Manage:

Print Runs and Faster Performance

Managing Your Print Runs
for Faster Performance

Have you or someone you know ever
decided to run a marathon?

Whether they are a competitive athlete or a novice runner, each must create a plan to improve their physical fitness and endurance. Part of this strength and conditioning requires knowing and tracking personal performance. Keeping track of times and distances run are simple ways to monitor progress. However, as training continues, runners add metrics like cadence, stride length, and distance covered using their heart rate as a baseline for evaluation. A lower heart rate means performance and endurance are improving. These numbers and evaluation techniques are to know how well they have performed in the past, how they are doing now, and what areas still need improvement with the goal of completing a 26.2 mile marathon.

Today’s Print Room supports the needs of companies and institutions while under constant budget and resource constraints. Like runners preparing for a marathon, Print Room operations must manage their business workflow and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to know the order and print volumes, in addition to capacity, service level agreement (SLA) performance, and costs. Knowing these variables is critical to providing effective print services for the organisation and keeping the print work in-house.

Planning a MANAGE Workflow

Estimating

Scheduling

Job costing

Invoicing

Job ticketing and tracking

Inventory management

Capacity planning

Data management
(system of record)

Purchasing and receiving

Data hygiene

Analytics

Customer journey mapping

The Cost of a Mis-MANAGED Workflow

Profitability erosion

Loss of job tickets

Inaccurate job estimating

Cash flow delays

Lack of job monitoring ability

Lack of or low raw materials delaying work

Delivery delays, reduced
customer satisfaction

Inaccurate reporting

Increase in labour

Shipping, tracking and invoicing challenges

Missed KPIs

Poor customer communication management

Investing in the Right Tools
for the Print Production Marathon

Unfortunately, many print rooms use generic tools like spreadsheets to price and manage print jobs which is problematic for several reasons:

First, multiple staff cannot use the tool at the same time, creating a bottleneck and removing any collaboration benefits.
Second, there are no user rights and restrictions, so any user can delete or corrupt the information, not to mention the risk of deleting the entire file.
Lastly, generic tools are more difficult to extract and automate the information for use in other business systems or downstream processes. For these reasons, it is best to manage the print room operations using a robust business management system such as a Print MIS.

Print rooms require a single record of truth for all customer and production information as it manages every element of customer and business records covering functions such as estimating, quoting, costing, job ticketing, tracking, job costing, scheduling, inventory management, purchasing, and, in some cases, accounting.

These tools can also integrate with other business software like customer resource management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or eCommerce portals to provide valuable data at the corporate level.

This is essential for today’s print rooms by:

Providing accurate job pricing for departmental chargebacks and to cover production costs.
Consolidating order intake, often from multiple sources such as online forms, eCommerce (web-to-print), and e-mail.
Generating job numbers and tickets to communicate production plans and details.
Tracking the volume and status of every work-in-progress job.
Capturing important shop floor production data from the time spent on each task to the amount of waste and consumables used.
Closing the communication loop with users through automated notifications.
Sending departmental chargebacks or invoices to recapture operating costs.
Creating reports for executive leadership to prove the efficiency and effectiveness of the print room, effectively proving its worth.

Running the Numbers

Over time, other functions and modules can be added and integrated to extend the value of your business management system. To maximise your investments, ensure that any additional solutions such as inventory management, scheduling, fulfilment, and others are based on the organisation’s needs and can be integrated into your automated processes. For example, after the core functions related to estimating and job management are locked in, collecting data from the production floor is a logical add-on.

Production floor data is the heartbeat of print production that can manage and monitor your organisational KPIs.

No matter which metrics are monitored, the numbers provide a performance path to know where you were, where you are now, and how to get to the goal.

The Production Floor

The golden rule of production floor data collection is to capture the minimum amount of data required for the maximum amount of an impactful analysis. As the industry progresses, investments are made, and new equipment is onboarded, the likelihood that some data can be automatically supplied by the device is increasing.

Regardless of how you collect data, the critical point is to collect it. Without data, the Print Room is operationally blind and risks disappointing customers and raising concerns for continued funding.

Important KPIs:

Estimate vs. actuals
SLA - delivery performance
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)
Equipment uptime
Material consumption
Waste levels and causes
Labour efficiency

ROI: Manage Case Study

Without Automated MANAGE Systems

Job pricing provided per customer service rep
Manual estimating, collecting details from disparate sources
Zero job tracking or stakeholder notifications resulting in job delays
Lack of invoice integration contributing to cash flow delays

With Automated, Integrated MANAGE Workflows Solutions:

WebCRD W2P, Avanti® Slingshot MIS, and RICOH ProcessDirector^TMWorkflow Automation

Integrated input/intake systems
Custom pricing, no rekeying
Capacity planning and inventory management
Shop floor management: real-time data capture and tracking ROI: Manage Use Case - Healthcare Print Room
Document and job-level audit

Benefits of a MANAGE workflow

Facilitate accurate job pricing to cover production costs
Consolidate intake from multiple sources (email, W2P)
Generate job numbers and tickets to communicate production plans and job details
Track the volume and status of every job
Capture important shop floor production data from the time spent on each task, waste and consumables
Close the communication loop with users
Create invoices or integration with accounting software
Provide standard or custom reports

5,000 orders x 12 minutes to rekey / 60,000 minutes = 1000 hours | Savings: 80+ hours per month

The Bottom Line

Managing your Print Room to the level of accuracy and detail expected requires a commitment to implement and use the right tools for managing your operations. Moving from manual processes and spreadsheet management to streamlined and automated print production takes time and requires sponsorship from management and rigorous adoption by the staff.

This requires trust in your solutions and processes, particularly the estimating engine, the foundation for order taking, quoting, and job ticketing. Estimates are built based on costs – all the costs that can occur as a job progresses from onboarding to completion. These costs include fixed expenses like equipment leases and variable costs like ink and paper. These costs must be identified, captured, and configured in the estimating engine, ensuring orders can be priced according to the operating model of the Print Room and support chargebacks and cost recovery.

A well-managed Print Room can delight customers, provide essential services, and justify the value brought to the organisation. Doing any of these using manual processes and generic tools is simply impossible for long term success. For Print Rooms stuck on spreadsheets and sticky notes, it is time to boost your print operations with the right tools. For those already using a print management system, it is time to leverage data to make your operation smart and essential to the organisation.

Book a free print workflow assessment now

And thats Manage covered. Watch out for the next section of the ebook: Prepare, which will be sent to you soon or contact us for more information.