizona. It’s a good time to get a handle on how you think your team will do once the real season begins. My friend Peter is in a Rotisserie league. For those of you who have never heard about those, let me give you just a bit of history. The definition of a Rotisserie league can be found in a google search: an association of individuals who simulate selecting, managing, and playing baseball, using the names and statistics of actual professional players to determine results.

The key word here is: statistics. Peter arms himself with all of these stats and tries to analyze and project how a player will do during regular season play. And then he figures out who he wants on his team based on the analysis he’s done. Now, you would think that if he’s done his homework, he would win the 1st place position every year. But that is just not so! Because you must take into consideration that players get hurt, not something you would know at the start of the season. However, based on his analysis, he can make projections and create what if scenarios to help him with his selection.

Now here’s the other thing about statistics. The season starts, and the announcers need to fill in time and how do they do this? With statistics. Now, I will admit, some of these are absolutely ridiculous to the average Joe watching the game. Like, how many innings are pitched on sunny days in Tuesday by teams with red in their logos.

This need to know even the most mundane minutiae is not limited to baseball! In fact, it’s not even limited to American sports! My friend Matt has a son who’s nuts over soccer – I mean football (to my English friends)! I asked him if his son was stat crazy and he said that there was a website, Optasports, that has all the stats you can imagine! I looked and sure enough there were stats and more stats – for all sorts of sports! One look at this website and I thought “Wow, they have statistics for everything!”.

In Peter’s case, the stats are important because it allows him to analyze the data and draw conclusions to enable him to make the right decisions.

Now comes the questions I can hear you thinking: “So, what does that have to do with Web to Print?”.

RedTie’s DATA tab, allows our customers to put together reports, or statistics on anything and everything that has to do with an order. Because it’s a DATA editor, they can choose what they want in their reports. The choices are broken out into 3 areas, by customer, by order and by item ordered. Picking and choosing what goes into the report is important; not every customer wants the same set of statistics. For example, one customer may want to know how many of a certain product is ordered in the month of May. Another may want to know how many orders were shipped on a Tuesday in March. By having the ability to pick and choose the statistics they want, they can analyze the information and then act accordingly. For example, if you see something is not selling on Thursdays, you can then offer the option of adding a discount code good for just Thursdays, for that item. It’s no different than Peter analyzing the data and drawing conclusions to make smart decisions.

Web to Print is more that just templates for customers to order from. With RedTie’s DATA tool, printers, ad agencies and/or marketing agencies can put together reports and after analyzing the data, make any changes necessary to increase business. In the B2B world, businesses want to know who has been placing orders and what they are ordering. This means that our customers can put together custom reports for their customers. They can even automate sending this data report to their customers on a daily, weekly or even a monthly basis. This is a good way to strengthen your relationship with your customer!

Well it’s just about time for the Umpire to yell “Play Ball!”, so I’ll end here and look forward to my own statistic: how many stats the announcers can come up with in 9 innings!