Packaging Innovation Asia Issue 10 2016
22
Sheetfed Offset
Print Software Enables Your Business to Scale Scaling your print business requires the removal of bottlenecks from order inquiry to accurate invoice payment. Your Print MIS is the system of record that can drive you to a more efficient business and enable you to scale.
Print software (web-to-print, Print MIS, production workflow systems, etc.) are clearly vital to running your print business in a data-driven world with margin pressures. The potential upside to these tools is huge. As the founder of Netscape and the now famous venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said, “software is eating the world.” We have seen printers completely change their ability to scale by investing in their software infrastructure. One printer said to me recently, “before when I sold a new customer I was afraid to bring the news back to my team because they were already so overwhelmed with our manual processes.” Today, after upgrading his technology and streamlining his operations by moving all manual, offline processes into his Print MIS and optimizing his integration with his web-to-print stores, new customers get added all the time with his team hardly noticing. By the way, this customer has doubled his business over the last few years and lowered his full-time head count. Yes, I’ll say that again; he doubled his business AND lowered his overall headcount. What printer wouldn’t want to say that or shout it for that matter?
He invested, don’t think these results didn’t take an investment of money (buying the print software) and much more important an investment in leadership and execution. Anyone can buy print software; the purchase doesn’t deliver the value. The execution of the print software in your business is what delivers the value. Too often we think that execution is the vendor’s job. It is not. You are the lead, you are the visionary, you have everything to gain and everything to lose. The vendor is a member of the team of people you need to make this a success. It is your job to get this print software working and most importantly REPLACE all the manual processes you have in place today. Print MIS implementations should “eat Excel spreadsheets, log books, FileMaker Pro hacks, post-it notes, job boards, white boards, chalk boards, etc. by the dozen.” In the process of implementing a Print MIS, you should retire all those “pockets of manual tracking and processing” that got built up over the years where you didn’t have a single trusted system of record. If you implement a Print MIS and keep all those “pockets of manual tracking” around, you just spent a bunch of money to make your business even MORE INEFFICIENT! (ouch).
Let’s think about scale for a minute. We often limit our discussions of scale to our printing equipment. If your business volume doubled tomorrow, my guess is that you’d be fine with your printing equipment (maybe run a few more hours on your presses each day or add another shift), but everything in front of it and after it in your workflow would be a disaster. If your business is growing, your job is to look for the bottlenecks from the very beginning (initial customer inquiry) to the very end (accurate paid invoices). The bottlenecks are the places where you’ve been using labor to patch your workflows instead of solving them. Many printers call us and say; “we’re just not very efficient, we need a workflow specialists to come in a look at how we’re doing things and recommend improvements.” I’m not against this approach, I just think it leaves out the primary tools that people use to run their business today (ERP/Print MIS). Your Print MIS is the tool, it is the “system” that should run your business. Diving into a printer’s Print MIS reveals so much about their workflow, it’s like looking at a car and detecting how the driver has been driving it over the years. When you optimize your Print MIS, you end up optimizing the use of your labor, the chain of custody of your jobs as they flow through your plant, and your ability to put the right data in front of the right people to make better decisions! Think through this exercise. What is your current order volume? What if that order volume doubled tomorrow? Which parts of your business would be in chaos? Which parts of your business would be just fine? When you look at your business in this way, you can optimize now so that the people who work for you are more open to scale. Have you ever thought about that? Your people might be unconsciously controlling your growth so they can keep up with the chaos?