Printing and Marketing Group (PMI) had moved into the print-on-demand space in order to grow its business. COO Armando Pena and his managers had got rid of their large offset presses, and were focused on digital work, PURL campaigns, storefronts for large corporate clients, and fulfillment. The business model was sound and primed the company for growth.
Based in Union City, California, with sales offices in San Diego, PMI had built a 20-year-old business on printing, marketing and mailing services for the real estate industry. Real estate still provided the bulk of PMI’s work, but increasingly orders were coming through a web-to-print portal. Agents create and order sales materials, while print brokers and B2B resellers also send through a high volume of work.
The challenge was the number of manual entries needed to fulfill the orders from the storefront, which ranged from 1,000 to 1,500 per month. Manual processing—keystrokes, copy/paste functions, multiple spreadsheets—was eroding productivity and hurting the bottom line. PMI also needed an open a system that could seamlessly integrate with its storefront and some of its partners, including Page DNA, FOUR51 and MarcomCentral. Pena and his team had a print MIS system in place, but it no longer functioned efficiently, didn’t integrate well with third-party software, and wasn’t robust enough to meet current needs and manage growth.
PMI found a solution with Avanti Slingshot. Its open architecture, with Avanti’s dedication and expertise in achieving a successful implementation and integration, were key attractions for Pena. PMI installed Slingshot’s core module, integrated its storefronts through JDF and XML, and installed Order Entry and Shipping modules to expedite its new focus.
The result, said Pena, could not be better. After just three months PMI saw a substantial decrease in order input errors, it fulfilled more orders quickly, and incurred fewer overtime hours. Order Entry and Shipping also created huge time savings. In fact, the company expects to save as much as eight hours a day for order input, tracking and managerial tasks.
Now Pena and his team can focus on building the business rather than struggle to get jobs out the door.
“Everyone’s finally starting to see the big picture,” said Pena. “Once you start working in estimating, you realize your true costs. We can look at history, particularly in outsourcing, and it’s all in one place. We no longer need to run around to find information.”
Another plus: Slingshot is browser-based. Having the staff access it from any location to do a quote has been a huge benefit to customers.
You can download and read the full PMI case study by clicking here.
