Software - MIS

In the past two months I’ve been fortunate to attend both the Association of College and University Printers and the In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association conferences, where I saw about 215 managers, all told. It was great to see them, and as far as I could tell each of them thoroughly enjoyed the events. I can’t help but wonder, though: where are the rest of them? There are tens of thousands of in-plants out there; around 20,000 of them read this magazine. Yet most remain holed up in their shops, alone with their thoughts and troubles, no one to confer with.

Like many children of his generation, Rob Lingard had dreams of becoming a cowboy. Some aspired to be firemen or football players, but Lingard held visions of becoming the next Gene Autry.

Can we directly motivate another person? Not really. But we can intentionally foster a climate that helps people motivate themselves. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said it well: "Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it."

To keep Michigan Farm Bureau's Printing Services operation running efficiently and effectively, Karen Meyers depends on Avanti's Graphic Arts Management System. Its estimating, order entry, inventory management and reporting modules, as well as Avanti's eAccess Web-to-print software, have streamlined the in-plant.

How can one manage workflow, prioritize jobs or manage resource allocation without a basic understanding of the volume and types of orders flowing through the shop? Sadly, I rarely see shops that collect even the most basic production data. Not knowing what we print, and for whom, is a big problem that will only increase in importance as we move forward.

Continually increasing productivity is always important—even more so in the tough economic times we continue to live in. The good news is that almost every team has the potential to do this. Before sharing ideas on how to improve productivity, let's first define it.

Creating your own customized shop floor management system always seems like a great, inexpensive idea at first. But then the years stretch on, your IT staff turns over and support fades away. That was the scenario at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where the 14-employee Reprographics department had been using an internally designed system based on IBM Lotus Domino since the late 1990s.

After putting up with an inefficient, Excel-based job management system for years, Ashland University Printing & Imaging Solutions acquired EDU Business Solutions' Print Shop Pro Manager software. Since then, life has been so much simpler for the in-plant's six full-time and four part-time and student workers. Customers can now pull up previous jobs and review the details, sparing staff from fielding their calls.

Now in its 18th year, the On Demand Conference and Exposition tried something new this time when it moved south of the Mason-Dixon line to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Not everyone was happy with the results. Though some exhibits were packed at intervals, others were not so busy. Perhaps the absence of key companies like Xerox, Kodak, Presstek and Standard caused some potential attendees to skip this year's event. Or maybe D.C. was too far for the Northeast day trippers who attended previous years' shows in Philadelphia, Boston and New York.

Before his in-plant's print management information (MIS) system went live last summer, John Meyer says the production environment was more than a little chaotic. With handwritten job tickets, job specs delivered by fax and Excel files to track production, the in-plant was frequently overwhelmed trying to manually input job data or locate individual jobs.