Automating Your Shop Boost Profitability with a Print MIS
Stephen McWilliam, Executive Vice President, Avanti
As a print and marketing services provider, you have a lot going on. Chances are you’re managing a variety of print types including offset, large or wide format, digital, and direct mail. Upstream, you’re offering creative services to feed print, which requires managing data. You also may be offering
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fulfillment services and solutions. All of this impacts your business processes, from quoting through to reporting.
You’re also likely integrating print with other highly- customized and personalized programs. The combination of all of these factors can create a lot of pain in your operation as you’re continually faced with the challenge of maintaining numerous spreadsheets, applications, and databases to run your business without having one source to access and control them.
What can you do to get ahead of the game and drive more jobs through your shop while keeping your customers, staff, and bottom line thriving? As you look around, you see more and more owners investing in automation via a print management information System (MIS) to solve these challenges. And yet, you still can't help but wonder if it's all worth it. Implementing a print MIS is a time-consuming and very resource-intensive change. Yet, if you don't make the change and your competitors do, will things only get tougher? You know it's probably the right thing to do, but how do you know that, after all that expense, the ROI will come? How long will that take?
The truth is that automation is the key to profitability. As one of our customers keeps telling us, “You can’t touch a $500 job 10 times and expect to make money.” In fact, we coach people that “if you have to repeat it, figure out how to automate it.”
Print MIS is technology that spans your operations and helps you connect all your critical (and often disconnected) software applications, systems, process, and tools. By connecting and integrating these pieces and providing information for job tracking, estimating, reporting, and customer relationship management (CRM), a Print MIS helps businesses centralize activities so they can more effortlessly navigate the volume of information needed to drive success.
A print MIS can provide the foundation that allows you to scale efficiently as you continue to grow. With the right print MIS, you gain the ability to connect your “islands of automation” and eliminate the errors inherent to the manual re-entry of data. It enables you to work more efficiently, control costs, and move more jobs through the shop with ease while having access to the real-time data you need to make informed business decisions.
The key to increased productivity is efficiency and automation. Any time that data can be passed seamlessly and automatically between departments, equipment, and applications, you reduce turnaround time.
It is critical to have the most current, accurate information about the job and an easy way to communicate what actually happens on the job, internally and externally, as it makes its way through the shop. By bringing a customer- centric view to the production system, your organization is empowered to manage and communicate critical sales, marketing, and customer information essential for continued success and future growth.
With real-time visibility to business-critical information, your sales and client services teams can answer customer requests instantly. Your production team can better manage the distribution and control of finished goods— goods your plant produces, goods you purchase from a supplier, and goods already owned by your customer. Marketing can identify your most profitable customers
SOLUTIONS
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