Quick Printing

JUL 2014

Quick Printing is the only business resource serving the quick and small commercial printing niche in North America. Quick Printing is the authoritative source for business information, emerging technologies, shop profiles and management insight.

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Excel spreadsheets—to supplement the MIS when the hallmark of a good MIS is that it doesn't need supplementing. Legacy Systems One of the biggest issues with the state of MIS today is a familiar one to anyone who has been involved with technology or bought any kind of software: obsoles- cence. "The biggest trend right now is that there are all these legacy systems printers are being forced to make decisions about because those systems are no longer sup- ported or being developed," said Jane Mugford, managing director of Print Innovation, a consultancy that assists print companies with their MIS and Web-to-print strategy and execution. The problem with older, legacy systems is that they were designed predominantly for an offset workflow. "Now you have a digital environment, with wide-for- mat and cursory products you need to support as well," added Jennifer Matt, president of Web2Print Experts and a fre- quent writer and consultant on all mat- ters MIS. "If you're a printer and you're not looking at diversification, you're not going to survive." Thus the MIS needs to support that diversification. The ability for an MIS and its inte- grated workflow to support digital print- ing isn't just a question of being able to provide accurate estimates and price quotes—although as we will see, that is a large part if it—but can be instrumental in deciding whether to print a job offset or digital. Back in the 1980s, said Gerald Walsh, director of market development for EFI, "it was very common for a pressrun to be 10,000 units or more. Today, [shorter- run] jobs come in and you have to make a call: is this going to a digital job or is this going to be an offset job? It's not always an easy call." Digital presses have improved in quality and support longer runs, while offset presses now can handle shorter runs than has traditionally been economical. So the decision to use one or the other isn't as clear as it used to be. Not only that, said Walsh, there are many other factors to take into consider- ation. "Inkjet capabilities, different types of finishing. There are a lot of variables that come into play." EFI has long developed the gold stan- dards for printing industry MIS and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solu- tions, with its Logic, Printsmith Vision, Pace, and Monarch solutions. Recog- nizing that estimating has become a substantial challenge for today's print shops, this year EFI is releasing iQuote, which was originally developed for the Latin American market by Brazil-based Metrics Sistemas de Informação, which EFI acquired in 2012. "All the estima- tor has to do is say, 'This is a 32-page booklet that is 8x10-inches and I want to run it on this paper,'" said Walsh. "Then iQuote will go through and, for each [specified] quantity, figure out what is the best production path, what is the best equipment to use, and based on all that information, the best cost and sug- gested price for you to sell this job." It is also flexible enough to account for any special discounts salespeople may wish to add—if, for example, they are courting a new customer, or the custom- er haggles over price. Essentially, though, "You're not operating in the dark," said Walsh. "You get an upfront and exact picture of what that job will mean to your business." Finding the quickest and most hands- off route through the production process has become another of the major tasks of a fully integrated MIS. "In all my conversations with clients and prospects, the words I hear more than anything else are 'fewest number of touches,'" said Morrie Brown, owner of PrintPoint, Inc., whose eponymous product started in 1992 as a basic, entry- level, Mac-based MIS program, and has evolved over the past 22 years into a $4,000+, full-featured MIS solution. The company has since added a Web-to-print solution for customers, as well. "They don't have quality estimators anymore with enough experience," Brown added. In Our Estimation It's a common phenomenon. "Our typical [customer] doesn't have a full-time estimator position anymore," said Eric Wold, vice president of Smart- Soft, developer of PressWise. "A lot of customers want their salespeople and CSRs to enter the actual job." Some industry veterans may remember the name PressWise from the 1990s, when it was an Aldus product designed for page imposition. Although SmartSoft now owns the copyright to the name PressWise, it's a full-featured MIS solu- tion and is not related to the imposi- tion software. Distinct from other MIS solutions, PressWise utilizes a "software as a service" (SAAS, pronounced "sass") approach, with no client/server version. "I find that being a SAAS product keeps us honest," said Wold. "There is so much shelfware in the industry. If [customers] don't use PressWise, they're gone, so we've got a pretty powerful incentive to ensure that adoption happens post-sale." Enhancing Client Communication Another major goal of an integrated MIS system, in addition to effective esti- mating, is to offer "self-serve" functional- ity for print customers. This can include uploading files, tracking jobs, looking up old invoices, reordering past jobs, and other "transactional" functions. "Those activities are client-oriented," said Wold. "They've got something they want to do now. Good service today has become enabling clients meet their needs as rap- J u l y 2 0 1 4 / Q U I C K P R I N T I N G 17 w w w. M y P R I N T R e s o u r c e . c o m EFI has long developed the gold standards for printing industry MIS and ERP solutions with its Logic, Printsmith Vision, Pace, and Monach (dashboard pictured above) solutions. QP_16-18_0714_MIS.indd 17 6/16/14 4:39 PM

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