step 5 Maximize Profits For Digital Printing

How do you calculate your profit today? Does it wait until the end of the quarter or the end of the year for a review with the accountants? What do they look at? Their accuracy is based on the data they see, and they can’t make recommendations if they don’t know what wasn’t invoiced.

Part of your technology stack should be devoted to the processes behind accurate estimating and quoting, timely change request management and job reconciliation at the point of invoicing.

That means you need mechanisms to capture all elements that are part of the costs of goods sold, all change requests and the resulting additional labor hours and material costs, and late-binding discounts requested prior to invoicing.

Begin with an honest look at the processes in place today. Ask these questions:

Does the inventory management system automatically update the estimation system as inventory arrives and prices fluctuate?

How are change requests captured, costed and invoiced?

How are discounts managed?

If you find that you have unconnected systems that require manual updating and are missing the ability to automate the estimating and production systems, this is a great time to talk to your vendors and build a plan toward automation.

For each system, ask the vendor about how to connect their systems to build a single system of record for every job that includes actual costs and pricing options. They may have APIs, Software Development Kits (SDKs), or professional services to recommend. Listen to their ideas.

A common recommendation we hear is to consider tools that can link together in a framework, share data, provide access to Business Intelligence tools for analysis, and feed real-time dashboards. Tools that cannot share data should be reviewed for replacement.

Anything that can be automated should be, and it should all be done based on an implementation plan that includes team engagement, executive buy-in, milestones and milestone postmortems to build the best workflow.

The goal is to drive more money to the bottom line, eliminate bottlenecks and avoid leaving money on the production room floor due to failures in managing change requests and discount policies.