Printers in this country are a hands-on lot, particularly the owners and managers of medium-sized and smaller outfits. The lure of ‘DIY’ – building your own, better mousetrap – is ever present. So when it comes to a management information system (MIS), finding the right system for your business requires a joint approach between vendor and user to find a tool that conforms exactly to the requirements of your front desk and production floor. Every business is different. It might take some tweaking to make an off-the-shelf system truly cater for the unique needs of your business.
CanPrint Communications managing director David Daniel says there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Looking back at his company’s 22 years of working with ever-evolving MIS configurations, Daniel emphasises that running a branded system does not need to be a ‘top-down’ transaction from your MIS supplier.
A ‘one-size-fits-all’ MIS can be tweaked to fit with your company’s quoting, ordering and fulfilment needs. Daniel says his company’s relationship with its MIS vendor is a textbook scenario of how to attain a system that’s customised and flexible, yet leaves the specialists in charge of the technology.
This way, CanPrint can get on with its work producing public sector documents and commercial print in the nation’s capital, free from the IT headaches that can dog a homegrown MIS.
“It’s a give and take process – our MIS developer has great ideas, but sometimes so do we, and both sides have to listen to each other,” says Daniel.
For example, CanPrint needed to invoice multiple clients for a single job, with aspects of the job billed to the various stakeholders. Each party had to be invoiced separately, but from the one job ticket. It presented this requirement to its MIS supplier, Printcost.
“Within days, they came back with a configuration. We call it ‘G-Code’. There’s now a button for normal invoicing and ‘G-Code’, which can invoice up to 10 related customers.”
In 1988, the company (as Union Offset) first turned from scratchpad quoting to a DOS-based estimating system from Printcost. The software developer was then a young New Zealand company set up by MIS pioneer Chris Cochrane, who since sold it to fellow New Zealander John Durkin. The first Windows version came along in 1999.
Two years earlier, Union Offset had purchased the assets of the Government Printer in Canberra and launched CanPrint, developing a mix of government and commercial jobs. Last year, the company became part of the Opus Group, which includes book printer Ligare and large-format display printers Cactus Imaging in Australia and Omnigraphics in New Zealand.
The Printcost MIS has grown with CanPrint to become the web-enabled system in place there today. Automatic updates are piped in to CanPrint’s IT department almost weekly.
The MIS connects to the pre-press department and from there to a Prinergy workflow for CTP for any of CanPrint’s six Heidelberg presses, with jobs transferred by hot-folder to any of its 11 Océ high-volume digital lines.
All of the company’s estimating is done on the MIS. Job tickets are generated from the system, and all stock is carried on the MIS. (The company is certified to ISO 9001, so quality assurance (QA) is essential to its business practices.)
“The merchants’ price books are on the system, so if you put in the code the merchant used for his stock, it jumps up and adds the price in. We used it for time and cost, for collecting data on how long each job has taken. We run an ‘actual versus estimate’ on each job, and we run a report on that, part of our QA.
“The report is run every week and if there’s anything that’s lost money, then we report why. You can pull down a job ticket and examine if the wrong stock was used, a wrong PMS colour, or it wasn’t varnished. You can then go back and find out how it happened and what can be done to fix it. It’s part of the QA.”
CanPrint runs its debtors on the MIS, and since the Opus era, has been running general ledger and creditors on it too.
When a prospective job is quoted, it is entered into the system either as ‘simple’ (non-finished) work, or as ‘magazine-style’ work, and how it will be finished (saddle-stitched, wire or perfect-bound), sheet size, type and grammage of stock, inclu-ding price code, pagination, the press to be used, eights, 16s or 32s, number of colours.
Push-button solution
“Then you just push a button to either print or email the quote,” says Daniel. “But whether you will be happy with that quote depends how competitive the market is – we have won and lost work
on $80 margins. You can play with the parameters, speed the press up, slow it down, and so on. Printers lose sight of the fact that printing is very much like building a kitchen or any manufacturing process. You can print a basic job, but some people want UV, some want lamination, and so forth. The system can handle each of these.”
Printcost’s John Durkin says version nine includes more graphical displays and other user-friendly navigation.
Graphic Print Group, a 49-year-old business in the Adelaide suburb of Richmond that mainly handles publication and packaging work, runs version three of an MIS from Printer’s Choice. The system has been streamlining orders and quotes since April last year. A Windows 7 version will be installed this year. Office manager Ian Murray says the system replaced an older one from another supplier that had been running since 1994, although the company has used some form of automated quote-and-order system since the 1980s.
Murray finds that the Printer’s Choice MIS makes light work of production and quotes (including multiple variations), job planning, generation of impositions, stock control, purchasing, delivery tracking and print management. He finds it useful to display current buy prices for merchants’ paper stocks online, so when quoting, it shows the buy price for that stock. “The updates are quick, they’re provided to us, and we just apply our discount.”
Computer-generated imposition grids are another favourite. “There are standard templates or you can design and install your own layouts and recall them for subsequent use. We used to spend a lot of time on writing and rewriting imposition schemes,” says Murray.
Integration evolution
He believes today’s MIS products are far more integrated than they were a decade ago and have web-based features such as online ordering, storing client mail with the job, and exporting to spreadsheets. “They might have changed in effectiveness in how they display, but there are only so many ways you can calculate a quote, and I don’t think the ‘works’ part of the software has changed a great deal.”
Graphic Print Group has made some changes to the MIS configuration and has lodged some suggestions with the developer. Murray advises against building a generic system from the ground up, unless a print business has a sizeable IT staff and deep pockets.
Diane Cornish of Printer’s Choice says her company’s MIS product is customisable for most printing type requirements, such as offset, digital, web, wide-format and screen printing. It is a fully integrated modular system. “Smaller printers usually start with quotes and jobs modules and grow from there.”
Adelaide commercial printer 5 Star Print, which runs wide-format, production digital and offset, has bought a Da Vinci system from Australian developer Ink Outside the Square. It is now being installed and will go live later this year, replacing a system that has been running for eight years.
The printer’s managing director, Carolyn Cagney, wanted more emphasis on online ordering. “I was looking for a shopfront-type tool,” she says – and saw Da Vinci at PacPrint last year.
“It’s almost JDF, in that you can turn a quote into a job almost automatically, without booking in and manually planning before it goes to pre-press.
“With Da Vinci, when the quote is accepted, the system works out the imposition and the job bag. It removes a bottleneck of two stages of double handling,” she adds.
Cagney says that Ink Outside the Square has prepared intensively for the installation. “They’ve put in our pricing. For five or six months now, they’ve been putting in our information, as well as
our suppliers’ costings and spreadsheets. Any MIS is only as good as the information you feed into it.”
And even then, 5 Star Print will run parallel systems for some months to ensure a problem-free transition.
Ink Outside the Square’s Glenn Mitchell sees MIS “as all about intelligence and automation with the resultant decrease in payroll and increase in speed and customer satisfaction. All of our development efforts focus on these issues.”
He offers Da Vinci’s new iQuote module as an example. The print buyer logs on to a website, specifies their unique and custom requirements and receives an immediate formal quotation for a print job without the need for the printer to have previously defined the job or quote and without the printer needing to intervene in the process in any way.
Next generation
So what should printers except from the latest generation of MIS? Web-to- Print solutions that are totally internet based with no software download on the client’s side, allowing job tracking, file transfers and proofing, says vendor Peter Ludwig, managing director of Australian software company Pent Net.
Web-to-print has attracted a lot of attention across the industry, bringing brand owners and users, as well as designers, together in online transactions. The buzz around web-to-print is under-standable, say the pundits – when integrated into a MIS, the combined technology can literally automate all processes from order to delivery.
Ludwig is emphatic about the ability to customise an MIS. “With all our development being done locally, our products can be tailored for individual business needs from small print shops and designers to corporate clients. We have a well-defined consultation process with our clients prior to implementation to make sure that all specifications and requests are met.”
Customers do not need an in-house IT technician to use the Pent Net product.
“It is a one-off cost, with no click rates. Our software can be internally or externally hosted. The customer owns it and you will not need a web designer or programmer to make pricing and product changes.”
Printcost’s John Durkin is enthused about web-to-print. “A lot of our latest developments tend to be in our online offering – ePrintcost, our web-to-print module has saved our customers many hours of administration time, especially with online proofing.”
Diane Cornish of Printers Choice says printers should opt for an MIS supplier that can offer a broad knowledge base, widely tested MIS software, rapid problem solving and regular upgrades.
Next generation
Optimus’ Linda Bissett sees a trend away from individual customisation, as MIS developers become more responsive to their customers as a whole. “Optimus has been built to ensure that customisation is available to those that require this service.
“However with 28 years of experience in building MIS systems, we have seen a general move away from customisation due to the fast evolvement of Optimus as a product.
“We ensure that our four major releases per year have functionality most relevant to the industry by constantly encouraging feedback from the major industry associations and federations, vendors
from all parts of the print industry and more importantly our customers and prospects,” she says.
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