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



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PIA Converge Conference

Are you planning on going to the PIA Converge Conference in November?

The Converge Conference - The Next Generation of Print and Communication Services - is designed for the new breed of company that is integrating the components of conventional and digital print, web technology, automated workflow, personalized and cross-media campaigns, mailing services, and more.

While many challenges exist to undermine profitability, so do numerous profitable opportunities. Progressive printing companies are adding new services, changing their names and rebranding. The result is a new breed of company integrating the components of conventional print, digital reproduction, web technology, mailing services, personalized cross media campaigns and much more.

The Converge Conference will present the strategy, tactics, and tools necessary for creating a dynamic new profit oriented business paradigm. Key industry leaders have acknowledged that there is no other conference attempting to serve the industry in the same way as Converge. The conference is broken into three tracks - Sales and Positioning, Production and Workflow Issues, and Value Added Services - the program is designed to appeal to a wide cross section of companies and individuals. I will be giving a session on how to integrate these new services into your management information system.

The Converge Conference takes place November 7-10, 2009, at the Hilton Bonnet Creek in Orlando, Florida. It is presented in partnership with the Printing Industries of America, the IPA, the Association of Graphic Solutions Providers, Digital Printing Council, Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and Printing Impressions magazine. Visit the Converge Conference website at http://converge.printing.org/

If want to learn how your organization can grow and prosper by taking advantage of new value-added business opportunities, join us in Orlando at The Converge Conference.

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.

Maximizing Your Print Management Software ROI With Post Implementation Assessments

When you purchased your current management system, you probably received all the training you needed to get the system fully operational. Right?

Wrong. Never assume the status quo is acceptable with your MIS system.

Studies from Profectus and other research organizations consistently show that businesses never use 40% or more of all application functionality. Often companies are unfamiliar with all the capabilities of their MIS due to ineffective training, "crash courses" to quickly get a system operational, and cutting training investments.

Once the system has been installed and is fully operational, it still has to be managed. You want to ensure that the system continues to operate at peak efficiency.

Business processes may change and need to be integrated into the system. New production equipment or product lines may have to be defined in your cost centers, production standards, and job tickets. Personnel might change positions and require training on other software components. As new employees are hired, they also will need training. The software itself will change over time as new functionality is incorporated into software product releases, requiring additional training to take advantage of these features.

As time passes, all systems tend to retreat from their initial levels of efficiency. Sometimes this is not noticeable until the system's efficiency has been significantly impacted. This deterioration can be avoided by conducting regular checkups of your implementation.

An annual budget for training will ensure that everyone is consistently taking full advantage of the system's capabilities. Take the time and invest the funds necessary to determine exactly what training and education is required by each person, and then provide it for them.

The better your people are trained on the capabilities of the software and the information it provides, the more likely your organization will maximize the system's potential.

A formal analysis of the entire system should be conducted at least annually. Revisit your initial implementation goals, objectives, and expected benefits to see if they are still being met. Talk to the users to determine their level of satisfaction and the need for additional training, modifications in business processes, changes in the system setup and reports. Then make adjustments as warranted.