From our vantage as a print MIS supplier, we regularly encounter the struggle some printers face when deciding whether or not to adopt a print MIS solution. We are intimately familiar with their concerns about cost, support, on-boarding, maintenance and more.
However, that same vantage also brings us face to face with the very real changes that are occurring in the printing industry.
Digital Printing Has Forever Changed the Industry
At the risk of over-simplifying, digital printing has changed everything. It’s driving down costs, enabling personalization and reducing lead times.
Most importantly, it’s changing the expectations of print customers. They’re growing accustomed to clean-design, on-demand and one-stop-shop. They expect their suppliers to be customer focused, technically savvy and price competitive.
Which brings us to print MIS solutions like ours, Avanti Slingshot®.
The Costs of Not Adopting a Print MIS Solution (Now)
Competing into the future will be impossible without adopting a print MIS solution like Avanti Slingshot®. Here’s why:
- Traditional, largely manual ways of operating a printing business are too inefficient and expensive. Sticky notes, whiteboards and Excel spreadsheets are time consuming, error prone and opaque. Using them, it’s impossible to understand costs, job status and the overall business the way customers expect and print-shop decision-makers need.
Solutions like Avanti Slingshot® automate labour-intensive tasks and reduce manual touchpoints. They enable print-shop operators to run with fewer resources and print additional volume. That results in better quality, shorter delivery times and increased customer satisfaction. Overall profitability can be sustained or even increased in a world where projects are smaller and profit per project is decreasing.
- Printing businesses already integrate with multiple vendors, customers, applications and equipment. This integration is going accelerate even more in the future - with increasing customer demands for personalization and security; with new printing technologies like inkjet; and, with on-going advancements in IT including Artificial Intelligence and Cloud MPS.
Print MIS Solutions like Avanti Slingshot® (and suppliers like Avanti) represent the central core of these current and future integration efforts (and the expertise necessary to implement them). They are the central nervous system, connecting the brains of the business (management) to all its functions including marketing, sales, estimating, production and shipping.
- There won’t be any ‘easy’ competition in the future. In order to thrive, competitors will be larger, more sophisticated and very, very good at what they do. Real-time, in-depth and accurate business intelligence will be a critical component of their success.
This is one of the greatest benefits of solutions like Avanti Slingshot®. They provide operators with a transparent view of the operation across multiple locations and multiple lines of business. A good Print MIS platform offers insight into the jobs, production, delays, errors, resources, costs, and ultimately revenues and profits. The data required to understand what’s happening in the business and necessary adjustments is readily available and easy to understand.
Now is the Time to Adopt a Print MIS Solution
Although the adoption of print MIS may not seem as natural to some printers as purchasing a new press, now is a critical time to seriously consider it.
That’s because the trend to digital has fundamentally changed the printing business.
Many weak competitors have already been eliminated. Customer expectations have changed. IT and other technologies have risen in importance for printers, vendors and customers.
Adopting a print MIS solution now does two things. First, it provides a critical tool for running the business competitively. Second – and equally importantly – it kick-starts a competency in printing information technology that will be absolutely necessary in the future.
