Print businesses face an ongoing challenge of doing more with less: customers are becoming more demanding even as print shops are grappling with a rising staffing gap.
Throughout the print workflow, from ordering to approval and delivery, print shops are accustomed to repetitive manual processes that struggle with both efficiency and accuracy.
And that’s a problem: low efficiency and poor accuracy directly harm both customer satisfaction and business profitability.
We’ve shared before how Avanti Slingshot™, our print MIS software, improves your business processes and your resource planning. Today we’re focusing on how our print workflow management tools can improve three specific aspects of your print workflows: the ordering process, the approval process, and the delivery process.
Streamlining the Ordering Process
Ask any print shop employee responsible for order intake: it’s a process fraught with incomplete information, errors in translation, delays, and mistakes during data entry.
Unfortunately, that’s just been part of the game: taking orders over the phone or via email naturally leads to each of these issues.
Emails land in unmonitored inboxes or get caught in spam filters. Customers are unclear over the phone. Internal copying or rekeying leads to introduced errors (this can happen even verbally communicating project details between team members, too).
Print MIS software—especially when paired with a high-quality Web to Print interface—can automate and centralize the ordering process.
When information is entered once, and only once, there’s only one opportunity for manual errors that lead to reprints and waste.
Better still, when customers must supply all that information directly into your Web to Print interface, you offload that last manual entry point to the customer (along with the burden of getting it right).
Avanti Slingshot delivers powerful features that streamline the order intake process, including:
Combined with its seamless order intake capabilities, these features create significant value to print shops of all sizes.
Enhancing the Approval Process
Legacy approval processes are equally burdened down with inefficiencies and the potential introduction of errors.
Going back and forth with customers via email is time-consuming (your email contact might be out sick or on a three-week vacation and you have no way to know). Hashing details out over the phone is perhaps more timely but even less clear.
And then there’s version control issues: with multiple rounds of proofs floating around via email (with the classic branching email chains as people are added and removed to the discussion), you end up with chaotic communication and far too many versions of files.
Our print MIS software solves all of this: Slingshot provides online proofing tools with version control, and users receive automatic notifications when it’s time to take action.
Instant feedback and real-time collaboration lead to faster approval cycles, reduced turnaround time, and greater clarity.
Optimizing the Delivery Process
Delivery logistics are another ongoing headache for print businesses: customers expect tracking information on their shipments, and your team must physically coordinate with couriers in the fulfillment process.
With supply chain issues and courier delays, some delivery delays are out of your hands, but good luck getting your customers to see it that way.
You may be thinking: that’s all true, but what can a print MIS system do about it?
Answer: quite a bit.
Print MIS software enables efficient delivery management. With Avanti Slingshot™, you’ll gain the ability to create automated shipping labels, and you can enable powerful tracking integrations that provide proactive delivery status updates to your customer—all without manual actions from your staff.
Slingshot gives you real-time visibility into the delivery process, enabling proactive communication with customers and minimizing delivery delays.
Integrating Print MIS Software into the Workflow
All these benefits sound great as we’ve described them, but it’s time we get to the one very important question we’ve avoided so far: how do you actually integrate a new print MIS solution into your print workflow?
The process isn’t like installing Microsoft Word or even updating to the latest edition of Windows. It’s a detailed, time-consuming process that generally takes print businesses at least 8 months to complete.
That timeframe is enough to scare some businesses away, and we fully understand it. But think of the long-term benefits you’d miss out on: you need all these improvements to efficiency, accuracy, and scalability to thrive in today’s landscape.
If Avanti Slingshot feels like the right choice for your print business, our team of implementation specialists will walk you through the entire process, from preplanning to implementation to staff training. We work with every customer to ensure the successful adoption of our print MIS software.
Improve Ordering, Approval, and Delivery with Avanti Slingshot
With Slingshot, our powerful print MIS solution, you’ll gain automation capabilities that will redefine what you can do as a print business: who you can serve, how quickly you can serve them, and how well you’ll be able to protect profitability as you do so.
With automated order intake, you’ll reduce errors and delays, improving efficiency. With online collaborative approval, you’ll gain clarity and buy-in and eliminate versioning issues. And with real-time visibility into the delivery process, you’ll gain customer trust and better meet deadlines.
Now is the time to explore the potential that print MIS software has to drastically improve your print workflows.
Ready to learn more about what those improvements would look like in your context? We’ll create a no-obligation demo customized to real data from your print shop!
Click below to get started.
