MIS: Upgrade or Replace?
As we all try to make our businesses more efficient, one of the best ways to do so is to rely on the resources of a good MIS. An MIS can accomplish many things, from job quoting and costing through production planning, inventory management, materials ordering, sales order processing, financial accounting, and developing key management reports such as accounts payable and receivable, general ledger, and instant P&L statements. Many MIS are first optimized for the traditional business operations: estimating, scheduling, raw material ordering and tracking, and ultimately, for invoicing, billing, and accounting.
Most printing and prepress companies own and operate an MIS of some sort, but they can take many different forms. It's not unusual to see a larger company rely on an enterprise MIS. These are customized to handle business issues specific to printing. Many package printers own MIS that were developed, off the shelf, specifically for printing labels, packaging, and corrugated materials. A number of exceptional systems exist in the marketplace. Yet other companies have relied on home-grown systems developed from common applications, such as FileMaker Pro, Microsoft Access, and even Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. These systems may have been built to solve a specific problem and have grown over time to provide MIS functionality for a printer or prepress operation.
Today, if you do not have a seamlessly integrated, systems-driven workflow and MIS, it's only a matter of time before you start losing business to print providers that do. But business requirements, processes, workflows, and goods produced can change over time, and an MIS that was a perfect fit when it was purchased and installed may no longer support your business needs. However, replacing your current MIS is not always the best option. In this tough economy with increasingly intense competition, those who have the need to upgrade their systems would be wise to assess their existing capabilities and determine whether the expense (time and resources) and disruption of implementing a completely new MIS is worth the reward.
Getting an MIS to operate smoothly with other systems is important because margins are smaller, runs are shorter, and the ability to absorb prepress overhead costs based on the press run is tough. The slim margins of printing profitability can be quickly lost due to inefficiencies, waste, and mistakes. Since the value of work-in-process increases as the job progresses through manufacturing, analysis and control becomes even more critical during the final stages of a job. When all the business parts work in harmony, they can reap synergistic results.
Most companies operate a number of software systems running their print businesses. While some of these systems may communicate with each other—particularly if they were developed by the same vendor—typically data is not easily (or at all) transferred from one system to another. We have all heard about islands of automation, where MIS, production (workflow), order entry, and other systems may not work in harmony.
But what are the limitations of the older "standalone" MIS that are still in common use today? For many MIS, anything related to prepress data is a black hole. To get a true reading about the success of a business, an MIS needs to accommodate the prepress and production systems. Machine and labor productivity are always critical factors to business performance. Collecting time sheets, job tickets, or even tracking employee tasks and timekeeping online can help explore efficiencies in production, identify errors and unwanted costs, and improve processes. They can deliver information such as stock levels, requirements analysis, order status, and delivery dates. A good system can make scheduling easier, getting real-time feedback directly from the plant floor. Stock control becomes an exact science—tracking raw materials and finished goods and managing quantities, ordering, transactions, and movements. It also serves up all the information needed for immediate answers to customers' questions, in real-time. An automatic customer sales rep (CSR) can offer customers online access to account information—and free up CSRs to handle more urgent needs.
Diversification: A major influencer
As the print industry goes through extraordinary changes, print providers are also diversifying their businesses by offering new services or supporting new markets, like never before. Digital printing, particularly as it relates to package printing, is still in its infancy, although we are starting to see new corrugated presses that were previously unavailable. Another area is wide format, where package printers are offering sign and display graphics to support their packaging efforts.
Unfortunately, many MIS were optimized for packaging, but not for other print products. For example, they can help create estimates for packaging, but have a tougher time estimating digital or wide-format jobs. While many MIS can capture order details—line screen, colors, structure, substrate, inks, etc.—there must be exact communication, and a certain set of job ticket rules, between the MIS and the automated workflow hub to be able to build and drive a project.
Quite often the challenge is not with the sophistication of the MIS, nor the adjoining production and business systems. Often it's a matter of systems integration. By automating and connecting dissimilar software systems, as well as managing a Web-based order system, a company can maintain competitiveness by meeting and exceeding customer expectations on quality, price, turnaround time, and service.
With the right data connections and a good understanding of the very unique requirements of packaging, an integrated system can create and track very specific notes about a packaging order—whether from the customer or the CSR. An integrated system is required because job tickets produced by MIS typically focus on the printing process and include little or no information about the complex prepress tasks required to produce the order. With the right IT support and tight integration with other systems, the job ticket can be enhanced to include exact prepress instructions. These reduce operator error and can even be passed to production workflow systems to automate the prepress process even further.
Order information can originate from an estimate, an online Web-to-print system, or many other order submission mechanisms (such as automated Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) orders from a brand owner's ERP system) that all generate order information differently. Workflow management products such as Facelift™ from Hybrid Software receive and deliver order information to pre-defined, standardized order tickets that can be targeted for specific applications (packaging, fulfillment) or processes (offset, digital, flexo). These tickets feed and trigger important pre-production, production, and post-production processes, enhancing automation in an operation.
Coordinating efforts by integrating platforms
There are a few ways to assure that communication flows freely between systems. The first challenge is how to access the data from different systems and databases and then 'map' that data from one system to another. An MIS typically contains the due date and the order quantity, but middleware systems are needed to extract this data and reformat it as JDF, XML, or others required by production systems.
Many vendors offer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for their business or production systems to help exchange order information along with the job. Unfortunately, these solutions are seldom "plug and play" and may require custom development to implement. Other companies find that upgrading MIS software is a costly endeavor that does not provide them the new benefits they anticipated. While all of these fixes may bring temporary improvement, they may not be cost-efficient, nor effective, to maintain as the business grows.
At a typical package-printing company, many separate systems work together to manage the entire order lifecycle. The majority of workflow-related systems on the market today hold order information in a database. Many of them are also compatible with a wide array of order information via JDF, JMF, broader XML-based schemas, and other formats. By connecting these sources of data through an integration platform middleware system, order information can be harvested, standardized, managed, and used to automatically trigger key actions. And, they help serve one goal: to efficiently and effectively move an order through the production lifecycle from pre-production, production, and post-production through invoicing, shipping, and archiving.
If you have a very capable IT department (with lots of time), it is probably capable of mapping data, particularly if it has built some of your systems. If you have a number of systems built by a single vendor, they can probably interchange data already, but may not be compatible with other systems. While the process can be costly to implement and support, there are outside consultants who have experience in data mapping. A simpler method is working with a company that offers software built specifically to map data between systems and display it in a common job ticket, no matter the source or form of the data.
In researching your MIS alternatives, the most important suggestion you can take from this is not to throw the baby out with the bath water. You may find that what you had can be vastly improved with better integration with your other systems. It could cost less, become much more productive, and prevent an uncomfortable cycle of implementing new software. Investing in new systems without properly considering alternatives, could deliver even more extensive—and expensive—problems.
About the author—Mike Rottenborn is president and CEO of Hybrid Software has spent more than 23 years working in the graphic arts industry. He founded Hybrid Software in 2007 with a goal to provide a software solution that bridges the gap between e-commerce portals, prepress workflows, and MIS/ERP systems. pP
