Imprint MIS has been making its mark in the UK print industry for more than 40 years, and its roster of happy clients are a testament to the fact that “it must be doing something right” in the words of its Commercial Manager Pete Horwood.
“Imprint MIS touches every part of the business, and it has enabled us to grow while maintaining costs and productivity levels, and the amount of control it allows us to exert over the daily tasks we are doing is critical to our success,” says Helen Kingston, Procurement Manager, Latcham.
Helen continues: “We did a lot of research and Imprint encompassed everything that we did as a business, but we could also see that it would be able to grow with us. We didn’t have an estimating system that was consistent across all the different versions we used within the business, and we weren’t able to actually monitor the output and the performance of the production elements within the factory environment.
“Our production planning board was done in an offline system as well – so really to run the business we were looking at lots of different standalone pieces of software, but nothing that came together to give us an overall coherent reflection of what the business was actually doing at the time. That is what Imprint has done for us.”
Pete adds: “Predominantly we are UK based and focussed, I think that is a big selling point and has value for our customers. All the team who are customer-facing have expertise and experience from within the print industry and so understand the opportunities our customers are pursuing and the challenges they need to overcome.
“The biggest thing we offer is helping to relieve bottle necks and pressures. Often, we will speak to people who want to improve their systems of integration and reduce manual touch points. But we seek to really understand, where is your specific pain point, what is slowing you down and then have a conversation and work up from there. How we do it comes later, truly understanding where you want to go and how we can help you go there faster comes first.”
Centralise and prosper
Pete also emphasises that data centralisation and consolidation is also a first key step for Imprint MIS to work on with its customers: “So much efficiency and productivity can be released from this step alone, and we are very strong in assisting with this. Demonstrations are a pointless exercise unless there is a fundamental understanding of our customer’s business first.”
Helen concludes: “What we really like what was the people at Imprint, and their deep experience of print businesses like ours. They made it their business to understand our business. The willingness to work with us to make any changes to the system and make it work better for us was fundamental to the success of the implementation.”
Imprint MIS is focussed on enabling printers to generate trusted information from a central data source, so that you can use quickly and confidently as a business owner or manager to make the right decisions. Answering questions like: was that job profitable? What slowed down lead times? Did we hit our productivity bench marks?
Pete concludes: “This can then help to hone and improve the accuracy of estimating on future jobs, help you to adapt workflow processes and shift patterns, even the specific equipment you use for a job, so that you can continuously hit those targets on productivity, efficiency, lead time and profitability. It also means that perhaps someone with less knowledge or experience can do the estimating, using that data and knowledge, to the same accuracy and quality – freeing up more senior staff to focus on working on the business instead of in it.”
