Last week, you learned the first of six essentials that every print business needs to do well. Superior estimating ensures profitability from every job, helps you manage your clients’ expectations with ease, and delivers answers faster than you ever thought possible.
This week, we’ll look at another essential: order and workflow management.
Although many might think they have a pretty decent handle on order and workflow management, how often have you found yourself or your team chasing down orders across your shop rather than investing in your print buyers?
The truth is, the old, manual way of managing orders and job workflows simply can’t keep up with the needs of today’s print buyers.
If you want to be a printer who does things well, it’s time to take a good, hard look at this area of your business for everyone’s benefit. Here are just a few of the reasons why order and workflow management matters.
5 Reasons Superior Order and Workflow Management Matters
1. Superior order and workflow management weeds out the redundancies.
Did you know that surveys have estimated that as much as $5 trillion a year is spent on repetitive tasks? Another survey estimates that a person spends (wastes) 69 days a year on mundane tasks.
If you’re thinking, “Yeah, but not us,” consider this: how much time is your team wasting re-entering the information from an online order into a legacy Print MIS? If that process takes even as little as five minutes and they re-enter twelve online orders per day, that’s a whole hour that they could be spending making sales calls and selling more printing.
A superior order and workflow management system will make production ready to occur the instant your customer uses an order form. And, it eliminates those costly redundancies by getting rid of all of that data re-entry, allowing you time for what matters most.
2. Superior order and workflow management skyrockets efficiency and organization.
Today’s print buyers are often looking for high-quality, low-cost jobs that are done faster than they can even say printing. That requires two things on the part of the printer: efficiency and organization.
Your order and workflow management system needs to ensure efficient production, offer complete planning for both the day-to-day and for the long term, and send alerts on inefficiencies to help you and your team avoid waste.
3. Superior order and workflow management helps you optimize.
Are you wasting precious time and energy sending emails back and forth, updating information, or waiting for approvals?
A top-quality order and workflow management system can not only track job progress and keep everyone in the loop in real-time, but it also helps you optimize your shop to:
- Increase your profitability and keep you competitive.
- Handle more jobs and get them done quicker
- Better manage your inventory and resources, allowing you to see how costs like these affect your bottom line and alerting you to restock when necessary.
- Handle multiple jobs at once through order management and approval systems.
4. Superior order and workflow management eliminates any guessing.
When it comes to order and workflow management, let’s face it: no one likes guessing.
Everyone is happier when they have the details they need to see each order from concept to completion. These powerful details help hold outside vendors accountable for tasks within an order, provide “need to know,” on-the-fly status updates to inquiring customers, and help you designate production stages for easy communication.
When you add great communication and connection together, you easily get high productivity and the ability to see and understand the whole picture of what’s going on in your shop at any given moment.
5. Superior order and workflow management sets you up for greater connection (human and otherwise).
The ultimate goal of streamlining any system or process is to free you up for the more important things in business and in life, such as human connection.
When your order and workflow management solution is able to connect multiple people, processes, and entities (like vendors) together, it allows you to worry less and relax more, knowing that everything is synced together.
Check Yourself
- How often do you catch yourself or your team tracking down order details in order to process a job?
- Have you missed important client deadlines or communication because of inefficiencies in your production process?
- Do you wish your team spent less time entering order details and more time selling printing?
If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, your print business could benefit from a superior order and workflow management system.
How Will You Manage?
Don’t fall prey to the old-school solutions of yesterday.
Improve your connectivity and productivity, eliminate those manual redundancies, increase transparency and trust, and improve your overall work culture by re-evaluating your order and workflow management solution today. You’ll be glad you did.
