Heppelmann provided an analogy of a Microsoft Word document and a printer.

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If we take this analogy back into Manufacturing, I believe manufacturing companies must now be partially like a word document and partially like a printer.

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"Their mill is the printer, printing off document after document after document and just having people sign them, " said Ice Legal attorney Chris Immel.

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In another demonstration, a printer that was printing a tax document with social security numbers scanned the document and sent it to another system.

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Relieved, you walk over to the nearest printer on your network to pick up the document.

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HP's printer division recently began a remote-conferencing and document-sharing service called Halo, which has 15 corporate customers.

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Meanwhile, the rest of us continue to struggle with the problems users face even in a Windows 7 world: sporadic freezing, the occasional printer that disappears from our network, the sudden shutdown of Word when in the middle of a document.

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