10 Ways to Financially Improve Your Printing Organization

Financial performance is a major concern of all organizations, whether you’re a commercial, packaging, digital, large format, or in-plant printing operation. Here are 10 ways you can improve the financial performance of your organization.

1. Improve Administrative Processes
Implement lean principles in your administrative areas to eliminate unnecessary and redundant non-value-added activities, steps, and handoffs in your sales, estimating, order entry, purchasing, invoicing, and accounting workflow.  Put a team together to define the steps required to get jobs through your administrative processes and design a more efficient "Lean" workflow.

2. Implement Industry Best Practices
Best practices are proven methods in which printing organizations have achieved top performance and serve as goals for other companies that are striving for excellence. Why reinvent the wheel? Improve your financial performance by adapting these accepted best practices to your specific needs.

3. Speed Up Throughput And Delivery
Write up orders accurately and effectively, and then use the quickest means available to produce and deliver products to customers. Unnecessary delays can add days or weeks to customer payments. You must pay out considerable costs in paper, wages, and other expenses to produce orders, so you want to get reimbursed as soon as possible.

4. Leverage Technology
The proper use of technology will improve the synergy of your organization and help it run more efficiently and effectively. An integrated management information system (MIS) like Avanti, EFI Monarch, EPMS, ePace, Radius, or Printers Software is a critical tool for managing and operating a financially sound printing organization. A typical MIS incudes estimating, order entry, inventory management, shop floor data collection, scheduling, job costing, and accounting. Implementing an ecommerce solution can eliminate time and costs associated with processing orders, speed your order to cash cycle, minimize inventory, and enhance relationships among customers and suppliers.

5. Keep A Tight Control On Inventory
Paper accounts for approximately 1/3 of your costs, so less cash tied up in inventory generally means better cash flow. While some suppliers offer deeper discounts on volume purchases, if inventory sits on the floor too long, it ties up money that could be put to better use elsewhere. Implement Just-in-time (JIT) inventory practices to reduce in-process inventory. You should not have items sitting in your inventory if it can be replenished before a job goes to press.

6. Review and Reduce Expenses
Take a hard look at all of your expenses. Consider ways to decrease operating costs, but be careful not to cut costs that could impede performance or profits. Reduce production expenses by scheduling better, reconfiguring work shifts, improving job planning, and eliminating spoilage. If you haven't already done so, implement Lean Office and Lean Manufacturing principles.

7. Know Your True Costs
Having a clear understanding of your costs is essential for producing accurate estimates, pricing orders, measuring job costs and profitability, and generating accurate accounting reports. Good job costing and shop floor data collection software can help to make sure that all of your labor and material costs are fully accounted for and absorbed in your estimating cost rates and pricing.

8. Invoice Customers Promptly
A customer cannot pay an invoice until they received it, so the faster you get the invoice to the customer, the faster you’ll get paid. When possible, send an invoice within 1 to 2 days after the order has shipped. A best practice is to establish the invoice amount when the order arrives and as the customer requests changes. The only exception is billable overs and shipping charges. Many companies are expediting the invoicing process by sending PDF invoices to customers using email.

9. Measure Your Performance
If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Time after time studies have found a strong correlation between a company's financial performance and effective goal setting. There are various tools for measuring performance including Performance Benchmarks, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), Balance Score Cards (BSC), and dashboards. Metrics can assess the health of your organization’s financial, production, cost, quality, and customer service performance.

10. Utilize Your Employees  Better
The need to effectively leverage the skills of employees is critical to improving your financial performance. You may have some people that have evolved into the wrong position over time. Or employees that are overloaded with work while others do not have enough to keep them busy. Take a close look at the skill set and workloads of your staff. Make sure employees are in the position that is best leveraging their capabilities.

If you're interested in learning how Profectus Printing Industry Business Consultants can improve your organization, contact Profectus for a FREE phone consultation at 1-888-868-8662. Or visit our website: www.profectus.com



Cost Rates Advisor Budgeted Hourly Rates Software

How E-Commerce Is Changing The Role of The Customer Service Representative

As more E-Commerce innovations become available to the printing industry, customers will become more empowered to place, track, and manage orders on their own. Many of the Customer Service Representative's daily responsibilities will become the customer's responsibilities. Rather then passing information from the customer to the CSR and back to the customer, the customer will be able to resolve questions at the click of a button at Internet speed.

So, what will your CSRs be doing in 3-5 years? The Internet, email, preflight software, and smarter file creation software have already begun to change the role of the CSR. Today, CSRs are spending more of their day at the computer, communicating information to customers, suppliers, and intra-company staff via email and web forms.

The future CSR will be more of a sales consultant position. Responsibilities will include preserving personalized relationships with customers, creating new business opportunities, and troubleshooting jobs.

Customer phone calls to the CSR will change to technical questions about file preparation, production requirements, and billing questions. The customer will also be contacting the CSR when there is a problem with the order status, finished goods inventory counts, and other information viewable on the Web.

The same E-Commerce features available to the customer will help the CSR service customers. This also presents the opportunity for the CSRs to work from remote sales offices, telecommute from their home, or use wireless Internet devices while in the customer's office.

Perhaps E-Commerce may even combine the roles of the salesperson and the customer service representative into one position in the future.

Profectus, Inc, is a national consultancy that helps printing organizations implement best business practices and maximize the value of their information technology investments.

Top 7 Reasons Printing Organizations Prosper From Ecommerce

Top 7 Reasons Printing Organizations Prosper From Ecommerce

Implementing ecommerce in your printing organization can be very challenging, but when done right your organization will receive significant paybacks. Here are the top 7 reasons printing organizations prosper with ecommerce.

1. Time and cost reduction – Ecommerce eliminates time and costs associated with entry and verification of documents and the expense of preprinted forms, paper, toner, postage, phone calls, faxes, and manual filing systems. This significantly reduces your labor costs and cost per business transaction.

2. Cash flow - Ecommerce eliminates days of mailing and paper shuffling by electronically exchanging invoices and payments with your customers. The same is true with suppliers, which allows implementation of just-in-time manufacturing practices that minimize your inventory investment.

3. Reduced stocking costs - Ecommerce speeds the ordering cycle, providing better information and minimizing inventories, floor space, storage, warehousing, and insurance costs.

4. Improved service - Ecommerce will enhance relationships among your customers and suppliers by providing continuous accessibility to order, billing, and other information, simplifying everyone's efforts.

5. Differentiation - Successfully implementing ecommerce with your customers and suppliers will project your company's image as a technological leader, especially when you exploit these new business opportunities before the competition.

6. Multi-company consolidations - Consolidators inherit an assortment of systems and data structures with each new acquisition. Ecommerce standardizes the information among the parent company, acquired companies, and divisions.

7. Business survival - As more of your customers adopt ecommerce technologies, they will demand their business partners also implement ecommerce.

Implementing an e-Business Strategy

It takes several years to actually implement the strategies needed to truly become an e-business. In fact, a recent study suggests that we will be implementing e-business strategies for the next 5 to 7 years. By then, e-business will just become "business."

In order for a company to actually become an e-business, its business practices and Internet technologies need to become fully integrated. Companies need to reinvent order processes and workflows, and people need to learn to adapt to these new ways of conducting business.

Some of the business practices and processes you may want to consider realigning include:

• Pre-production, production, and post-production workflows


• Forms, paperwork, reports, job tickets, etc.


• Personnel roles, job functions, job descriptions


• Departmental structure


• Inter-company, customer, and supplier communications methods

Implementation of an e-Business Strategy may require cultural changes in your company. Company owners and management must be willing to change the very way they do business if they expect to maximize their investment in e-Business technology. They must take an active role, even if only to monitor the implementation progress. This will demonstrate to employees that the new technology and related changes in the company are supported by the management and owners.

The most difficult part of becoming an e-business is "people". Companies will achieve greater success by educating their staff. You can accomplish this by hiring industry consultants, attending seminars, and subscribing to e-business publications.